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TWO MURDOCH BOOKS IN ONE

~ Posted by Robert Butler, May 16th 2012
 
Hard to think of a better example of two books squeezed into one than "Dial M for Murdoch", published last month, a fascinating account of the hacking scandal and the cover-up at News International. The book has two authors—the Independent's Martin Hickman and the Labour MP Tom Watson—and both make appearances in the book, where each is referred to in the third person. But there's a big difference: Hickman is an observer and Watson is a main character.
 
For most of the book, the tone is what you would expect: good clear reporting, the facts—shocking as they are—presented in a reasonably detached fashion. But every now and then, "Tom Watson" makes an appearance in the story and the tone can suddenly veer off. We hear about some of his thought processes as if he were a character in a novel and this leads, inevitably in this context, to moments of bathos. We learn for instance that Watson "watched every episode of the American detective series 'The Wire' and decided to follow the advice of one of its characters". (This was the moment the detective Lester Freamon, played by Clarke Peters, repeated Deepthroat's line: "Follow the money.") The quality of the information changes too. We get the little details that thriller writers like to use to locate characters. "At 10am the next day, as he drank black coffee at the Fire Station in Waterloo, Tom Watson was called by Ed Miliband's office..."
 
In short, one writer is working in a different genre from the other. Watson wants us to root for the little guy and share his point of view. Two hours before questioning Rupert and James Murdoch at the Select Committee hearing, we learn that "Watson shut the door of his office in Portcullis House, put on the Doors album 'LA Woman' at full blast and paced around rehearsing questions."
 
The trouble with this is that Watson isn't the only hero in the hacking story: at the very least, there's also the Guardian's Nick Davies and the solicitors Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris. What coffee were they drinking? What music were they putting on when they paced around their offices? Balance suggests we should be told, but it would be ridiculous if we were.

It's clear from "Dial M for Murdoch" that Watson has paid a high price for his campaign: his marriage broke up, he has felt suicidal and he has feared for his personal safety. Yet he is still a central figure in a story that is moving swiftly. One day he should write a personal book about his role in exposing this scandal. Just not yet. 

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life

TRANSLATOR IN THE SPOTLIGHT

~ Posted by Simon Willis, May 15th 2012

Last night, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was awarded to Aharon Appelfeld's novel "Blooms of Darkness" at a ceremony in London. It was a night for the winner, but also for small publishing houses, which had published five of the six novels on the shortlist, including Appelfeld's (Umberto Eco's "The Prague Cemetery", published by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Random House, was the exception). The prize proved, yet again, how much we need these publishers. Independents have given us everything from the multimillion-selling "Millennium Trilogy" by Stieg Larsson, published by the MacLehose Press, to last night's winner, about moments of hope amid the terrors of the Holocaust, published by Alma Books.

It was also a night for translators. The prize is one of the very few occasions when authors share the spotlight and the prize-money equally with their translators, whose reward doesn't often extend beyond a tiny sum of money for their work and a small credit on a book's title page. But Appelfeld was joined on the stage by Jeffrey M. Green, who has been translating his Hebrew into English for many years, and who as well as a cheque got a chance to speak about the translator's art.

He compared translating not to writing but to acting. Translators, he said, have to find their own way to deliver somebody else's words, just as actors do on stage, where each performance of a part, like each translation of a book, will be slightly different from all the others. But he didn't stop there. Writers, too, he said, are often translators of a kind. In "Hamlet", Shakespeare gave us Danish characters speaking Elizabethan English. Appelfeld's characters are native German-speakers. Hugo, an 11-year-old boy, is saved from the Holocaust when his mother smuggles him out of the ghetto into the hands of a friend, Mariana, a prostitute who cares for the boy. Although Appelfeld himself was brought up speaking German, he refuses to write in it, regarding it as the "the language of the murderers". So his characters speak to us in Hebrew. Thanks to the part played by Jeffrey M. Green, they also speak in English.

