Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Wales / Can the slumbering dragon awake?


Illustration by Mitch Blunt

Wales: can the slumbering dragon awake?

The upheaval after Scotland’s vote should bring a historic moment for Wales. But, can it finally seize the opportunity to become more than a ‘nearly nation’?

Simon Jenkins
Tue 30 Sep 2014 05.59 BST

So what of Wales? Throughout the turbulent Scottish referendum, it has been the bystander, the afterthought, the constitutional Cinderella. When Scotland toyed with departing the United Kingdom, Wales shuddered. When Scotland was wooed with lavish gifts, Wales feared those same gifts might pass it by. Now Wales is suddenly thrust on stage: the campaign for “further devolution” is coming its way. Can Wales seize the moment and refashion itself as more than a “nearly nation” in the new political geography of Europe?

Emmanuel Carrère / The most important French writer you've never heard of


Emmanuel Carrère: the most important French writer you've never heard of

As his latest 'non-fiction novel', Limonov, comes out in English, the acclaimed and bestselling author discusses his extreme personal candour and why he likes to court danger

Emmanuel Carr re / Ed Alcock / M.Y.O.P.
Emmanuel Carrere: ‘Yes, maybe I’m more explicit than some.’ Photograph: Ed Alcock/MYOP
Relaxing cross-legged in his Paris apartment, with his crew cut, bare feet, and black fatigues, sun-tanned Emmanuel Carrère could be a guerrilla commander at a ceasefire, or a colonel in the French Foreign Legion enjoying some metropolitan R&R. In fact, he's the best kind of writer, not just a bestseller but a man who is not afraid to leave the comfort zone of his desk, go out into the world, take risks, and get his shoes dirty. According to the Paris Review, "There are few great writers in France today, and Emmanuel Carrère is one of them."

Women we love / Taylor Swift

 
WOMEN WE LOVE
Taylor Swift
London, september 2014




Monday, September 29, 2014

Brigitte Bardot / Influence on Fashion


Brigitte Bardot

Influence on Fashion

Brigitte Bardot is one of my favourite actress. For me she is personification of femininity.
She was "fashion-revolutionary" and " Many Thanks" her for that! =)  

In fashion the Bardot neckline (a wide open neck that exposes both shoulders) is named after her. Bardot popularized this style which is especially used for knitted sweaters or jumpers although it is also used for other tops and dresses.

Bardot is recognized for popularizing bikini swimwear in early films such as Manina (Woman without a Veil, 1952), in her appearances at Cannes and in many photo shoots.

Bardot also brought into fashion the choucroute ("Sauerkraut") hairstyle (a sort of beehive hair style) and gingham clothes after wearing a checkered pink dress, designed by Jacques Esterel. She was subject for an Andy Warhol painting.

Bardot starred in 47 films, my favourite are "And God Created Woman" (1956), "Une Parisienne" (1957).



The 100 best novels / No 54 / The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)



The 100 best novels

writtein English

No 54

 The Maltese Falcon

by Dashiell Hammett (1929)


Dashiell Hammett’s crime thriller and its hard-boiled hero Sam Spade influenced everyone from Chandler to Le Carré

Robert McCrum
Monday 29 September 2014


R
aymond Chandler, who has yet to appear in this series, once said: “Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did, he did superbly.” He added, in a summary that helps define Hammett’s achievement: “He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” He also gave his characters a distinctive language and convincing motivations in a genre that had grown stereotyped, flaccid and uninvolving.

The Maltese Falcon is the Hammett novel that jumps from the pages of its genre and into literature. It’s the book that introduces Sam Spade, the private detective who seduced a generation of readers, leading directly to Philip Marlowe. Dorothy Parker, never a pushover, confessed herself “in a daze of love” such as she had not known in literature “since I encountered Sir Lancelot” and claimed to have read the novel some 30 or 40 times.
What is Hammett’s appeal? The hard-boiled detective was not really his invention, but he made him a character readers could identify with: the beady-eyed loner who coolly puts himself in harm’s way out of a fierce determination to redress wrong and achieve justice. That’s a winning insight into the character of any great protagonist. Spade’s involvement in the world is not cynical but passionate, and yet his successes are always shadowed by hints of loss and failure. This has filtered down into the work of countless genre writers from Chandler to Le Carré, to Sara Paretsky. Moreover, like Hammett himself, Spade is vivid, physical, and highly sexed. He also shares many elements of Hammett’s career and character. Strangely, from a writer with a keen eye on the market, Spade makes only this one appearance in a full-length fiction.



The three principal women at the heart of The Maltese Falcon, especially Brigid O’Shaughnessy, all respond to Spade’s sexual magnetism. But he, in the end, will always subordinate his desires to the greater good. So he will surrender Brigid, the murderer, to the cops. “You’ll never understand me,” he says to her, an almost existential statement about the relations of men and women.
Chandler said that Hammett took the murder out of the drawing room and put it back in the alley, where it belongs, adding that “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” Like Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle (19 and 26 in this series), Hammett was an original who created a profoundly influential literary template that gives him classic status.

