o’ britishness. zadie smith. martin amis. et al.
Every literature or creative writing course I’ve ever taken has addressed this topic: Britishness. What does it mean to be British? Do we do the same thing in The States? I don’t think so. (I never did.) But I’ve never taken a literature/writing course on U.S. soil. So, maybe…
Zadie Smith was the first writer I explored with this particular question in mind: What does it mean to be British? In my view, she answers it fantastically. But I’m a Yank. So what do I know? I’ll tell you what, this – Smith is a brilliant comic novelist (you will especially agree with me if you’ve ever heard her read aloud her work.) And I think Amis does a disservice by not pointing it out. But again, who am I to question the son of Sir Kingsley?
Manchester Centre for New Writing
According to Professor of Creative Writing Martin Amis, he and fellow ‘Literature and Britishness’ panellist Howard Jacobson are the last remaining British comic novelists. If successful humour hinges on implied superiority over other groups we have become a nation terrified of referring to people collectively at all, let alone to any kind of grudge or rivalry based on national identity.
Jacobson claimed to be uncertain whether Britishness actually exists, and certainly not to believe in multiculturalism. In his view, the concept is a device of the English intelligentsia, which would hate its own country’s culture if it couldn’t dismiss the English aspects and embrace those from elsewhere. Yet he spoke of an appealing English quality in the voices of novelists like George Eliot, which he described as simultaneously satirical, tolerant, aloof, and aware of its own absurdity.
He agreed with comments by Amis about the effective tradition of sexual symbolism in British writing, going so far as to say that “…the best sex in an English novel has no mention of sex”. In Amis’s view this is again related to British writing being unusually grounded in sanity, with a median, middle class world its traditional subject matter.
* Listen to the full debate online
* Download the full debate as an mp3 file
mit opencourseware
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content – lecture notes, exams, videos, etc. It’s not a degree-granting or credit-bearing initiative but it is a publication of the course materials. Which works well for someone like me who has no practical use for things like the Essentials of Geophysics but finds it wonderfully fascinating and know-worthy all the same.
I’ve sat about 30 of these over the past year – working my way through everything from String Theory to Tolstoy. I have absolutely no plans to touch the mathematics modules. At all. (Have always loved physics. Have always hated pure maths.)
Christmas could not excite me more than the content for literature and writing.
Writing and Humanistic Studies
The MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies gives students the opportunity to learn the techniques, forms, and traditions of several kinds of writing, from basic expository prose to more advanced forms of non-fictional prose, fiction and poetry, science writing, scientific and technical communication and digital media.
brain snacks. yale open courses.
Free online Yale video lectures for:
Milton
A study of Milton’s poetry, with some attention to his literary sources, his contemporaries, his controversial prose, and his decisive influence on the course of English poetry.
The American Novel Since 1945
The reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones.
Modern Poetry
The authors discussed range from Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, to Stevens, Moore, Bishop, and Frost with additional lectures on the poetry of World War One, Imagism, and the Harlem Renaissance.
princeton university library digital collection
One of the things I loved about the University of Manchester were the special collections (which date back to the 3rd millennium BC) held by the John Rylands Libraries. Stateside, Princeton University Library is digitising its rare books. Their latest addition is the Islamic Manuscripts Collection. The University Library holds approximately 9,500 Islamic manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and other languages of the Muslim world written in Arabic script. The manuscripts date from the 9th to the 19th centuries. Two hundred of these manuscripts are being digitized for the digital library.
There’s also a late 13th-century Byzantine manuscript from Constantinople which contains Aristotle’s Organon (De interpretatione, Analytica priora, Analytica posteriora, and Topica), accompanied by diagrams and other textual materials.
Princeton University Library Digital Collection
bookmarks.
These links are more for me than anything. I use to print and bind articles of interest into a journal. I’ve now gone digital. And yeah, I still have a crush on my pink western digital passport, but it’s no comparison to paper. Nothing really is.
The diaries of the novelist George Orwell are now published online as a daily blog.
Interesting video interview with Ray Bradbury on Literature and Love.
And in The Economist…Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. His and Hers.
Most favoured of all the Man Booker award winners. Salman Rushdie’s recent CNN interview.
my sister is jack handey
On Romance:
My instant messenger just popped up with a note that says ‘Add Me’. I don’t know what it means. But it sounds dirty.
So he says “But you’ve (bungee) jumped with me before” and I say “Yeah, but I’m married to you now. I don’t have to do stupid things to impress you anymore.”
I use to have one of Jon Bon Jovi’s videos Tivoed. Watched it every morning. Then the husband got ticked off and said I was just using it to get in the mood – so I had to delete it.
On Pregnancy:
I know you’re dreading the whole birthing-process. Labor and all that. But don’t . Honestly. By the time you carry a baby for nine months, you’ll be begging them to take it out.
Pregnancy’s a funny thing. With your first everything is so new and exciting. The anticipation of what ‘might be’ is just…incredible. With the second, you already know. So it’s all ‘I’ve created a life. I’m a creator’. By the third one you’re just like…I get it already! Can we please have the baby now.
On Family:
Our brother use to read romance novels. That’s a rumor I’m thinking about starting.
She was convinced he’d never leave her. Seriously. Why else would she introduce him to the family.
On Intellect:
Eating fish and reading big-worded books should help. That and Zoloft.
I’m not saying he’s stupid. But he looks like he might be.
On Fitness:
Yeah. Whatever. I can’t run. I’ve had three kids. My bladder will fall out.
So some people think I’m fit because I wear a size 2. What some people don’t know…is that I’m a midget!
On Me:
She has this uncanny ability to brainwash her little sister. Honestly. She’s just like you.
Sometimes I listen to the voice mails you leave – and they’re so long – I start to answer you back.