Simon Willis is apps editor of Intelligent Life and writes Found in Translation for the magazine

MAN CITY'S GREAT ANTI-CHOKE

 ~ Posted by Tim de Lisle, May 14th 2012

A funny thing has happened with Manchester City’s last-gasp Premiership triumph. It is being seen as the start of an era, even a dynasty. Both words were tripping off the lips of their players and manager yesterday. You might expect that, in the dazed aftermath of a stupendous drama. But even the pundits seemed to agree.

There is only one thing to say to this: hang on a minute. Manchester City’s last league title came 44 years ago. The previous one was 31 years before that. One of sport’s eternal verities states that it is harder to stay at the top than it is to get there. Look what happened when City were way ahead in this season’s title race: they choked.

Luckily for them, Man United promptly did the same thing. But even when City went back to the top, and had only to beat QPR at home to wrap it all up, they managed to choke again, conceding two goals against ten men.

Look at how they did in the other tournaments this season: they crashed out of Europe, twice, to modest opponents; they lost in the third round of the FA Cup, at home, to United; they reached the Carling Cup semi-final but lost at home to Liverpool. Dynasty? What dynasty?

We are making an elementary mistake here. Because City come from Manchester (or are based there), we are assuming they will now do a United. But doing a United is a very rare thing: in the 44 years since City’s last title, only United and Liverpool have managed it.

All the other teams to taste the league title—Leeds, Forest, Villa, Blackburn, Arsenal—rose and faded. That’s the norm. And being richer than the rest seldom makes all the difference. Chelsea, so rich under Roman Abramovich and so strong under Jose Mourinho, looked like starting something big in 2006, but they have won only one league title in the past six, have just slumped to sixth, and they are looking for their eighth manager in five years. Money can’t buy me continuity.

Another of sport’s eternal verities states that you have to take it day by day, game by game—“don’t get ahead of yourself”, as the pros say. We are getting way ahead of ourselves here. It could be the start of an era, but as yet there is no way of telling. If City win two trophies next season, let that conversation begin.

For now, instead of gazing dimly into crystal balls, let’s just say this: after scoring two goals in stoppage time on the final day, City fully deserve their title. It was one of the great anti-chokes.

 Tim de Lisle is editor of Intelligent Life

WRITERS IN THEIR OWN HAND

~ Posted by Emma Hogan, May 11th 2012

“Writing Britain”, which opens today at the British Library, traces how writers from Chaucer to Zadie Smith have used the British landscape—from its rolling dales and hills to its inner-city tower blocks—in their work. With over 100 items from the library itself, and others on loan from America or other parts of Britain, it is not lacking in jewels. There is a delicately-wrought manuscript of "The Canterbury Tales", an original illustration from Tolkein's "The Hobbit", a psychedelic cartoon of "Alice in Wonderland" by Ralph Steadman and the wonderfully pulp-like cover of Alan Sillitoe's "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning". 

But the real gems are the manuscripts. Looking at these exhibits—from Laurie Lee's draft of "Cider with Rosie" written on the back of a BBC script to a list by W.H. Auden of his favourite names of lead mines in Derbyshire—another theme emerges, which brings these authors even closer: their handwriting. The only manuscripts on display by Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot show them writing in clear, straight, evenly spaced copperplate, Eliot's few markings and changes as coolly confident as the progress of "Middlemarch". Looking at the handwriting of these two women, they suddenly seem unshakable, and you can understand how they took on the whole host of male Victorian writers.

In contrast, Coleridge's notebook from his 1802 tour of the Lake District is as ragged as the mountains he writes about—his swerving D's and P's slipping and sliding off the page. So too with William Blake: his tiny, spidery handwriting fills the notebook he carried with him, "London" and "Tyger, Tyger" crammed on two opposite pages in a pencil so delicate it seems as if one smudge would obliterate it.