A note on the text

The Maltese Falcon was originally serialised in HL Mencken’s “pulp” magazine, Black Mask, from September 1929. Then it was published in book form by Alfred A Knopf in February 1930. For publication, Blanche Knopf, his editor, tried to tone down the overt sexuality of the magazine version (she feared the references to Joel Cairo’s homosexuality would alienate readers) but Hammett prevailed.
The story has been adapted several times for the cinema, and the 1941 version, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, is generally thought to be a film noir classic.

Raymond Chandler, who owes so much to Hammett, deserves the last word. He said of The Maltese Falcon: “If you can show me 20 books written approximately 20 years back that have as much guts and life now, I’ll eat them between slices of Edmund Wilson’s head.” Nearly 100 years later, the “guts and life” of Hammett’s prose still puts some of his etiolated heirs to shame.


Three more from Dashiell Hammett

Red Harvest (1929); The Glass Key (1931); The Thin Man (1934).

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Brigitte Bardot / A Sinner


Brigitte Bardot
A SINNER

They may call me a sinner, but I am at peace with myself.

Brigitte Bardot / A Photograph


A PHOTOGRAPH
by Brigitte Bardot

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never cease looking back at you.


Brigitte Bardot / I really wanted to die


I REALLY WANTED TO DIE
by Brigitte Bardot

I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life. Death was like love, a romantic escape. I took pills because I didn't want to throw myself off my balcony and know people would photograph me lying dead below.

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Friday, September 26, 2014

Brigitte Bardot at 80 / Still outrageous, outspoken and controversial

Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Bardot at 80: still outrageous, outspoken and controversial

Since her first public appearance in 1950, BB, the screen icon who turned her back on film fame, has courted scandal

by Agnès Poirier
The Observer, Saturday 20 September 2014
brigitte bardot
Brigitte Bardot in 1965. Photograph: Alamy
The woman Paris-Match deemed "immoral, from head to toe" in 1958, is turning 80 in a few days. "The most beautiful woman in the world" may have chosen to leave the limelight in 1973, at the peak of her fame and beauty, to dedicate her life to animals, yet Brigitte Bardot has never ceased to be a controversial figure.

Brigitte Bardot and Picasso

Brigitte Bardot watching Pablo Picasso at work in his studio in Vallauris

Brigitte Bardot and Picasso
Villauris, 1956






Thursday, September 25, 2014

A new life for King Juan Carlos

Juan Carlos and Vargas Llosa

ROYAL FAMILY

A new life for King Juan Carlos

After giving up the throne, Spain’s former monarch seems keen to maintain an informal public role


Juan Carlos arrives in Bogota to attend the inauguration of President Juan Manuel Santos. / JOHN VIZCAINO (REUTERS)
Since abdicating on June 19 in favor of his son Felipe, Juan Carlos de Borbón has spent the summer putting together the details for a foundation that will bear his name. Sources close to the 76-year-old say he has no plans to retire fully from public life, and intends to remain active.
The Zarzuela Palace, the official residence of the Spanish monarchy, has little to say about the former head of state’s activities, pointing out that he no longer has official duties. However, on August 7 Juan Carlos did travel to Colombia for the presidential inauguration of Juan Manuel Santos, standing in for his son, who in recent years had already taken over a growing number of such appearances on behalf of his father.
Juan Carlos’s exit from public view has even prompted speculation over his health, as well as rumors, which started in the Italian press, that he was to divorce his wife Sofía and marry 49-year-old socialite Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, who continues to use her German former husband’s aristocratic title. Her “friendship” with the former king was made public after it was discovered that she had accompanied him on an ill-fated hunting trip to Botswana in 2012, when he broke his hip.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

The race to save Mexico’s dying languages

Manuel Segovia Jiménez is one of the world’s last speakers of Ayapaneco. / SAÚL RUIZ


The race to save Mexico’s dying languages

The country’s wealth of 68 indigenous tongues is almost unmatched anywhere else


    When Fidel Hernández goes back to his home village of Chicahuatxla, the houses suddenly sprout mouths, eyes and backs. There is nothing odd about this. It happens automatically every time the bus emerges out of the Mexico City sprawl and heads down south to his native state of Oaxaca.
    At this point Fidel, a PhD student at UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, leaves behind the doors, windows and ceilings of the Spanish language and steps into the universe of Triqui, a tonal language of which there are 25,883 speakers, according to the official count.
    Triqui is part of what might be Mexico’s greatest yet least-known treasure: its linguistic diversity. The country is home to 11 linguistic families that branch out into 68 languages, which in turn have 364 dialects. Such a profusion of tongues is to be found nowhere else in the world save for Papua New Guinea, Brazil and parts of Africa.
    But this diversity is in grave danger of extinction. Barely seven million indigenous people actively use their own languages, and most are speakers of Náhuatl, Yucatecan Maya, Mixteco, Tseltal, Zapoteco andTsotsil. Out of 364 existing dialects, 259 are likely to disappear, according to the National Institute of Indigenous Languages.

