Readers of the World: Chile
We’re off on a trip once more – although there’s no need to pack your bags – as we resume our journey of literature around the globe and find our Readers of the World.
Two weeks ago, we found out all about Nigerian literature; this time, as the climate gets considerably chilly at home we’re diverting to an altogether different kind – that is, the South American republic of Chile (please excuse the terrible pun…). Our tour guide is former Communications intern Mike Butler (who previously showed us around the literary delights of Iraq), who examines two of Chile’s finest writers…
‘We were going to be perfect, we were going to be brave, we were going to be beautiful’ – Jorge Guzman
If September 11th 2001 signalled the end of the 1990s, when the end of history had been declared and we were set to live under the aegis of a prosperous and triumphant liberal democratic system, then, as Christopher Hitchens observes, September 11th 1973 could be seen as the day when the curtain fell on the optimism and idealism of the 1960s. This was the date of the Chilean military coup led by Augusto Pinochet and backed by the White House administration of Nixon and Kissinger, which saw the bombing of the Presidential palace in Santiago and led to the death of the socialist-leaning President Salvador Allende; the rule of the ensuing military dictatorship would last until 1990.
Pablo Neruda, the most famous Spanish-language poet of the twentieth century, died twelve days later in unrelated circumstances. (The celebrated theatre director and folk singer Victor Jara was imprisoned, tortured and killed in what might be called ‘related circumstances’.) Neruda is best known for his early collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, a series of sensuous and melancholic poems whose imagery draws heavily on the nature and wildlife of southern Chile. He was a member of the Chilean Communist Party and was a close associate of Allende, and his political awareness is displayed in poems such as The United Fruit Co. (the identification of whose corrupting influence in Latin America presaged that company’s role in the US-sponsored anti-socialist coup in Guatemala in 1954) and They Receive Instructions against Chile (‘they decide from above, from the roll of dollars, / … / and the trunk of the tree of the country rots’). Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971, joining his compatriot Gabriela Mistral, who became the first Latin American writer to win the prize in 1945.
‘Paul Celan shall rise from his ashes in the year 2113. André Breton shall return through mirrors in the year 2071. Max Jacob shall cease to be read, that is to say his last reader shall die, in the year 2059.’ If you enjoyed reading that sentence, from his 1999 novella Amulet, then you’ll probably enjoy the rest of Roberto Bolano’s oeuvre, most of which has been translated into English only since his death in 2003. He left Chile for Mexico at the age of fifteen and returned in August 1973 ‘to help build socialism’, although this ambition was soon thwarted by the circumstances outlined above. He was briefly imprisoned following the coup and left Chile for good soon after, although his work is haunted by the events of that year and the brutality of the subsequent junta and dictatorship.
Most of his stories and novels are about fictional or fictionalised poets and writers, although they express ambivalence and suspicion about literary writing: Nazi Literature in the Americas is a series of fictional biographies of Fascist or Fascist-sympathising writers; The Savage Detectives is centred on a pair of poets, including one ‘Arturo Belano’, whose work is largely forgotten. Bolano’s own writing has an unmannered and inconclusive style that brilliantly captures the messiness and disorder of real life; avoiding the imposition of any kind of false order or lyrical grandiosity and disregarding conventional narrative authority and clarity, it could be described as a kind of anti-fascist aesthetic.
Neruda also had a certain distrust of literature and books: ‘I am a man of bread and fish / and you won’t find me among books’, he writes in Such is my life, following Wordsworth and Whitman in giving an apparently self-negating precedence to direct experience over words on a page. In a similar vein, he writes that ‘poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.’ Neruda and Bolano seem to offer differing views on the importance of writing: for Neruda, ‘the poet of my people’, who read his work to a stadium of 70,000 of his compatriots after collecting his Nobel Prize, poetry is a vital part of the life of a society that should transcend books and learning; for Bolano, poets are frustrated outsiders who squabble amongst themselves and leave little of value behind. Either way, it’s hard not to be swayed by Neruda when he says that ‘the poet gives us a gallery full of ghosts shaken by the fire and darkness of his time’ – and there was certainly enough fire and darkness to keep Latin American poets well occupied during the twentieth century.