Some of these writers wrote in a hand that seems startling. Katherine Mansfield, whose spiky short stories made the equally edgy Virginia Woolf declare that her work "was the only writing I have ever been jealous of", writes in a soft, flowery script, with florid G's and L's. Stella Gibbons, whose "Cold Comfort Farm" parodies doom-laden Edwardian country novels writes in a well-spaced child-like way—the irony and mischief which made her famous seemingly absent from her handwriting. Similarly, Daphne du Maurier's early pencil notes for her windswept "Rebecca"—used as evidence when du Maurier was unsuccessfully sued for plagiarism—has the rigid neatness of the schoolroom.

And yet often it is what they didn't end up saying which is just as illuminating. J.G. Ballard's manuscript for the opening page of "Kingdom Come" shows his black biro script covered in red and blue revisions and indecisions—crossing out most of the text apart from the one, inspired, first sentence: "The suburbs dream of violence." With the advent of typewriters and computers, these criss-crossing changes can be seen even more clearly. Seamus Heaney crosses through his typed lines of poetry making subtle changes with a red pen: "glen" becomes "arbour", and "haven" becomes "harbour". What's deleted takes us as close to the workings of their minds as what remains.

Emma Hogan wrote the Notes on a Voice on Charles Dickens and  T.S. Eliot. Her posts for the Editors' Blog include Another Top 40 for Dickens and From here to New Hampshire. She tweets as @erahogan

LEONARDO HAS THE BEST APP

~ Posted by Simon Willis, May 10th 2012

More and more galleries are producing apps for their exhibitions. Some are modest, like the one for the Lucian Freud show at the National Portrait Gallery, which doesn't go beyond the exhibition itself. Others have bells and whistles. For its Abstract Expressionist exhibition in 2010, MoMA in New York produced an app with videos, interactive maps and audio commentary on the paintings. The problem was that artists like Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock made very big pictures, and the scale is lost on screen. The other problem is that if you're looking at a dark painting by Rothko on an iPad, you also see your own face reflected back at you.

The app for "Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist", which is on at the Queen's Gallery in London, is the best yet. You get illustrated mini-essays about every stage and aspect of Leonardo's career as an anatomist, each one ending with a video from a curator, historian or surgeon. You get animated comparisons with modern anatomical understanding, which occasionally show where Leonardo went wrong, but more often show how right he was.

But the real reason to download the app, of course, is the complete drawings, which, because of their scale and intricacy, work very well on screen. The pages of Leonardo's notebooks weren't that large, so you're not seeing them hugely reduced. The beauty of the drawings is in the detail, and on the iPad you can zoom in on every joint, nerve and tendon. On one sheet alone there are five separate studies of the muscles of the shoulder and arm, each drawing showing something different: the system of bones; the way the muscles attach to the bones; the muscles from the neck to the tip of the thumb, from two different angles; the shoulder with its largest muscle removed to show the smaller muscles underneath. It's all meticulously captured.

You can get close in the gallery too, but what you can't do is read Leonardo's notes, written in his famous mirror writing. On the iPad, the notes are reversed and translated in situ on each page, telling you what is shown, how it works or how it's best dissected, but also giving an insight into why he draws a hand, foot or heart in the way he does. "When you have drawn the bones of the hand," he wrote, "and wish to draw on this the muscles which are joined with these bones, make threads instead of muscles. I say threads and not lines in order that one should know what muscle goes below or above another muscle, which cannot be done with simple lines." Here is Leonardo using his art to make his science as clear as possible.

His mastery of the line extends to the one-liner. Next to a drawing of the lungs he wrote: "Dust does damage." Next to a drawing of a man's heart he wrote: "The heart is placed exactly in the middle between the brain and testicles."

"Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist" is on at the Queen's Gallery in London until October 7th. The iPad app costs £9.95

Simon Willis is apps editor of Intelligent Life. His recent posts for the Editors' Blog include Scanning the planet's crust, I'm with Michael Berkeley and Solitude builds like electricity

THE ART OF THE FAIR

~ Posted by Hazel Sheffield, May 9th 2012

Where in New York would you put a very big tent? As Frieze’s co-founder Amanda Sharp said, “The true story is that I opened Google Maps and looked for big green spaces.” The one she found was on an island that nestles under the hulking Robert Kennedy Bridge between Manhattan and Queens. Once home to a mental asylum and public burial ground, Randall’s Island is now best known for its parkland, tennis academy and athletics track.  

For a tent, the New York-based architects SO-IL created a snaking marquee whose curves follow the contours of the island. Tumbleweed rolled around in the grass outside the tent (installed by Latifa Echakhch) to heighten our sense of the wild. The festive tone was struck by artist Joel Kyack, who had worked in booths at state country fairs as a child. He manned a game truck, inviting people to roll a ball into the lips of a yawning mouth.

This will be the 10th year of Frieze in London, and demand from New York's gallery owners for something similar persuaded Frieze's founders to try their first one here: of the 180 galleries participating from 30 nations, 60 are American. But the location also provides a powerful new context for the art. In the "Frame" section, reserved for galleries less than six years old, Night Gallery from Los Angeles showcased a nightmarish bedroom installation concocted of black tape, video and mirrors by Samara Golden called "Bad Brains", a reminder that Randall’s Island still houses a psychiatric ward. 

Going round, there were plenty of fun moments too: a huge plaster nose protruded into the aisle; a blue plastic Disney dwarf grinned at us from one of the nooks; up close, a wall of chicken wire by the Romanian cartoonist Dan Perjovschi turned into a mesh of tiny drawings of people. 

Every taste was catered for: we dipped crisps into a French horn filled with guacamole and, in the bends of the marquee, where hip Manhattan restaurants and cafés like The Fat Radish and Intelligentsia Coffee opened out onto the grass, we picked at red beet and quinoa salads and took in the Manhattan skyline. We were a few short miles from the air-conditioned galleries of Madison Avenue, but it felt, triumphantly, like a day at the fair.

Hazel Sheffield lives in New York, where she is the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Scholar at Columbia University. Her posts on the Editors' Blog include Obama breaks into song and Art and Kraftwerk in New York

LENA DUNHAM'S DEBT TO "PEANUTS"

~ Posted by Tom Shone, May 8th 2012

Critics have been busy naming the various influences that have been stirred into the pot of "Girls", Lena Dunham’s bruised, brazen new comedy for HBO about the growing pains of a group of Williamsburg Millennials. In New York magazine, Emily Nussbaum compared Dunham’s candour to that of the stand-up comedian Louie CK: “They’re Mr Magoos of the dating world, stumbling into mortification, then exploiting it as material.” In Vulture Matt Zoller Seitz found the show “precise and aesthetically modest, like a female-centric cousin of movies by Whit Stillman...and late-seventies Woody Allen.” Halle Kiefer in Rolling Stone opted for "Seinfeld", while the New York Times’s Alessandra Stanley went for "Sex and the City".

I would like to propose another antecedent: Charles M. Schulz. Where else have we encountered Dunham’s preoccupation with ill-matched couples, self-abasing love and self-basting humiliations than in "Peanuts"? Admittedly, Charlie Brown’s love for Little Red-haired Girl never got him as far as an actual date (“You know why that little red-haired girl never notices me? Because I’m nothing! How can she see someone who’s nothing!”) whereas Dunham’s Hannah achieves regular, monkeyish intercourse with an artsy Prospect Heights carpenter who likes to take her from behind on his dirty sofa. But the look on Dunham’s face as he does so, squished into the sofa so that she almost seems to be turning out to face the viewer, seems to cry out for a fluffy thought balloon above her head containing the words “Good grief”. Or better yet: *sigh*.

