The Reader Online

I saw this the other night and just had to share. It’s from Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, a thirteen-part TV series by the science-writer and astronomer Carl Sagan, originally broadcast in 1980 but recently re-mastered and re-released as a gorgeous DVD box-set. I couldn’t recommend the series – or the book that accompanies it - highly enough if I had a thousand years and all the adjectives in all the languages of the world at my disposal. It’s a fascinating, inspiring and deeply poetic voyage of discovery through life, the universe and everything.

This clip is from an episode called ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (other episodes have such titles as ‘One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue’, ‘The Backbone of Night’ and ‘The Edge of Forever’) which looks at intelligence and the evolution of the brain. Luckily, some kind soul had posted it on YouTube. I apologise for the quality – but only of the picture!

By Clare Williams, Get Into Reading Project Worker

We began reading The Rescue Man in June and are currently just over one third of the way into this impressive first novel by Anthony Quinn. Reactions from the group have been mixed although all are agreed that the book is certainly rich in thought provoking material to give plenty of food for thought! The general consensus at present seems to be that group members are very interested in the book in terms of the ideas it offers for discussion, but don’t quite like it as a novel in terms of those fundamental basics of character and plot. This in itself however has generated interesting debates about what we as readers want out of a novel, and especially what we want out of a novel to be read in one of our weekly GIR groups. Whilst one group member has criticised the book for being ‘too slow’, saying that they’d ‘like more to be happening – more characters, like we had in Great Expectations’, others have responded with the caution that ‘it’s no use jumping straight into it – you need to get to know the people’s characters first.’

So far we have been learning about the story of a rambling historian called Tom Baines, who appears somewhat cut adrift from life, unable or unwilling to live in the present and embrace its glorious randomness with all of its human characters and unpredictable events. Baines, an orphan with an unwavering attachment to his native city of Liverpool, is a man who fears commitment, whether that mean commitment to people – in one scene he falls into a self-deprecating fit of anxiety and remorse when a girl called Brenda invites him to a party – or a commitment to his profession. His love of architecture is a clue to his need for solid structures, permanent anchors in life and yet with the onset of the Second World War even this ostensibly stable crutch appears to be disappearing from his grasp. One other thing we have learnt about Baines is that he is a man who is plagued with the guilt of a brooding secret – blaming himself for the suicide of Alice Thorn, a girl who Baines once had a great affection for but who fell under the influence of a careless lover Duncan Heathcote. This past seems to only exacerbate his need for caution and tendency towards indecision.

As a group we have felt that a change needs to happen to Tom Baines for him to make a change within himself and his way of looking at life – indeed, for the story of the book itself to move and grow. That change appears to be being opened up in the novel, firstly in his meeting of two fellow enthusiasts Richard Tanqueray and his socialist wife Bella and secondly with the outbreak of war, which forces him into a position of action rather than what for Baines has become a rather dilapidating cycle of thought. This outlet for action comes in the form of Baines joining The Rescue Men. Maybe now things will begin to change for Baines and also pick up the pace of the novel which is the thing that seems to be wanted be some of our group members. It may also come to him in his reading of the diary of Peter Eames, a Victorian architect – indeed one group member feels that the diary might actually provide Baines with the ‘key’ that he seems to be looking for to make sense of his own life.

The book is set in Liverpool and as local readers we are all in agreement that it is meticulous in its recreation of the architecture and moreover mood of the city during the 1940’s. We have all been fascinated by the author’s descriptions of local buildings and streets and feel that we have gained a greater appreciation into what makes up a history of a building, a city. The book itself is infused throughout with a kind of mystical reverence for the past and the ghosts of lives which once inhabited the familiar buildings which many of us continue to pass each day. The book’s inclusion of Peter Eame’s diary only adds to this sense of mystery, enriching the novel with revolutionary ideas about art and life as forwarded by the likes of John Ruskin. Indeed, the book is rich in all kinds of literary allusions – including ones to Great Expectations – but yet again we are talking about ideas here rather than characters, and while ideas are all very interesting, the group is still waiting to be gripped by the characters in the book and the unfolding of their life stories by which as we readers are still waiting to be gripped. Ironically the author has put its readers perhaps too closely into the mindset of its central character Tom Baines – we are now ourselves waiting to see how the novel will unfold, waiting ourselves for the tide that another Liverpool writer, that other great Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough, referred to as ‘the tide in the love affair of mortals’ which must be taken at full flood if it is to be assuredly taken at all. However, as Clough also recognised and we have seen Tom Baines experiencing, this is easier said than done and it is perhaps the case that Quinn is challenging our desires as readers to make us appreciate and sympathise with Baines or even Peter Eames as another human being by making us vicariously living through the confusions and complications and procrastinations of their lives. We shall see!

This week’s poem has been chosen by Katie Clark, a Get Into Reading project worker, who read it with residents at a local care home for people suffering from dementia. They particularly enjoyed Clare’s evocative descriptions: how the mist “reaks and curdles up / Like fallen clouds”, and that wonderful “rawky creeping smoke”!

We hope you like it too, as we approach the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…

Mist in the Meadows

The evening oer the meadow seems to stoop
More distant lessens the diminished spire
Mist in the hollows reaks and curdles up
Like fallen clouds that spread – and things retire
Less seen and less – the shepherd passes near
And little distant most grotesquely shades
As walking without legs – lost to his knees
As through the rawky creeping smoke he wades
Now half way up the arches disappear
And small the bits of sky that glimmer through
Then trees loose all but tops – I meet the fields
And now indistinctness passes bye
The shepherd all his length is seen again
And further on the village meets the eye

John Clare (1793 – 1864)

In Memoriam by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Masterclass with Clare Williams

10.30am – 3.00pm, Wednesday 4th November
19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool, L69 7ZG
£30 (lunch & refreshments included)
Concessions available

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d,

Let darkness keep her raven gloss:

Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,

To dance with death, to beat the ground

After the death of her beloved husband Prince Albert, Queen Victoria remarked that: “Next to the Bible, In Memoriam is my comfort”. Today, this poem continues to captivate the reader’s imagination as it interrogates the universal themes of life and death, courageously confronting the experience of grief and loss.

In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,

Like coarsest clothes against the cold;

Words often fail us in times of bereavement but for Tennyson they provided his one source of comfort. His writing gives us a language by which we can possess and make sense of our suffering; it takes us on an epic philosophical journey to search for resolution to the cycle of grief, pain, and doubt.

We invite all readers who are interested in sharing something of this journey to join Clare Williams in this Masterclass. We highly recommend that you read In Memoriam before hand, but a selection of key passages will be available on the day.

To book your place contact Casi Dylan on casidylan@thereader.org.uk or download a booking form from our wesbsite.

According to George Bernard Shaw, Britain and America are two countries divided by a common language. Well, perhaps: but there’s nothing common about the language (or indeed anything else) of Enid Stubin, our New York Editor, whose addictively incisive take on life and literature can be found in each issue of The Reader magazine. This from issue 16 is one of her very best, and gives us a final chance to cling desperately (and delusionally) to the dying days of summer. Enid is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Humanities at NY University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. But she’s also…

Our Spy in NY

Enid Stubin

Summer reading: that prismatic prospect for nine-to-fivers, the leisure class, and those academics possessed of three-month vacations. I’ve always been resistant to or envious of the notion of seasonal reading – what, I wonder, do literate folks do the rest of the year? I refuse to make a list of books I’d like to collect in May, June, and July, when, as an adjunct, I’ve been teaching remedial writing throughout the supposedly idle and therefore idyllic months of college vacation. But in response to an early-August repertory-house screening of Visconti’s The Leopard, I pawed through my grimy shelves for the Pantheon paperback (I know it’s here somewhere) of the di Lampedusa novel. I couldn’t find it but did turn up a copy of Malamud’s A New Life, ‘the National Bestseller at $4.95, now 60 cents’, whose cover features a voluptuous odalisque sprawled among the haystacks of some collegiate pastoral and a Montgomery Clift lookalike turned away in existential torment. It’s one of those books I’d managed to read as a sullen adolescent before I could understand it. A word on its provenance on my double-stacked shelves: in 1965, when my brother was courting the young woman who is now his wife, I inherited a short list of titles – A New Life, McCarthy’s The Group, Updike’s Couples, and Nabokov’s Lolita – and was invited into a casual book club that has informed what tastes I have today. These books were sophisticated, literary, and racy, and the act of reading them seemed to invite me into an alluring, adult world of possibility. Recently my sister-in-law told me that they were chosen by her mother – an intriguing literary inheritance.