Read Me Something You Love (please)
As National Storytelling Week rolls on, we’ve very appropriately got a piece from Short Story Book Club founder Steve Wasserman, who has started up a special read-aloud initiative of his own to help spread the storytelling love far and wide…
When I first heard about The Reader Organisation, and their bold strapline (“Bringing about a Reading Revolution”), I confess that I took the credo with a fistful-sized pinch of salt. In a world where everything from pet shampoos to multi-coloured sugar water vaunts itself as “revolutionary”, I presumed that this was just another bit of neat marketing speak: congenial intentions dressed up in costumes of the avante-garde.
But I decided to give the revolution a spin anyway and started attending a Get Into Reading group. Only then did I began to get it. By this I mean that I began to understand that the word “revolutionary” was being used with absolute legitimacy. It was the perfect trade description. In fact there was really no other word to describe what was going on in this group when we sat down to read together. It was, is, a revolution. Not just in the Marxist sense of historically necessary transitions from one social system to the next, but more so in the ancient roots of that word: the Old French revolution with its associations of rotating celestial bodies, and the Latin revolutus – revolving, turning, rolling back.
Rolling back to what? Jane Davis, chanelling Arnold, explicitly states what the revolution is about in her essay (now my Manifesto) The Reading Revolution. It is, she explains, largely about meeting “unmet primal needs”, that “unspeakable desire [for]…knowledge of our buried life”. But also for “connection”: connecting, even for just an hour or two at a deep human level with another creature; connecting from the often lonely space of our booming, buzzing, disconnected minds, and finding through embodied language (facial expressions, gestures, the sound of a voice) kinship, coherence, and communion. I think I get that now, I really do.
Jane Davis’ genius is in recognising that the “knowledge” (some might call it “happiness”) we’re all so frantically seeking does not always come from the more traditional, socially-sanctioned routes of counselling and psychotherapy, especially now that so much of it is IAPT-delivered. Or even from consuming nourishing reading material at home or on the tube. It doesn’t come from Facebook. It doesn’t come from Twitter. But it almost always does come through a me-you connection with another human being. As long as there is some egalitarian, shaping, inviting conduit through which these two human beings can connect. Reading aloud is that revolutionary conduit.
In some way then, the rolling back is also temporal: rolling back to the millions of years in which homo-sapiens sat around fires telling stories, sublimating their pains and pleasures into the “life-saving equipment” of anecdotes, tales and verse. Or in the span of our own personal histories: rolling back regressively to the deep, nurturing narrative cathexis set up between our infant selves and their carers. And if we lost out on some of the attachments and bonds we needed back then, maybe this revolution is about seeking them out now.
So in the very fullness of this revolutionary recognition, Read Me Something You Love was born. How it works is that I meet with someone and they read aloud with me a piece of literature that they love. As in a Get Into Reading group, we occasionally interrupt the reading with personal responses. I record our discussion, and edit it so as to keep only the content that the reader is happy for others to listen to. I then share this Read-Aloud Love on the internet. No money is exchanged for this service. We are both being “paid” in the doing of the activity. Both benefitting from the unadulterated, flowing pleasure of reading and being read to. For reading done in this way is also about clambering through the literary “scaffolding” (short stories, poems, extracts from novels) that “help us get around our inside space…mapping, exploring and even settling those places where we are still primitive”. Apart from my podcasts RMSYL also happens on a monthly basis with Megg Hewlett for our Short Story Book Club, which uses the Reader model.
If you’d like to do some mapping, exploring and settling through reading something that you love, please do get in touch. Details can be found here.
Until then: vive la (reading) révolution!
Steve Wasserman is a psychotherapist and mindfulness trainer living in London. He can be found on Twitter via @ShortStoryBkClb and @Mindful_Matters .
Reader Internships
My experience so far has been overwhelmingly positive and hugely beneficial to my professional and personal development. Much of this is down to the staff and environment here – the work can be challenging but there is a huge sense of achievement when it is completed successfully and I couldn’t have asked for nicer colleagues.
I have been given a wide range of responsibilities, gained valuable experience in different areas of the organisation, and gained new skills or built on my existing ones.
(Current intern)
Once again, The Reader Organisation are on the look out for four keen, energetic, graduate-level individuals who want to take on a sixteen-week internship with us in our Head Office in Liverpool. Our internships give you the opportunity to gain practical and stimulating work experience as part of a dymanic and growing charity.
These sixteen-week internships are for 25 hours per week (unpaid, but with travel expenses paid).
