Major Amberson had “made a fortune” in 1873, when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then.

I avoided Twilight phenomena because, to be frank, I didn’t want anything to pollute my image of a shirtless, ageless David Boreanaz. Still, I’ve always had a thing for British Boys, and Robert Pattinson has a superbly fascinating face. So, on Sunday I stole into a screening of Eclipse.

Today I read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. I’ve had this book laying on my bedside table for almost a year, and only picked it up because of the Pattinson connection. I’m sorry I’ve left it so long because this lady can write the socks off some of the authors I’ve been reading lately.

It’s not very often that I anticipate the movie over the book – but with a cast that includes Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson (He looks like he just stepped out of the Salford Lads Club circa The Smiths – that’s enough for me to think he’s hot) and the formidable Christoph Waltz (If there’s a better August out there, I’ve not seen him), Director Francis Lawrence is gonna be hard pressed not to make the adaptation better than the book itself.

On Thursday, 1 July 2010, Martin Amis will be discussing literature and violence at The Martin Harris Centre with guests Blake Morrison and John Gray. They’ll be mulling over…

The psychological and cultural roots of violent acts, and the ways in which writers from Shakespeare to JG Ballard depict and respond to it.

I’ve always read a great deal by and about Professor Amis but I never seem to find time to sit down and write about him properly. Ce la vie. I’m sure this discussion, like all the others, will make for good copy. If you’d like to attend, tickets are £7 from the venue – the University of Manchester’s Martin Harris Centre (0161 275 8951 / boxoffice@manchester.ac.uk) located on Bridgeford Street just off Oxford Road.

When I was about twelve I decided there was nothing to it but I had to learn Russian. (I often took on grand ideas during my summer holidays.)

Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky. If these wonderful writers could be transliterated so beautifully into English, imagine how wonderful they must be in their own language.

I still haven’t done it. Learned to read Russian. Though I still think I should. What I’m doing now, right this moment, is leafing through Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. Next, I plan to move on to Anna Karenina. I’ve had it laying by my bedside for some months now. I’ve only read it once. I was still in high school and imagine a lot of the subtext was well over my head.

My sister insists I get to it already. “Go read Anna,” she says, “so that we can have a proper discussion.” She really does heart the socks off old Leo and rereads what she sees as his great masterpiece whenever she has time to do it.

Me, I fancy Chekhov. (I’ve told you this before.) There’s a fair number of books out on how to imitate the man, including “How to Write Like Chekhov” which is quite good. But if you really want to learn from the master, read his correspondence.

Below, Chekhov, in a letter to D.V. Grigorovith, critiques a story called “Karelins Dream”.

Recently, I received this email. It went like this:

B,

Go to the library and get The Anti-Inflammation Zone. Now.

I think this is the most important book I have ever read about health and wellness. I know I say every couple months that I’m going Full-Weil (and I think Dr. Weil’s pyramid is better than this guy’s food plan) but the scientific info is ASTOUNDING. Like, I can’t believe the Surgeon Bloody General isn’t on television talking about this every single day.

Flynn

Joyce Carol Oates

I’ve got a story about me and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. And a video, somewhere, of me telling it to her…to Joyce Carol Oates. She probably forgot about it as soon as I told it but it was a wow moment, in the moment. You could see it on her face.

Something that’s neither here nor there but comes to mind because it comes to mind. Whenever I think of Joyce Carol Oates I always have this image of her running through Hyde Park. Long and lean and listening. Alone, with her internal self. What conversations they must have.

I’ve just finished reading The Falls. And I don’t know what to think of it. I never know what to think of Oates. Her talent is undeniable. The depth of her characters, incredible. She’s real and raw and honest. She doesn’t mollycoddle her readers. Doesn’t seem a fan of happy endings. I think that’s the thing I enjoy most.

Now, to Zombie.

“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

- Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (whom I adore…exceedingly) was a British poet and soldier who signed up for the Artists’ Rifles in 1915. He was known for his shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare – images which sat in stark contrast to both the public perception of war at the time, and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets.

Owen was killed in action on November 4 1918, just a week before the war ended. He was 25 years old.

Launched 90 years after the end of the First World War, the University of Oxford’s The First World War Digital Archive now comprises over 7,000 digital images relating to the poets of the Great War.

In 1952 Nabokov was invited to Harvard by Professor Harry T. Levin and others as a visiting professor. He taught an undergraduate lecture course in the novel and did research on Pushkin in Widener Library. It was during this period that his son Dmitri was an undergraduate at Harvard, and that the Poetry Room recorded both public and studio readings by Nabokov.

In 1959, after the great success of Lolita, the Nabokovs moved to Switzerland, from which Vladimir would return to America only twice before his death in 1977. On one of these occasions, in 1964, he read his work before a capacity audience in Harvard’s Sanders Theater, where he had lectured in 1952. Portions of this reading are included here.

This information is drawn from the pamphlet that accompanies Vladimir Nabokov at Harvard, a set of two cassette tapes issued by the Poetry Room at Harvard University in 1988. Penn State has been granted permission by the Nabokov Estate to use these sound files.

1. “The Ballad of Longwood Glen” (1964)
2. “Exile” (1952)
3. “A Literary Dinner” (1952)
4. “The Refrigerator Awakes” (1952)
5. “A Discovery” (1952)
6. Prose excerpt from Pale Fire (1964)
7. “Silentium” (by Fedor Tiutchev, 1946)
8. “Exegi Monumentum” (by Alexandr Pushkin, 1946)

Matthew Parker was a figure of the English Reformation and a benefactor to the University of Cambridge. An avid book collector who salvaged medieval manuscripts dispersed at the dissolution of the monasteries, his greatest tangible legacy is his library of manuscripts and early printed books (which span more than a thousand years) entrusted to Corpus Christi College and continuously housed there since 1574.

The Parker Library’s holdings of Old English texts accounts for nearly a quarter of all extant manuscripts in Anglo-Saxon, including the earliest copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 890) thought to have been commissioned by Alfred the Great as he pushed for greater use of the language. The Library also includes everything from monastic books from the early Dark Ages to illuminated manuscripts (The Bury Bible c. 1135) and autograph letters from Anne Boleyn and Martin Luther.

Parker Library on the Web is an undertaking of Corpus Christi College, the Stanford University Libraries and Cambridge University Library, to produce a digital copy of every imageable page of most manuscripts in the Parker Library.