Because I’d last read A New Life as a pre-teen, I riffled through the now-brittle orangey pages of the Dell paperback and entered the world of S. Levin, academic refugee from New York City making his way westward to Cascadia College, where he finds a crucible of overheated departmental politics: conflicted loyalties to the freshman writing director who hired him, a catalogue of misfit colleagues, the utilitarian squelching of the humanities and humanism, aching sexual and philosophical loneliness. Why does no one talk about this wrenching comic novel, sad and satirical, authentic, and somehow defiantly exultant? Maybe because the world it illuminates is that of academe, and academic satire doesn’t sell. Maybe not even to academics. When I first read A New Life, the impression it made on me was immediate, but how could that be? The world it limned so sardonically wouldn’t be mine for decades. And yet it was a world I knew before I knew it.

Malamud and Levin were on my mind as I hurtled south and east to my new teaching job, no mere provisional adjunct gig (part-time instructional staff, anxious and uninsured, like to claim solidarity with jazz musicians) but a full-time, tenure-track position at the prettiest campus in the city University of New York system – ‘Four days a week at the beach’, as a friend termed it. Catch the number 6 to Bleecker, dash downstairs to Broadway-Lafayette for the B train, and take it to the end of the line, Brighton Beach, where the salt air intoxicates and the signs dazzle, even if three-quarters of them are incomprehensible. I found myself in front of the Caviar Kiosk, which offered comically huge tins of beluga, sevruga, and malossol, along with Brobdingnagian plastic containers of plebeian salmon roe. What wondrous life is this I lead!

But I had deeper connections to Brighton. As a child I would clamor to spend whole weeks of the summer in Brooklyn with my glamorous cousin Eileen, a spirited hoyden with the after-school and summer social schedule of an aluminum heiress. Although I lived in Far Rockaway, bordered by beach and bay, I routinely begged to visit East Flatbush, from which, provisioned with salami sandwiches, nectarines, and second-tier towels, we would set forth via bus (the B49 to Sheepshead Bay) for a day at tony¹ Manhattan Beach. The sand was newer and coarser than the Rockaway stuff, but it reliably lacked the glittering green edges of broken soda bottles and the odd bit of latex detritus (‘What’s that?’ I’d ask one of my older brothers who, wise in the ways of the world, kept discreetly silent but hustled me on with a light blow to the back of the head). Eileen held court among her cronies, a posse of animated girls from Samuel J. Tilden High School. And I would come equipped with a squashy grownup paperback from her snazzy Danish-modern wall-unit: the autobiography of Gypsy Rose Lee (tidily titled Gypsy, to coincide with the release of the Natalie Wood film); Dr. Benjamin 

Spock’s Baby and Child Care; Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind; the ‘deft and daring comic novel’ by John Tessitore, which provided the screenplay for That Touch of Mink (a favorite Doris Day vehicle, with Cary Grant on board); and if not the complete oeuvre of Harold Robbins, certainly The Major Phase: 71 Park Avenue, Never Love a Stranger, A Stone for Danny Fisher, and the magisterial Carpetbaggers. Propped up on one of my aunt’s chintz comforter covers and anointed with the musky orange glaze of Bain de Soleil (‘for the Saint Tropez tan’), I negotiated the perilous transition from vaudeville to burlesque, prepared some unfortunate toddler for the rigors of toilet training, and followed the picaresque reversals of Robbins’s gritty guys and vulnerable vixens. All the while I was inviting the solar radiation that would culminate, twenty-five years later, in the odd basal-cell carcinoma. Along with the Howard Beach shelf of modern masters, this reading shaped my literary choices long before I took up ‘serious’ literature seriously. Cheesy covers wrapped incandescent prose; a schlocky Bildungsroman offered a glimpse into the mysterious realm of adulthood; lurid blurbs trumpeted contemporary fiction that has endured.  The crummy and the crafted both stayed with me.