- Communications Internship: Events and Publications
(click here for full details) - Communications Internship: PR and Publicity
(click here for full details) - Management Information Intern
(click here for full details) - Arts Administration Intern
(click here for full details)
Previous interns at The Reader Organisation have gone on to take up posts such as Editor at Vintage books, Marketing Manager at Princes Ltd, Digital Executive at a design company, Marketing Assistant at an architect’s firm, Accountant Graduate Scheme at KPMG, and a variety of positions within The Reader Organisation, including our current Communications Assistant, Research Administration Assistant and Development Manager.
How to apply
Please read the job descriptions (above) in full and complete this application form and return by email to jobs@thereader.org.uk or in post to The Reader Organisation, The Friary Centre, Bute Street, Liverpool L5 3LA.
Deadline for applications is 9am on 13th February 2012. You will be notified if you are to be called for interview by the end of the day on 15th February 2012. If you have not heard from us by then, you have been unsuccessful. Volume of applications may make replies to everyone impossible.
Interviews will be held at The Reader Organisation Office on 21st February 2012.
If you have any queries, please call The Reader Organisation on 0151 207 7207.
Recommended Reads: Farewell, My Lovely
Following on from Charlotte, this week’s Recommended Read comes from Dave Cookson, our other Reader In Residence at Liverpool Hope University, who submits Farewell, My Lovely as evidence that Raymond Chandler is the real ‘literary king of American cool’.
“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
“She’s a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge’s second term, I’ll eat my spare tyre, rim and all.”
When trying to recommend Chandler it feels like your own words will never do 
him justice, you have no choice but to quote some of the slick, sublime descriptions. Evidently as a female character in the world of private detective Philip Marlowe you can go one of two ways, but women often end up being the key to the story – not in the typical damsel in distress way, more the conniving vixen out to destroy everyone around her.
I was drawn to this as the second Marlowe novel, and I had read the supremely cool The Big Sleep at A-Level, where I have to say, my teacher read it brilliantly. I was engrossed by the seedy, dark, corrupt, mysterious worlds Marlowe operated in, and the ending was captivating to the point that despite being regarded as a classic, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall could not do it justice in the film adaptation.
I’d argue Marlowe is the greatest literary detective, and yes, I’m including Sherlock Holmes in that one. Marlowe operates as a lone wolf, is a womaniser and in Farewell, My Lovely he takes on jobs for the sheer thrill of the ride.
The story of Farewell, My Lovely is thrown at the reader from the start; Marlowe observes Moose Malloy, a physically intriguing character, he has – oh what’s the point? I’ll quote Chandler again:
“He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck…Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a piece of angel food.”
Malloy is out of prison after a stitch-up and is on the lookout for Velma, his former fiancée. Marlowe tries to find Velma, and uncover the framing of Malloy, but to say he gets more than he bargained for doesn’t really cut it. Marlowe witnesses robberies, murders and is on the receiving end of some tough treatment himself.
Marlowe as a detective is completely relentless, and there is a perpetual sense of peril that his intrigue will be his downfall, and that’s what makes this so exciting. There are so many threads of the plot, and you know that they will come together at the end, but the endless contemplation of how that will happen is a real treat.
If you’re a fan of The Great Gatsby read Farewell, My Lovely or The Big Sleep. In my opinion you will soon realise that when it comes down to it, the supposed literary king of American cool does not hold up to the descriptive delights of Raymond Chandler.
Oh, go on then, have another quote:
“You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at politicians, but there are a lot of nice people just the same. Take the guy that left that half bottle of whisky there. He had a heart as big as one of Mae West’s hips.”
Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler, Penguin (1940/2005)
Stories Before Bedtime: New Readers Announced
It’s not long to go until the next Stories Before Bedtime – an evening of twisted love stories read aloud at the Criterion Theatre in London – and not one, but two star guest readers have been added to the bill.
Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani – on-screen lovers in BBC Three sitcom Him And Her - will be appearing to read extracts from Ovid’s hilarious poetic elegy The Art of Love.
They’ll be joining Niamh Cusack and War Horse’s Tom Hiddleston, who will be reading The Courtship of Mr Lyon by Angela Carter and Tennessee Williams’s The Kingdom of Heaven respectively. 
With a star-studded and jam packed guest list and some wonderful and definitely unconventional Valentine’s day fare being read aloud, it promises to be another absolutely brilliant event.
