Sunday, January 24, 2010

Britain tastes better when it's swaddled in Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate


Charlie Brooker: The thought of the Americans meddling with the Cadbury formula is too much for many of us to bear

I'm not especially patriotic – I find the union flag a tad garish, and the white cliffs of Dover a touch bland – but the news that the US company Kraft had bought Cadbury came as a bitter blow. It's a very British thing, