2010
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s daughter marries in NY Sunday, 1 August 2010, 3:03 am
RHINEBECK, New York (Reuters) – Bill and Hillary Clinton’s daughter married her long-time boyfriend in the picturesque New York village of Rhinebeck on Saturday in what has been dubbed America’s royal wedding.
Coast Guard allows toxic chemical use on Gulf oil (AP) Sunday, 1 August 2010, 2:53 am
AP – The U.S. Coast Guard has routinely approved BP requests to use thousands of gallons of toxic chemical a day to break up oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico despite a federal directive that the chemicals be used only rarely on surface waters, congressional investigators said Saturday after examining BP and government documents.
Obama Weighs Influence on Democrats’ Midterm Races Sunday, 1 August 2010, 2:51 am
President Obama is stepping up his involvement in the fight to preserve the Democratic Party’s control of Congress, but he may stay away from some competitive districts.
Targeted Killing Is New Focus in Afghanistan Sunday, 1 August 2010, 2:48 am
The Obama administration is starting to count more heavily on hunting down insurgents and less on winning over civilians.
Source: By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER :
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s daughter marries in NY (Reuters) Sunday, 1 August 2010, 2:46 am
Reuters – Bill and Hillary Clinton’s daughter married her long-time boyfriend in the picturesque New York village of Rhinebeck on Saturday in what has been dubbed America’s royal wedding.
Chelsea Clinton’s wedding day Sunday, 1 August 2010, 2:36 am
July 31 – Guests arrive in Rhinebeck, New York to celebrate the former first daughter Chelsea Clinton’s marriage her longtime beau Marc Mezvinsky. Deborah Lutterbeck reports
From Taxis to Textiles, Italy Chooses Tradition Over Growth Sunday, 1 August 2010, 2:25 am
Like much of the Italian economy, the Carlo Barbera factory is struggling, for reasons that academics say reveal much about what ails Italy.
Engineers prepare to seal ruptured BP oil well (AFP) Sunday, 1 August 2010, 2:21 am
AFP – Engineers readied a plan to permanently seal the ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well, despite delays to the process caused by debris left behind by a recent tropical storm.
Crews gain ground on wildfire north of Los Angeles (AP) Sunday, 1 August 2010, 2:15 am
AP – A wildfire smoldered in the high desert north of Los Angeles Saturday, spewing plumes of thick smoke that promted air quality warnings as hundreds of firefighters worked to contain the 2-day-old blaze.
Child Trust Fund payments to drop Sunday, 1 August 2010, 2:01 am
Babies born this weekend will be last in the UK to receive the full payment to Child Trust Funds, as the scheme’s phasing out begins.
Tight security at Chelsea wedding Sunday, 1 August 2010, 2:00 am
The daughter of former US President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has married her long-term boyfriend at a lavish ceremony.
Treaty enacted to ban cluster bombs Sunday, 1 August 2010, 1:57 am
An international treaty banning the production and use of cluster bombs has come into force.
Dutch troops to leave Afghanistan Sunday, 1 August 2010, 1:50 am
The Netherlands is to end its military involvement in Afghanistan, after four years in which its troops have won praise for their effectiveness.
3 inmates escape from northwest Arizona prison (AP) Sunday, 1 August 2010, 1:37 am
AP – Police were using helicopters and dogs Saturday to search for three convicted murderers who escaped from a northwest Arizona prison, kidnapped two semi-truck drivers at gunpoint and used the big rig to flee.
Rescuers battle to reach Pakistan flood victims (AFP) Sunday, 1 August 2010, 1:22 am
AFP – With roads and bridges washed away, rescuers were Sunday struggling to reach people in northwest Pakistan trapped by the worst floods in living memory which have killed 800 so far.
Two Journalists freed in Mexico Sunday, 1 August 2010, 1:21 am
July 31 – Mexican police rescue two journalists kidnapped by drug cartel members. Deborah Lutterbeck reports.
MIT graduate admits link in leak case – Boston Globe Sunday, 1 August 2010, 1:02 am
 msnbc.com |
MIT graduate admits link in leak case
Boston Globe A recent MIT graduate acknowledged yesterday that he met and exchanged multiple e-mails with the Army private accused of providing thousands of classified war records to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, but he adamantly denied any … Probe of WikiLeaks suspect turns to Boston acquaintancesWashington Post Military airstrike video leak suspect in solitary confinementCNN Informant says WikiLeaks suspect had civilian helpThe Associated Press New York Times -FOXNews -Wall Street Journal all 663 news articles » |
You don’t have to play it by the book Saturday, 31 July 2010, 11:06 pm
William Skidelsky looks at the resurgence of literary experimentation, and the writers on radical form
● Tom McCarthy talks about his writing
● Lydia Davis interview
A couple of years ago, Zadie Smith wrote an essay in the New York Review of Books comparing Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (see below) with Joseph O’Neill’s acclaimed novel about cricket in post-9/11 New York, Netherland. As the essay’s title – “Two Paths for the Novel” – suggested, Smith saw the two books as exemplifying competing strands within western literature: Netherland was a “lyrical realist” novel in the mould of Balzac and Flaubert, while Remainder was heir to the works of 20th-century experimentalists ranging from Joyce and Kafka to Donald Barthelme and William Gaddis.
In healthy times, Smith said, these two traditions – the realist and the avant garde – would comfortably co-exist. But “these aren’t particularly healthy times”, and one reason for this is that the experimentalist tradition has been “relegated to a safe corner of literary history”, dismissed as a “fascinating failure”. As Smith put it: “A breed of lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.” In order for our literary culture to rebalance itself, she suggested, more writers need to follow McCarthy in attempting novels that set out to challenge the dominant realist mode.
