More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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18 October
The Verb, on a Friday night on @BBCRadio3, has changed. It needed to change, but it has not changed for the better.
I do not recall when I last heard it, but 9.45 used to be a convenient time to listen, and manage most of it before closing-time drinks at the local called, and I had been a regular for several years.
It needed to change, because, incessantly calling it the cabaret of the word, Professor Ian McMillan had become little better than Hughie Green, by which I mean the flowery introductions, larded with compliments for him for being there, us for joining him, and for guests who were never less than monstrously excellent, talented, and guaranteed to be worth our time…
Not to mention the same old people from whom the guests seemed to come, for example Toby Litt – he was back again, because we liked him, and we liked him, because he was back again, or some such self-reinforcing logic – and what ‘we’ had commissioned him to write. But there were, of course, gems, such as learning about Italian ice-cream in Oban from Janice Galloway, or Paul Griffiths (better known as a writer about (twentieth-century) music), with his short novel Let Me Tell You, where he had amazingly limited himself to a vocabulary identical to that of Shakespeare’s Ophelia :
I read that book, because of The Verb, and was stunned by its invention through limitation, telling a story of around a dozen chapters that had to circumvent having no word ‘mother’, or by using a noun as a verb, or an adjective as a noun.
That was its high point, before the guests became routine, the enthusiasm forced, the praise after everything read excessive - I loved the way that you xyz, and the surprise of the abc really caught me unawares. So what made you think of that moment when you say def ?
But what’s wrong now ? Well, on to-night’s showing, the floor-to-ceiling congratulation has gone, but it’s too much the questions / things that McMillan thinks that we might like to ask / comment :
Why did you write that as a fairy-tale ?
Is it very different, after working on a novel, to write a short story ?
When I get to the end of a short story, I’m turning the page, wanting it to continue. [Do people read a short story without looking to see how long it will take, and isn’t it a bad story (or your mistake), if you can’t tell that it’s ended ?]
That piece [an extract from awork in progress] sounded very self contained [which turned out to be because it had been made to be].
None of these sounded as though the words coming out of the authors’ mouths on these meagre cues had not merely been prepared, but rehearsed to death. The best of the programme, that the questions insulted no one, but just were too self congratulatory (I can only ask these questions, because I am a Professor of English Literature), and too much buttering up the writer, has gone, and the questions are banal – I can too easily credit that I did not need to be a Professor to conceive them, so why have one present the show.
So not :
Why have two of you written about wolves ?
What do you think about Orwell’s four stated reasons for writing, and does any of them weigh with you? [Pretty pointless to tell us these four things without doing something with them ?]
You have given ways in which novels are different from short stories – even accepting those, are the similarities greater than the differences?
You say that a writer of short stories has to be multi-disciplinary, dealing with, amongst other things, history and politics, but why are they not the concerns of a novelist?
Plus ça change, plus ç’est la même chose…
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Showing posts with label Paul Griffiths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Griffiths. Show all posts
Friday, 18 October 2013
Saturday, 9 June 2012
Is Professor McMillan for real?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 June
I'm sure that he's real, but is his every word on The Verb for real?
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 June
I'm sure that he's real, but is his every word on The Verb for real?
As I have said in a Tweet or two, great though it is to have the programme, has Professor Ian's geniality begun to wear a bit thin? That and the attempt to shock, inspire and amuse - I know it's the cabaret of the word, but cabarets don't always have the same Master of Ceremonies, and I don't get:
* Asking me to listen as if I were missing a layer of skin (in the last programme)
* Never having anything critical to say, although the occasional provoctaive question
* Even why there are so many regulars, given commissions or challenges
I have no regrets: without The Verb, I would probably not have heard Janice Galloway, written two pieces that I submitted to its competitions, encountered Paul Griffiths as (contrary)novelist (about which I have blogged elsewhere), etc., etc.
But would the next series of the programme benefit from giving guest hosts a turn, which worked well with Have I Got News For You? when Angus fell from grace.
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Sunday, 11 March 2012
A voice from my past
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 March
It was a surprise to hear Paul Guinery on Radio 3 this afternoon.
Not that he hasn’t been around as a presenter in recent months (unless my mind / memory is playing tricks), but because he was on the air, this time, as a guest of Sean Rafferty’s on In Tune, talking about his CD, Delius and his Circle. In conversation with Sean, Paul talked about composers of piano music such as Percy Grainger and E. J. Moeran, and engagingly played some of their pieces.
Apart from hearing Paul reading the news and announcing of late, I had not known of him in years. Although I do not know when he stopped being a regular voice on Radio 3, I do recall corresponding with him* in the late 1980s, when it was my joy to be able to listen to the radio through headphones when I was at work, which must have been around the time that, for their participation in Comic Relief, I received a photograph of all the presenters with red noses on (and even a rather suggestively placed one for the microphone).
The topic of our exchange of letters was the abolition of the feature Book of the Week, which was essentially a resource for when - one way or another - there were minutes to spare, and then the link person could dip into that week's book and read aloud (as well as at other scehduled times).
A serendipity about it was appealing (to me, at least, and I am sure that Paul said that he missed its passing), and it led to my reading several Books of the Week on the strength of what I heard read. In one case, it was a biography of Thomas More, whose Utopia I already knew (in translation, since I believe that it was written in Latin), and I was also familiar with several images, one famous, in the National Portrait Gallery. Sadly, the only thing that I take from that book is (and I quote from memory):
Equally, another Paul, Paul Griffiths, whom I knew as a writer of books about music (including his Concise History of Modern Music (for Thames & Hudson), turned up as a guest of Ian McMillan on The Verb, talking about his 'labour of love', Let Me Tell You, which had taken years to write (although short):
Taking, essentially, as some sort of principle the notion that less is more, and that, by restricting the means available, one can challenge oneself and produce wonders (which is under the umbrella of what Oulipo**, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, stands for), Paul limited himself to writing a novel about, broadly, Hamlet's story, but told from Ophelia's perspective, and only using the vocabulary of some 400 to 500 words that she has in all her lines in the Shakespeare play.
The result is powerful. Strange, too, but one soon loses the temptation to turn to the text of Hamlet and referee what this other Paul has done. When he talked about the endeavour on air, the inventiveness was patent, and he explained to his host Ian how, for example, the fact that Ophelia only uses the word 'father' (referring, of course, to Polonius) means that circumlocution is always involved in talking about Polonius' wife, Ophelia's mother, which he makes a feature of the book, and of Ophelia's (and Polonius') relations with her.
The words in Ophelia's vocabulary, though, have been used in any sense that they admit: so 'rue', from her famous garland, is not just a noun for a herb, but can appear as a verb, and that is only the simplest example of what has been done by Paul Griffiths in Let Me Tell You. If, as a reader, one knows the play reasonably well, one will be taken short from time to time at just how much has been done with such a small resource, and almost every chapter has a different feel to it, some of them, at the end (almost necessarily), being very dark.
End-notes
* Memory being what it is, and my cat having propelled a pile of papers from off the shelf in 'the office' in such a way that the letter was uppermost, I can now say that Donald Macleod was, in fact, my correspondent: in his letter, added to a standard one dated 31 March 1989, he informed me that the Controller of Radio 3, John Drummond, had objected to having a Book of the Week on the basis that readings from it, in odd gaps, did not relate to the surrounding programmes.
It seems that Donald missed Book of the Week, too, but that the idea of having readings from diaries was that they would relate to the date of broadcast. (True, but Drummond does not seem to have realized that such readings had no more necessary relevance to the programmes being broadcast that day than an abritrary book, and I cannot say how long such readings lasted.)
** Curiously, on the Wikipedia® web-page for Oulipo, the list of members as at 2011 bears this qualification: Note that Oulipo members are still considered members after their deaths.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 March
It was a surprise to hear Paul Guinery on Radio 3 this afternoon.