Lugging a manila envelope filled with my benefits package (largely offers for ‘catastrophic’ insurance and long-term nursing care), course syllabi, departmental requirements, and the author-ization for an ID card that would affix my squinting, haggard visage for all time under plastic laminate, I sniffed the air of Oriental Boulevard like a spaniel, off to fresh woods and pastures new. Will Eileen’s daughter, now seven, one day open one of her mom’s books and find, sifting out of the crackly, acid-laden bindings, some antique sand from my orgies of summer reading? I hope so. Let the kid form her own canon.

–
1. [Ed.] ‘tony’ is American for ‘posh’. Enid explains: ‘Manhattan Beach is posher than most NY beaches and compared with my native Rockaway and Coney Island, it’s the Riviera.’

Chosen by Devi Forsythe, Get Into Reading group facilitator

I used this poem when reading Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill. The courtship between Amos Jones and Mary is tender and  steeped with emotion and this poem highlights their meeting point.

Everyone in my group enjoyed it and one lady commented (without  any regret) that promises like pie-crusts are easily broken – she was speaking from her own chequered life which I thought was very poignant.  Someone else commented that it is the pie-crust that keeps the content (pie) intact and once that is broken the pie is exposed, vulnerable, ashamed, decaying and drying up.

Promises Like Pie-Crust

Promise me no promises,
So will I not promise you:
Keep we both our liberties,
Never false and never true:
Let us hold the die uncast,
Free to come as free to go:
For I cannot know your past,
And of mine what can you know?

You, so warm, may once have been
Warmer towards another one:
I, so cold, may once have seen
Sunlight, once have felt the sun:
Who shall show us if it was
Thus indeed in time of old?
Fades the image from the glass,
And the fortune is not told.

If you promised, you might grieve
For lost liberty again:
If I promised, I believe
I should fret to break the chain.
Let us be the friends we were,
Nothing more but nothing less:
Many thrive on frugal fare
Who would perish of excess.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Firefighters from Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service raced to Liverpool Central Library on Tuesday to help us with the launch of Liverpool Reads… The Savage. They joined author David Almond and illustrator Dave McKean to get the word about this huge book giveaway out to Merseyside and have a lot of fun to boot – I have never seen  grown adults revert so quickly to childhood – it seems that a big shiny fire engine brings out the kid in us all!

David and Dave talked to kids from local schools inside Liverpool Central Library about where the idea for the story came from and the creation of the illustrations. They kids left eager to get in to the book (and maybe to pick up a pen and paintbrush too) and were encouragemd by Jane Davis to share it with another – a sibling, parent, friend – to get the book out there to as many people as possible.

Got yours yet? Read yours yet? If so, pass it on!

Below you can download the full version of Gabriella Gruder-Poni’s essay, ‘Scenes from a PGCE’ published in The Reader 35.

In the magazine we printed the shorter piece under the tag line ‘The Reader Gets Angry’ partly to draw attention to Gabriella’s important essay, and partly as a warning to the faint of heart. This is indeed a furious argument against the slow forms of stupidity that large organisations are capable of maintaining on principle. It is an attack on the defeated policies that seek to preserve the appearance of success by lowering standards, and a defence of these core values in education: the need to read so as to understand the world in which you live, the right to inherit great literature, the value of raising yourself to equality rather than sinking towards it. There are recognisable figures here: the trendy teachers, the jobsworth functionaries, the bemused students, and the exasperated, disbelieving parents. One character you may not know yet — but you will certainly know her by the end of the piece — is Gabriella Gruder-Poni herself who keeps protesting throughout her training course.