Whether or not one agrees with her assessment of Netherland and Remainder, it’s hard to quibble with Smith’s contention that avant-garde fiction, at least in Britain and America, isn’t flourishing. For many, the death of David Foster Wallace in 2008 represented the end point of a project that had become synonymous with obscurantism, pretentiousness and boredom. In Britain, which has its own lively tradition of literary experimentation, ranging from Virginia Woolf’s excursions into consciousness to BS Johnson’s eccentric games with form (including his notorious 1969 “shuffle” novel, The Unfortunates) there is little sense of mourning for the passing of the avant garde. As Smith noted, a kind of fatalism has entered our literary culture, a sense that all other routes have been tested and found wanting. The well-made realist novel, inherited from the 19th century, is what we are stuck with now, and even if we aren’t excessively fond of it, it seems to be pretty much all we have.
But is this the case? The assumption that genuine experimentation is no longer possible is in many ways a parochial quirk of the anglophone world. Things are very different, for example, in Latin America, where anti-realist techniques have long been part of the mainstream, and where the recent success of writers such as Roberto Bolaño and César Aira (see right) shows that novelists can still be lauded for striking out in new ways. France may not be the hotbed of literary radicalism that it once was, but the avant-garde tradition represented by the likes of Georges Perec – famous, among much else, for writing a novel without the letter "e" – continues to be venerated.
Closer to home, there are a notable few who remain committed to experimentation. David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, is hardly an avant-garde figure – his novels are too mainstream for that – but with his twisting, time-bending narratives, he is a high-profile example of someone doing something different. And this month there’s a double reminder that experimentation is still possible, with the publication of Tom McCarthy’s new novel, C, and the Collected Stories of American author and translator Lydia Davis. McCarthy and Davis are in many ways antithetical figures: while McCarthy is something of a literary showman, a disseminator of maverick manifestos, Davis keeps herself out of public view, and offers few explanations for what she is doing. But in their different ways, both writers help us see that, where fiction is concerned, it is a mistake ever to assume that there should be limits on what is possible. Even if, as Zadie Smith says, lyrical realism has the run of the highway now, there are still a few slip roads down which others might go.
Stewart Home: Cut and paste
Stewart Home is a kind of subcultural chameleon, capable of playing many roles: artist, pamphleteer, film-maker, activist, hoaxer and writer. Born in London in 1962 , he has spent his adult life immersed in leftist counterculture. “One day in the spring of 1982 I woke up and decided I would be an artist,” he said. He formed a punk band, created a “one- man movement” known as “Generation Positive” and founded the parodic art fanzine SMILE, before becoming involved with the underground “anti-art” Neoism movement. Home also loves playing pranks: after claiming in a magazine that he had witnessed an arms dump involving musician Jimmy Cauty, the unfortunate guitarist was arrested while the police raided his house.
But Home is best known as a novelist. Radical in form and content, his books brashly flout conventional ideas of the "literary", mixing filth and the highfalutin and plundering a diverse range of sources. Home's deployment of collage techniques makes him an experimentalist in the tradition of William Burroughs, while his preoccupation with moral subversion and explicit sex draws parallels with Henry Miller and Jean Genet. Slow Death (1996) follows the progress of a sexually voracious skinhead who attempts to take on the art establishment, while 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002) charts a bizarre erotic relationship through a cut-and-paste collage of pornography, political theory and occult conspiracy. His most recent novel, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, merges penis enlargement junk emails with philosophical pontification to strangely comic effect. Anna Winter
Cesar Aira: Forward motion
One of Argentina's leading contemporary writers, César Aira specialises in short, roughly 100-page novels that he churns out at a rate of up to four a year. His productivity is partly explained by his credo of el continuo, or forward motion, which involves making up his plots as he goes along and never revising his work. His fiction is at the more playful end of the experimental spectrum, leading one critic to brand him "the Duchamp of Latin American literature". In one of his books, a character drowns in a vat of ice cream; in another, a mad scientist dreams up a plot to clone Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. His most recent work to be translated, Ghosts, concerns the apparitions who inhabit an almost completed luxury apartment block in Buenos Aires. Like Roberto Bolaño, Aira sees himself as an adversary of the likes of Márquez and Fuentes. Interest in him, particularly in the US, is growing and it seems likely we'll be hearing lots more about him. William Skidelsky
Ben Brooks: Emotional montage
It was picking up a £1 secondhand novel that set British schoolboy Ben Brooks writing. The book was Noah Cicero's The Human War, a savage tirade set two hours before the start of the Iraq conflict. Up until then, Brooks explains, he was reading, "just classics mainly, like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and stuff". That and "pretty awful set texts" – because, despite having three published novellas to his name and another on the way, 18-year-old Brooks only finished school a month ago.
At 16, he began sending his writing to James Chapman, who runs Fugue State, a small New York press devoted to experimental novels (including The Human War). Brooks’s first, Fences, was published by them last year and its “emotional montage” style sent ripples across the Atlantic. He’s also become known for what he calls “the font thing” – using text size as a sort of punctuation, so that some words whisper and others loom large. The unbound quality of these visual crescendos and diminuendos is echoed in the style of his imagery: all torrents of poppies and floods and liquid gold.
Youth has its downsides: “None of the books I’ve written do I particularly like any more,” he says equably. But, he adds, “it’s good for picking up girls and stuff.” Hermione Hoby
Children Take Up Krav Maga Friday, 30 July 2010, 8:51 pm
By taking up Krav Maga, children can learn to fend off potential abductors with tactics used by the Israel Defense Forces.
No crying shame Friday, 30 July 2010, 5:41 pm
Babe and 19 other films that make men weep