    Some indigenous languages may be saved because of their geographical isolation
    In many cases, the languages are doomed: 64 of them have fewer than a hundred speakers.
    One of these is Manuel Segovia Jiménez, a 79-year-old peasant from Ayapa, in the state of Tabasco. Don Manuel, who gets up at 5am and works out in the fields until 2pm, is one of just seven speakers of NnumteOote, the “true language,” also known as Ayapaneco. It is the most endangered language in Mexico. He is the only person who continues to use it at home on a daily basis.

    Tuesday, September 23, 2014

    Milan Kundera / Light but sound


    Light but sound

    20 years on, John Banville returns to the Czech Republic's most famous fictional export, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
    by John Banville
    The Guardian, Saturday 1 May 2004

    The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim 314 pp, Faber.
    The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan KunderaReturning after 20 years to what is acknowledged as a modern classic, I was struck by how little I remembered. As I began re-reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera's novel of love and politics in communist-run Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the early 1980s, I realised that, true to its title, the book had floated out of my mind like a hot-air balloon come adrift from its tethers. I managed to retrieve a few fragments - the naked woman in the bowler hat whom we all remember, the death of a pet dog, a lavatory seat compared to a white water lily rising out of the bathroom floor, and the fact that Nietzsche's name appears in the first line on the first page - but of the characters I retained nothing at all, not even their names.

    Monday, September 22, 2014

    The 100 best novels / No 53 / The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)




    The 100 best novels

    writtein English

    No 53

     The Sun Also Rises

    by Ernest Hemingway (1926)



    Hemingway’s first and best novel makes an escape to 1920s Spain to explore courage, cowardice and manly authenticity

    Robert McCrum
    Mon 22 Sep ‘14 05.45 BST






    I
    n Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, Corey Stoll makes a scene-stealing appearance as the young Ernest Hemingway, tough-guy modernist and friend of Gertrude Stein. It’s a cameo grounded in the truth that, for one of America’s 20th-century greats, Paris in the 20s was a source of artistic liberation. It was also the setting for the first section of Hemingway’s first, and best, novel (published in the UK as Fiesta).

    The novel, a roman à clef describing an anguished love affair between the expatriate American war veteran Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, a femme fatale representative in the writer’s mind of 1920s womanhood, is mostly located in Spain, Hemingway’s favourite country. For some critics, the heart of the novel is the bullfight, and how each character responds to the experience of the corrida. At the same time, the escape into the wild is a great American theme that recurs in the works of Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain (Nos 16, 17 and 23 in this series). In addition, The Sun Also Rises, like most novels of the 1920s, is a response to the author’s recent wartime service.
    The key to Hemingway, the thing that unlocks the most important doors to his creative life, was a deeper, more personal darkness, his complicated experience of the first world war. There are two versions. Either he was rejected for poor eyesight; or he failed to enlist and instead joined up as an ambulance driver. Each way, in the short-term, he was wounded by the shame of rejection and cowardice.



    However, once with the Red Cross, Hemingway got as badly injured as if he’d been in combat. Thereafter, throughout his life, he craved the company of risk-takers – bullfighters or big-game hunters – and longed to be accepted by them. Courage, cowardice and manly authenticity in extremis became his themes.
    Perhaps this is also the inspiration for his famously hard-boiled prose. The best of Hemingway’s fiction, at its purest and most influential, is found in his stories, but this first novel is also a literary landmark that earns its reputation as a modern classic.


    A note on the text

    Hemingway began writing the novel with the working title of Fiesta on his birthday, 21 July, in 1925. He completed the draft manuscript about eight weeks later, in September, and went on to revise it further during the winter of 1926.
    The novel is based on a trip he made from Paris to Pamplona, Spain in 1924 with his wife, Hadley Richardson, and the American writer John Dos Passos. Hemingway returned again in June 1925 with another group of American and British expats. Their experiences and complex romantic entanglements became absorbed into the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises.
    In the US, Scribner’s published the novel on 22 October 1926. Its first edition, just over 5,000 copies, sold well. The Hellenistic-style cover illustration by Cleonike Damianakes showed a seated, robed woman, head bent, eyes closed, shoulders and thigh exposed. Hemingway’s editor, the celebrated Maxwell Perkins, wrote that “Cleon’s respectably sexy” artwork was designed to attract “the feminine readers who control the destinies of so many novels”. Within two months, The Sun Also Rises was in a second printing, with many subsequent printings to follow. In 1927 the novel was published in the UK by Cape under the title Fiesta. In fact, The Sun Also Rises has been in print continuously since its publication in 1926, and is said to be one of the most translated titles in the world.

    Three more from Ernest Hemingway

    A Farewell to Arms (1929); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940); A Moveable Feast(1964).




    THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
    007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
    014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  
    031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)
    035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
    036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
    039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
    040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)

    041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
    042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
    043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
    044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
    045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
    046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
    047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
    048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
    049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
    050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)