The Reader Online

With the Oscar nominations being annoucned later today, we know that the season of awards and prizes is fully upon us. One award that has passed and that I haven’t yet commented on is the TS Eliot Prize, which was won by Philip Gross. His collection The Water Table won the award last month had we’re very proud to say that we have published two of him poems in The Reader 12, which you can buy here for only £3.

Not a letter to the Editor of The Reader, but a letter from the Editor of The Reader to the Editor of the TLS, on the subject of Research in the Humanities. Philip Davis says:

In my own experience, the attempt to launch an MA testing the claims of “bibliotherapy” – asking what kind of good it is that literature might do in the world of non-academic readers – found that the resistance from hard scientists was no greater than that from orthodox literature scholars.

Click here to read the letter in full.

The Reader 36 ‘Emotional Surges’

“Emotions make up the richness of human experience and they need to be understood, not lobotomised” Angela Patmore in The Reader 36

* New poetry by John Kinsella and Michael Parker

* New fiction by Vanessa Hemingway, a writer with a very famous grandfather, and a great voice of her own

* Seamus Heaney’s prose poem about Thomas Hardy

* Peter Robinson writes on his poem, ‘Otterspool Prom’, the latest in the series Poet on His Work

* Essays by Angela Patmore on why stress is good for you, and Hans van der Heijden, the architect behind the fabulous redesign of Liverpool’s Bluecoat, on Wittgenstein

* Eric Lomax (The Railway Man) talks to Angela Macmillan

* Blake Morrison, Philip Davis and Josie Billington discuss the importance of reading in groups, the latest contribution to The Reading Revolution series

And much more inside!

Buy your copy online now

One copy not enough? Subscribe here for quarterly Reader goodness.

You can now view online or download for free the previous issue of The Reader ‘Starting the Reading Revolution’. It’s nearly Christmas, you need a treat.

New Beginnings

Get Into Reading National Conference
Friday 8th January, 9am – 5pm
Blackburne House, Liverpool, L8 7PE

This conference will be a fantastic opportunity for everyone involved with, or interested in, Get Into Reading, and to share your experiences of the project from within your organisation, area of the country, profession, or personal interest.

Speakers include: Blake Morrison (author and Chair of TRO), Susan Blishen (Mental Health Foundation), Dr David Fearnley (Medical Director and Deputy Chief of Mersey Care NHS Trust) and Dr Jane Davis (Director of TRO).

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*SPECIAL ADDITION*
Friday Night Supper
Friday 8th January 7 –10 pm

Join The Reader Organisation and some of our panellists and writers for a special Friday Night supper which will feature a conversation between TRO Director, Jane Davis and guests, as well as live music. Not to be missed.

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New Beginnings Readers’ Day
Saturday 9th January, 9.30am – 4pm
Blackburne House, Liverpool, L8 7PE

Join Tim Pears, Brian Keenan and Clare Allan and many more in thought-provoking workshops and discussions, on the theme of New Beginnings, for an inspiring day hosted by the BBC’s Roger Phillips.

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Tickets for all events are now on sale!

Book now for the full New Beginnings experience – Conference, Friday Supper and Readers’ Day – for only £100 until the end of November.

For more information about New Beginnings, please email Claire Speer or visit our website.

Dr Dave Fearnley, Medical Director and Deputy Chief of Mersey Care NHS Trust, who earlier this month was named Psychiatrist of the Year by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, runs his own Get Into Reading group at Ashworth Hospital in Liverpool.

Dr Fearnley, who is also a member of The Reader Organisation’s Research Team, has written about his experience reading with patients weekly in this secure unit, and why he thinks it is so important, in The Reader issue 34, which you can download for free here, or buy your copy of the magazine here if the ‘real thing’ is more your thing.

From Frank Cottrell Boyce’s short story ‘Accelerate’, which was published in The Reader 31, film-makers Carl Hunter & Clare Heney have created a short film.

From Carl Hunter’s ‘When is a film not a film?’:

['The premise of Accelerate'] is that the woman finds away of making time pass more quickly, by selling some seconds out of every minute so that her days become “the edited highlights of themselves”. It was the perfect marriage of subject and medium – after all, what is a still photograph but a moment pulled out of the stream of time. If you had all the money and time in the World, this would still be the best way to tell that story. Young people seem to photograph everything nowadays. If you go to a concert, the audience is watching it but also filming it on their mobiles. We’d found a story and a storytelling style that tapped right into that jumpy, digital way of seeing things.

Watch the film here.

To read the story, you can download The Reader 31 from our ‘Downloads’ page by clicking here.

We’ve published another of Frank’s short stories in the current issue of The Reader, which you can buy here.

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.

In the Autumn issue of The Reader (35), we spend some time in reflection on the Anglican Cathedral, with an essay on Tracey Emin’s neon installation (pictured on our cover) and an interview with Liverpool-born composer Kenneth Hesketh, who in a wide-ranging interview describes an early acoustical experience in the Cathedral that has stayed alive as an active force in his musical thinking:

‘I used to have to set out the service music on certain nights – usually after evensong. Organist Ian Tracey, I think, was practising and there was no one else in the nave, central space or choir areas. As choristers are wont to do, I ran from the furthest bay of the nave up to the altar experiencing a Doppler effect as I did so due to my relative position to the organ’s sound. A shift in pitch occurred similar to when a police car siren approaches and recedes due to the pitch-waves contracting and enlarging. That moment has stayed with me ever since. I try to play with that kind of sound – active musical figures fighting for clarity against a heightened acoustical resonance, the music bathing in a reverberating, embryonic fluid.

It sounds mysterious and rich and large. But please, don’t be satisfied with words alone. Follow these links to explore Kenneth Hesketh’s music.

Here are a number of pieces that might be of interest in light of the article:

http://www.kennethhesketh.co.uk/work/cc/orchestral/At%20God%20speeded%20summer’s%20end%20extract.mp3

http://www.kennethhesketh.co.uk/work/cc/lgensemble/Ein%20Lichtspiel%20extract.mp3

http://www.kennethhesketh.co.uk/work/cc/lgensemble/Detail%20from%20the%20Record%20extract.mp3

There are also a few more things at this address:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=172893243

What better way to start the autumn than with a new issue of The Reader to tuck in to as the nights draw in? So it’s a good job The Reader 35 has just arrived!

The Reader 35 ‘Starting the Reading Revolution’ contains a special editorial by Philip Davis, who writes ‘This is not simply a magazine any more, it is a campaign’.

Also in this issue:

• New poetry by Les Murray, Connie Bensley and Tom Paulin; and John Greening writes the latest in our ‘Poet on His Work’ series

• New fiction by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Richard Flanagan

• Essays by Catherine Pickstock on Tracey Emin, and Paul Kingsnorth of the Dark Mountain Project on the myths and stories that threaten our world

• The Reader Gets Angry a searing indictment of teacher-training in this country from Gabriella Gruder-Poni

• Interview with Liverpool composer Kenneth Hesketh

• Recommendations from Adam Phillips and Frank Cottrell Boyce

Buy your copy here. Or even better, subscribe here now and ensure that you don’t miss out on any of the forthcoming issues.