Charlie Brown, it will be remembered, is the punch-bag for endless jokes about the size of his head, just as Hannah is teased mercilessly for her flabby body; both seem to draw punishment from the universe like air moisture, suckers for an endless succession of humiliations, disappointments and set-backs which leave Brown, at least, staring out at the reader despondently, as if to say: do you see this? As Schulz’s biographer David Michaelis puts it, “No rage boils up, no self pity spills over, no tears are shed, no lunch line is squeezed out—just silent endurance.”

Dunham is not the first to master the art of the dying fall—those little comic diminuendos that descend like snow, at the end of a scene. Ever since American TV sitcoms started ditching their laugh tracks, any number of shows—from "The Office" to "Curb Your Enthusiasm"—have mastered the art of the soft drop, most of them at the service of the comedy of social unease: David Brent’s lame attempts at humour, sliding down people’s faces like egg yolks. Dunham’s moments, like Schulz’s, feel almost unwatchably private. Theirs is not the comedy of social embarrassment—but the softer, crueller kind you can experience solo.       

Tom Shone writes our column "At the Cinema". His books are "Blockbuster" and "In the Rooms" 

ON THE MENTAL SPECTRUM

~ Posted by Rebecca Willis, May 4th 2012

Watching “The Bridge”, the latest offering of Scandinavian noir to reach our TV screens, makes me feel hopeful—despite the increasingly dark deeds of the criminal mastermind who's keeping the police of Copenhagen and Malmö on their toes. That's because of our heroine, Saga Noren. She has the white-blonde good looks of a Swedish ice queen and an unusual brain under all that hair. Saga can’t read social signals, can't relate emotionally to other people, and takes everything literally, at face value. In short, she is somewhere on the autistic spectrum. "I don't think she knows she has Aspergers", the actress Sofia Helin, who plays her so convincingly, told Time Out. "The writer Hans [Rosenfeldt] was very precise about this. She just thinks she's odd". Label or not, she makes Sara Lund in "The Killing" just look mildly workaholic. 

Whatever you think of the way she is characterised—and at times it is heavy-handed—her presence and her role are significant if you believe that our fictions—in literature, film and TV—tell us something about our society. Madness and mental illness have been explored from classical mythology through Hamlet and Lear to "Crime and Punishment" and "The Bell Jar". But they are states of mind that could, in theory, happen to any of us. They are narratives about (non-PC word coming up) "normal" people who become deranged. The portrayals of characters with a from-birth condition are thinner on the ground and, I think, relatively recent. Lennie in “Of Mice and Men” springs to mind. So does Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man”. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, narrated by a boy with autism, was published in 2003 and takes to the stage at the Cottesloe in July. And now we have the saga of Saga. 

Of course there will be critics, asking how it would play if she were ugly, whether we laugh at her or with her—sometimes it feels uncomfortably like the former; judging from the first four episodes, Saga doesn’t do humour. People complained that “Rain Man” perpetuated the myth that people with autism are always savants, with a particular area of genius. And Mark Haddon, they say, doesn’t really know what it’s like to be autistic. Likewise Helin is just acting, but Saga is a potent character rather than a victim, and she has agency—she is good at police work and has an excellent clean-up rate on her cases. It’s a good thing that we have a strong and positive portrayal on our screens of someone who is—in the phrase once coined by a right-on London council—"differently abled”. And as often with matters of liberalism and tolerance, the Scandinavians are leading the way.

Rebecca Willis is associate editor of Intelligent Life 

AN INTERMITTENT "SCREAM"

~ Posted by Robert Butler, May 3rd 2012

They thought it might go for $80m. But last night in New York, Munch's "The Scream" went for $107m—the highest price paid for a work of art at an auction. If you couldn't get there, you could always watch it online. Sotheby’s said they were streaming the sale live from 7pm, or midnight BST. At 11.45 last night, the live stream was a shot of an empty podium and the tops of people's heads as they walked past, no ambient sound, and no sign when that might arrive. Twitter was doing a better job. Someone tweeted a picture of the queue. Someone tweeted the photo of their press pass. Someone tweeted the view from a hotel foyer: "The #Carlyle is swimming with art barons, vampires and 300 yr. old women."