Not that he hasn’t been around as a presenter in recent months (unless my mind / memory is playing tricks), but because he was on the air, this time, as a guest of Sean Rafferty’s on In Tune, talking about his CD, Delius and his Circle. In conversation with Sean, Paul talked about composers of piano music such as Percy Grainger and E. J. Moeran, and engagingly played some of their pieces.
Apart from hearing Paul reading the news and announcing of late, I had not known of him in years. Although I do not know when he stopped being a regular voice on Radio 3, I do recall corresponding with him* in the late 1980s, when it was my joy to be able to listen to the radio through headphones when I was at work, which must have been around the time that, for their participation in Comic Relief, I received a photograph of all the presenters with red noses on (and even a rather suggestively placed one for the microphone).
The topic of our exchange of letters was the abolition of the feature Book of the Week, which was essentially a resource for when - one way or another - there were minutes to spare, and then the link person could dip into that week's book and read aloud (as well as at other scehduled times).
A serendipity about it was appealing (to me, at least, and I am sure that Paul said that he missed its passing), and it led to my reading several Books of the Week on the strength of what I heard read. In one case, it was a biography of Thomas More, whose Utopia I already knew (in translation, since I believe that it was written in Latin), and I was also familiar with several images, one famous, in the National Portrait Gallery. Sadly, the only thing that I take from that book is (and I quote from memory):
Every man thinketh that his own shit smells sweet
Equally, another Paul, Paul Griffiths, whom I knew as a writer of books about music (including his Concise History of Modern Music (for Thames & Hudson), turned up as a guest of Ian McMillan on The Verb, talking about his 'labour of love', Let Me Tell You, which had taken years to write (although short):
Taking, essentially, as some sort of principle the notion that less is more, and that, by restricting the means available, one can challenge oneself and produce wonders (which is under the umbrella of what Oulipo**, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, stands for), Paul limited himself to writing a novel about, broadly, Hamlet's story, but told from Ophelia's perspective, and only using the vocabulary of some 400 to 500 words that she has in all her lines in the Shakespeare play.
The result is powerful. Strange, too, but one soon loses the temptation to turn to the text of Hamlet and referee what this other Paul has done. When he talked about the endeavour on air, the inventiveness was patent, and he explained to his host Ian how, for example, the fact that Ophelia only uses the word 'father' (referring, of course, to Polonius) means that circumlocution is always involved in talking about Polonius' wife, Ophelia's mother, which he makes a feature of the book, and of Ophelia's (and Polonius') relations with her.
The words in Ophelia's vocabulary, though, have been used in any sense that they admit: so 'rue', from her famous garland, is not just a noun for a herb, but can appear as a verb, and that is only the simplest example of what has been done by Paul Griffiths in Let Me Tell You. If, as a reader, one knows the play reasonably well, one will be taken short from time to time at just how much has been done with such a small resource, and almost every chapter has a different feel to it, some of them, at the end (almost necessarily), being very dark.
End-notes
* Memory being what it is, and my cat having propelled a pile of papers from off the shelf in 'the office' in such a way that the letter was uppermost, I can now say that Donald Macleod was, in fact, my correspondent: in his letter, added to a standard one dated 31 March 1989, he informed me that the Controller of Radio 3, John Drummond, had objected to having a Book of the Week on the basis that readings from it, in odd gaps, did not relate to the surrounding programmes.
It seems that Donald missed Book of the Week, too, but that the idea of having readings from diaries was that they would relate to the date of broadcast. (True, but Drummond does not seem to have realized that such readings had no more necessary relevance to the programmes being broadcast that day than an abritrary book, and I cannot say how long such readings lasted.)
** Curiously, on the Wikipedia® web-page for Oulipo, the list of members as at 2011 bears this qualification: Note that Oulipo members are still considered members after their deaths.
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