Get your tickets now – they’re available from the Criterion Box Office, online or by calling 0844 8471778. Tickets cost £12.50/£10 for GIR members/concessions.
Bupa residents share their stories for National Storytelling Week
This week (28th January-4th February) is the 12th annual National Storytelling Week and to celebrate, special story-based events are happening all over the country in association with an ecletic range of organisations. One organisation that is getting involved in a big way is Bupa, who we recently ran a Get Into Reading pilot project with.
Across their 300 care homes in the UK, Bupa will this week get residents as well as members of the local community sharing stories and bringing the act of storytelling to life. Alongside a number of special storytelling events, Bupa residents will also get the chance to take part in a special poetry and short story competition, sharing their own stories.
From our time spent partnering Bupa, and as the range of our work with older people tells us, we know that sharing stories with care home residents has a great effect in a number of ways – boosting wellbeing, increasing relaxation and good mood, stimulating memory and encouraging connections not just with themselves but with relatives, care home workers and one another.
The strongest testament to the power of shared reading has amongst Bupa care home residents comes from family members of residents who have witnessed firsthand the positive effects of storytelling on their loved ones, and how it leads to the telling of personal stories:
Since attending the group my Dad has rediscovered his love of literature. He does not have the concentration to read for himself so being able to read out in a group and have poetry read to him and discuss the piece together has been great for him. He has also met other people from the other house where the group is held with whom he has interacted.
At one session recently Dad started chatting to another member of the group and it turned out that the three other gentlemen had attended the same school as my dad. My dad is in his 80’s and it was lovely for us as a family to see him becoming animated about stories he had shared with the 3 guys. He talks very fondly of the atmosphere in the group, it sounds very welcoming and creates an environment where people can chat freely about the piece they are reading.
My Dad also told me that one of the people in the group used to have difficulty speaking and since going to the sessions has now started talking to the other members – this is a massive credit to the group and the way it is presented…it has given my dad so much joy.
The Reader Organisation fully supports the ongoing storytelling sessions at Bupa care homes nationwise, knowing that the act of storytelling holds great therapeutic benefits for older people, and we hope that as many people as possible – old and young alike – will get involved in the activities to experience for themselves the wonder of reading and storytelling.
If you would like to find out more information on how to attend or take part in a Bupa storytelling event, call 0845 600 4622 or e-mail storytellingweek@bupa.com .
London Penny Readings: A resounding Reader success
It’s hard to believe it’s been over a week since our first London Penny Readings ; we’re still all on a Dickensian, shared-reading-on-a- massive-scale high and suspect that most of attendees are feeling the same way, looking at the quite astounding results of our audience feedback.
A staggering 92% of audience members who responded to our feedback forms said that they enjoyed the event ‘very much’ (with nobody ticking the ‘not very much’ or ‘not at all boxes’) – and given the array of talented readers and incredibly entertaining performers, it’s not hard to see why we got such an enthusiastic response.
Indeed, there was a lot on offer to enjoy and we’re thrilled to say that every aspect went down a storm – it’s especially heartening to find that 93% of audience respondents said they enjoyed the readings most; given that reading aloud is at the very heart of the Dickensian tradition the Penny Readings adheres to, it’s brilliant to know that it is as timeless as ever (we like to think that Dickens would be very proud indeed).
Plus we had lots of wonderful comments too:
So worth the trip, you were all brilliant. What a buzz and what connections!
A great afternoon’s real entertainment.
Interesting to see the other people who came and the enthusiasm.
A really enjoyable afternoon.
Absolutely fantastic. Here’s hoping there will be many more Penny Readings in the future…
(Also, you can read a first-hand audience perspective of the event on this lovely blog: Mrs Miniver’s Daughter)
Featured Poem: All Nature has a Feeling by John Clare
This week’s Featured Poem has been chosen by Wirral project worker Helen Wilson; a very evocative and thought provoking piece by John Clare.
I read this poem with one of my open community groups recently, all of whom immediately began to talk enthusiastically about ‘that feeling’ being around nature brings about, agreeing unanimously that it was ‘good’. We were all particularly struck with the parallels between the poem and our current book, The Rainbow, where characters seem to have very strong ties with the natural world. One women commented that she couldn’t help but have green shoots come to mind all through reading of the poem, explaining, ‘they remind you that it’s getting warmer – summer’s on its way’. We then talked about how new flowers – ‘blooms revivified’ – are like a symbol of hope, coming through after the many deaths of winter.