At midnight a smooth-looking man in black tie stepped forward. The sound came on and went off again. Was that deliberate? Soon the twitter stream was announcing "#Sothebys live stream dead." The problem was too many people wanted to watch. My computer was getting snatches of audio and video, stuttering and jumping, but the numbers on the screen were out of synch with the audio.

When "The Scream" revolved into view at 12.45 BST, the auctioneer had a line you don't often hear. "I'll start the bidding at 40 million". However bad the feed was, he made the next 10 minutes look irresistible. There was the balletic way in which he flung an arm out in one direction, then swung back and flung it out in another. He might have been surfing. In the pauses, he twisted the gavel in his right hand, as if it was a string of rosary beads. After $90m, it became a stand-off between two telephone bidders represented in the room by his colleagues. ("Back with Charlie, still against you Stephan, let's try one more.") As it neared $100m, things slowed down and he was at his most inscrutable. "I have all the time in the world."

Those of us online could only guess at the drama. We knew we were missing out on some great TV. The first thing Sotheby's should do is invest in a back-up server, then get more than one camera, and then be a little more courteous to online viewers. They might even get an expert in to help us along. Who knows what business is out there. Someone tweeted at 1am: "Shame on @sothebys for messing up the live stream. I'd have gone to $108 if it had been up." 

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life

SCANNING THE PLANET'S CRUST

~ Posted by Simon Willis, May 2nd 2012
 
The pictures could be taken by aliens. When you walk into "Transmission", the current exhibition at the Brancolini Grimaldi gallery in London, it's not immediately clear what you are looking at. The images on the wall, hung without labels or titles, are uncannily familiar: landscapes, often captured from high altitude; networks of crevasses and fissures, mountain ranges and isolated craters. We've seen things like this before in photographs of the lunar surface or pictures sent back by rovers on Mars. But you are in fact looking at some of the most photographed places on the planet: the Yosemite national park, the Grand Canyon and Mount St Helens.
 
Dan Holdsworth is a photographer, but this isn't quite photography, or at least not quite as we know it. He made the pictures out of data, captured by the United States Geological Survey using satellites in space, which make laser scans of the Earth's surface and take coordinates every few metres, which Holdsworth then renders digitally. In the centre of the room is a stack of more than 6,000 sheets of paper, more than a foot tall, printed with nearly 5m coordinate points in neat columns. They represent 0.23 square metres of the print of Yosemite Valley on the wall.  
 
His largest image of the Grand Canyon looks a bit like a frosted branch, and vast swathes of the Cascade mountains in California like scrumpled paper. There are two remarkable pictures of Salt Lake City, except that you have to look very hard to make out the city at all. From a distance, you can see a flat plain abutting mountains. But go in close, and there it is: the faintest outlines of industrial buildings, freeways and convoluted roundabouts, like fine imprints in wet clay. In Holdsworth's pictures we're seeing great American landscapes and a big American city made to look small, no longer the familiar grand vistas, but mere features on a planet's crust.
 
Holdsworth has just published a new book called “Blackout”, which also shifts our perspective, but this time from ground-level. He has photographed mountains and glaciers in Iceland, near the volcano which grounded planes in 2010. But he’s inverted the pictures, so that light becomes dark—the basalt rock bone-white, the sky black. Oliver Morton, who writes our column The Music of Science, has written the accompanying essay. He says that the images remind him not of Mars or the moon, but of “the volcanoes of Venus", a planet whose "searing heat and extraordinary pressure...have allowed almost no exploration of its surface". The resemblance is sobering. Earth, once again, looks unearthly and strange. For Morton that "opens up a question that is both moral and aesthetic: Why do I care about this barren land—if, indeed, I do?"
 
"Transmission: New Remote Earth Views" is on at the Brancolini Grimaldi gallery in London until May 19th. "Blackout" is out now from Steidl BG

Simon Willis is apps editor of Intelligent Life