It begins:

Two months into a PGCE in English, I noticed that the Year 9 students in my school, considered one of the best in the county, had trouble with basic vocabulary: ‘envy’, ‘lament’, ‘fiend’, ‘distinguish’, ‘negative’ and ‘eternal’ were Greek to them; no wonder they found reading frustrating. So I brought from home a stack of vocabulary books that I had used in middle school. With their witty exercises on usage and notes on etymology, these books had awakened in me a love for the English language, and I hoped they would do the same for the students I would soon teach. In the spirit of sharing a good book, I lent one of the volumes in the series to the convenor of my PGCE. A few months later, instead of returning the book to me, Mr.F— summoned me to his office. ‘Why did you lend this book to me?’ he demanded. ‘I thought you would be interested’. How wrong I had been: far from being interested, he was outraged. The book was ‘dreadful’ and ‘frightening’. I was almost too surprised to argue, but I did mention my own positive experiences learning from the books – here he seemed momentarily embarrassed – and using them to teach English composition. Wouldn’t learning new words make the students better readers and writers? Not at all; the books were ‘boring’, ‘dangerous’ and flawed, because they did not include all possible definitions of the words. ‘You have to start somewhere!’ I thought, but didn’t say so. Hoping to placate him, I said, ‘Well, if you don’t want me to use them, I won’t’. ‘Oh, you certainly won’t’. Finally, he exclaimed: ‘They’ll never need these words!’ Thankfully, the interview came to a close soon after, and I left with his words ringing in my ears: ‘They’ll never need those words’, never need words like ‘assail’, ‘assimilate’, ‘mishap’ or ‘ostentatious’. Why not? Didn’t he expect them to read and write? I began to suspect that my students’ woeful ignorance might be a consequence of attitudes like those of Mr. F—. After a demoralising first term, reckoning that I was not going to learn anything, nor was I going to get a chance to help the students, I considered dropping out of the PGCE. But a friend convinced me to think of myself as an undercover reporter, and I decided to stay. ‘They’ll never need those words’ – these words are the reason for this article.

Download the article here.

Please do write in to us to tell us what you think — for and against — and to pass on your experiences in the school system or to tell us what were your own school days were like.

Get your Liverpool Reads book – The Savage – now!

We’ve got 20,000 copies of The Savage by author David Almond and illustrator Dave McKean, to give away across Greater Merseyside as part of Liverpool Reads 2009.

Today, author of The Savage, David Almond, illustrator Dave McKean, Deputy Chief Fire Officer Mike Hagen and Director of The Reader Organisation, Jane Davis, along with trainee firefighters, will be helping to load up fire engines with free copies of this year’s Liverpool Reads book, The Savage, and begin the quest to get them to communities across Merseyside.

You can get your copy of The Savage from: all Greater Merseyside libraries (across Halton, Liverpool, Knowsley, Sefton, St. Helens, Warrington and Wirral), Merseytravel bus stations and M2Go rail station shops, Waterstone’s (Bold Street and Liverpool ONE), News from Nowhere (Bold Street), Amorous Cat (Lark Lane), Starbucks (Bold Street) and all Liverpool Football Club Stores.

‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man’s search
To vaster issues.
                    So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing as beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.
So we inherit that sweet purity
For which we struggled, failed, and agonised
With widening retrospect that bred despair.
Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued,
A vicious parent shaming still its child
Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved;
Its discords, quenched by meeting harmonies,
Die in the large and charitable air.
And all our rarer, better, truer self,
That sobbed religiously in yearning song,
That watched to ease the burthen of the world,
Laboriously tracing what must be,
And what may yet be better— saw within
A worthier image for the sanctuary,
And shaped it forth before the multitude
Divinely human, raising worship so
To higher reference more mixed with love—
That better self shall live till human Time
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb
Unread for ever.
                      This is life to come,
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven, be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty—
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense.
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

George Eliot (1867) 

Whether you believe in any sort of afterlife or not, to live on ‘in minds made better by [your] presence … in pulses stirred to generosity’, is perhaps the best kind of immortality. And writers, especially when they write as powerfully and meaningfully as George Eliot (pen-name of Mary Ann Evans, 1819 - 1880), have a better chance than most of achieving it. Her works are used frequently and to great effect in Get Into Reading groups (where she continues to be ’to other souls / The cup of strength … a good diffused’) and her words are never far from conversations about the relationship between life and literature. In fact, more than any other writer, her spirit seems to happily haunt the desks and shelves and printers and carpets and corridors that constitute The Reader Organisation.

We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves

George Eliot, The Lifted Veil