How silence can ‘speak happiness’ provoked some careful thought, with many members reflecting upon the quiet calm found in natural surroundings. Why this might be ‘beyond the reach of books’ gave us a great deal food for thought, especially as we were all in a reading group at the time!
The group was quite perplexed by ‘Its birth was heaven’, unable to attach an exact meaning to these words, but were very keen on ‘There’s nothing mortal in them’. One member commented, ‘to be mortal is to really die, but here there’s no real death’. This was picked up on by the rest of the group, who mentioned ‘the cycle of life’ and how reassuring it was that new life replaces the old. Some people commented on how remembering this ‘bigger picture’ made it easier not to worry about the day to day trials life can bring.
Explanations and ideas were often accompanied by much gesticulating, as if the group couldn’t quite express what they felt the poem was getting at in words alone. One women made small circles in the air to illustrate her point, whilst another drew lines with her hands above one another to show the ‘different levels’ she felt the poem referred to. One group member finished off the session by stating quite firmly, ‘there’s life and then there’s life, y’know, and this is life.’
All Nature has a Feeling
All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal; and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There’s nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal is its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.
John Clare
The Reading Revolution in Northern Ireland
We’ll be taking Read To Lead to Northern Ireland very soon, as part of a new schedule of Open Courses for 2012 (if you’re in Northern Ireland and are interested in training to become a shared reading facilitator, read on…) but The Reader Organisation already has a growing presence in the country, with very successful Get Into Reading groups operating in Queen’s University and within the Criminal Justice system.
Our Northern Ireland project worker Patricia Canning fills us in the ongoing progress of Get Into Reading Northern Ireland, highlighting the powerful impact words and literature have amongst a wide range of people:
Every Wednesday afternoon I read with a group of women who tell me that being a part of this Get Into Reading group makes them feel relaxed, ‘chilled’, less stressed, and on the whole, liberated. The irony is, that this GIR group is in Hydebank Prison, Belfast. Reading an extract from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol a few weeks back, the women talked about how his depiction of the biting cold had made them all feel very chilly: ‘he really knows how to describes things, doesn’t he? I’m freezing here!’
Being able to ‘feel’ what the writer is describing – even if it is the cold – is a testament to the power of words, and of the benefits of reading good literature. These women, like everyone else who benefits from attending Get Into Reading groups across the mainland, enjoy that liberating feeling of being able to identify with other characters, with events and with feelings and emotions that they might otherwise struggle to understand, articulate, or even acknowledge. Words can do that – as Ferdinand Pessoa puts it:
To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.
Reading a difficult Shakespearean sonnet recently, one of the women read the line, ‘I all alone beweep my outcast state’, and proclaimed, ‘it’s about depression, isn’t it?’ In our group, Shakespeare has helped us understand that depression is a timeless phenomenon and can chance upon the best of us.
Thankfully, these benefits are reaching further afield because people are attending to the positive effects of shared reading here, as Health In Mind’s recent poetry and prose event at Coleraine library so wonderfully demonstrated. We now have a fantastic Get Into Reading group in Queen’s University, Belfast, every Thursday afternoon, which is well attended by a spirited bunch of people who read, chat, drink tea, chat, read, and marvel at the ways in which reading together enriches both the reading experience and our day in equal measure.
The Reading Revolution has begun in Northern Ireland, but we need passionate people who believe in the power of reading to help take it even further. We are hosting an open Read To Lead training course at Holywood Library over three weeks: Friday 3rd, 10th and 17th February 2012. If you want to share the joys of shared reading in your community, there are a few places left on the course. For further details and to book your place, please contact Jessica Reeves for more information: jessicareeves@thereader.org.uk
A (Reading) Dog’s Tale
We’re quite partial to the odd shaggy dog story now and again – and this is the tale of an adorable shaggy dog who is playing a big part in creating a Reading Revolution amongst school children in Teeside.
Each week, Audrey the dog visits Redcar Community College to sit in on children’s read-aloud sessions. Teachers noticed that children often get nervous when they are asked to read aloud and so enlisted Audrey to help them relax and feel less self-conscious while reading. Needless to say, the sessions – and Audrey – have been a big success.
While of course Audrey should stay where she is, we’d quite like a ‘reading’ dog of our own to be a Reading Revolution mascot…
