Epexegetic Biographic Addenda

19 April 2012

The tug of war over Joyce copyright continues. The National Library of Ireland has just released digital copies of a collection of papers bought from Alexis Léon in 2002 for €12.6 million, in response to an attempted copyright coup by Danis Rose. The NLI’s holdings are a stunning collection of Joyceana, consisting of an early Paris notebook from 1903 and notes for a translation of Dante’s Inferno, as well as 500 manuscript pages and 200 pages of annotated proofs of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

If it feels a bit like a rush job (the resolution isn’t great, though the NLI plan to publish better quality images to coincide with Bloomsday), that’s because it is. The NLI’s hand was forced when Rose released a six-volume edition of The Dublin Ulysses Papers earlier this year. More »

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At the EYE

19 April 2012

Pola Negri in The Spanish Dancer.

From Amsterdam Centraal it looks as if a flying saucer crash-landed on the other side of the IJ. But as the ferry leaves the railway station and crosses the water towards the EYE Film Museum, designed by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, the building seems to shift form, and there’s a pleasing, if baldly angular, aerodynamism to it that doesn’t lessen the retro-modernist aesthetic but makes the shape more interesting. However, like so many recent museum designs this one seems intent on rivalling, if not overshadowing, the works inside. More »

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Away from Doing the Dishes

18 April 2012

I sort of find it heart warming. Bored mother of two teenage boys has midlife crisis and instead of buying a car, moving to Oaxaca or having an affair, she writes raunchy Twilight fan fiction for two years. When she’s finished she changes the names from Bella and Edward to Anastasia and Christian and a small Australian e-book publisher puts it out: success enough for anyone with a midlife crisis novel, especially someone who wrote under the unlikely handle ‘Snowqueens Icedragon’. But that’s not all. More »

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Not the Pulitzer Prize

17 April 2012

‘Fury at no Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,’ according to Australian radio. ‘Pulitzer Prize board has shirked its duty,’ the Telegraph says. The board couldn’t decide between the three finalists put forward by the judges (it’s a scrupulous two-tier selection process): Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, The Pale King by David Foster Wallace and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. It hardly matters, except to the writer (or his estate) who didn’t pick up the $10,000. But whether it’s a publicity stunt, dereliction of duty or simple failure to come to an agreement, is it also a sign that standards are slipping? Only perhaps in one sense: it’s an outrageous 35 years since the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction last wasn’t awarded. But in the prize’s first sixty years it happened 10 times: including in 1917, the year it was created, and no less than three times in the 1970s. Those were the days.

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Between the Lines

16 April 2012

Gates in a 'peace line', Lanark Way, West Belfast. © Laurence Cooley 2005

In 1971, a parliamentary Working Group criticised the speed with which walls, gates and fences were being put up to separate Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland. The ‘peace lines’, constructed mainly by the British army, were creating an ‘atmosphere of abnormality’, the Peace Walls Working Group warned. But they did ‘not expect any insurmountable difficulty in bringing together well-meaning people from both sides’, and believed that before long, the barricades would come down; ‘normality’ would return. More »

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Swedish Lessons

13 April 2012

Here in Sweden – as, I believe, in other Scandinavian countries – everyone has access to everyone else’s tax returns on the internet. I’m sure it’s sometimes circumvented, but not in most cases, and it seems to deter dishonesty and greed. People really do feel that they are ‘all in it together’ (whatever ‘it’ is).

Maybe David Cameron learned about this from Fredrik Reinfeldt, when he visited him in Stockholm in February. Apparently they got on famously, with Cameron taking away all kinds of ideas. It is interesting how the ‘Swedish model’ has flipped recently, so far as Britain is concerned; formerly an ideal of social democracy, it has now taken on a much more rightist tinge. George Osborne may have got the idea of increasing pensioners’ taxes (in effect) from Reinfeldt, who did the same when his coalition was re-elected in 2010. By that time his ‘Moderaten’ (Conservatives) had cunningly rebranded themselves as the ‘real workers’ party’: of workers, that is, as opposed to slackers, which pensioners essentially are. More »

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My Media Easter

13 April 2012

The influenza season draws to a close. But the virus isn’t going quietly. Monday 2 April started early for me with an interview on the Today programme about the sensible decision by the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity to give up trying to censor papers describing the enhancement of bird flu infectivity in ferrets. I covered the same story for Good Morning Scotland. The benefits of knowing about potentially nasty mutations before they take us by surprise far outweigh any risks from al-Qaida virologists. More »

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Anglobalisation

12 April 2012

Elif Shafak’s novel Iskender, published in English as Honour this week, came out in Turkey last August. Like her previous books, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Within days of its appearance, however, a blogger accused Shafak of ‘lifting’ themes and characters from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The blog post quickly went viral. Smith’s Turkish translator said that Shafak had used White Teeth as a ‘template’ which didn’t really fit with the Kurdish characters in her novel. One journalist suggested the book should be moved to the foreign fiction shelves of Turkish bookshops. More »

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Counter Terror Markets

11 April 2012

At a loose end in the last week of June? No idea how to fill those empty weeks between the queen’s diamond jubilee and the Olympics? Forgot to buy tickets for the Counter Terror Expo at Earl’s Court at the end of April? Got a warehouse full of fighter jets and cattle prods you can’t offload because your European ‘partners’ have foolishly slashed defence spending as well as education and welfare budgets in the name of austerity? All is not lost. From 25 to 27 June, Securing Asia 2012 will be ‘bringing the Asian Homeland Security and Counter Terror Markets to the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre’ in Westminster: More »

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How to Snoop

9 April 2012

On Saturday night the Home Office website went offline for seven hours. The hacker group Anonymous took it down, they said, as a protest against the government’s planned new surveillance legislation. The plan, we learned earlier in the week, was to introduce a bill that would allow the security services continuous access in real time to all UK phone calls, emails and web traffic. It sounded scary, but most people stopped worrying about it after it became clear that nothing concrete would be known about the proposed legislation until the Queen’s Speech in May. There were also vague promises that the law, which would now be published in draft form only and open to consultation, would include the ‘highest possible safeguards’. ‘All we’re doing,’ Nick Clegg said, ‘is updating the rules which… allow the police and security services to go after terrorists and serious criminals and updating that to apply to new technology.’ ‘Let’s be absolutely clear,’ David Cameron said. ‘This is not about what the last government proposed and we opposed.’ He was very nearly telling the truth. More »

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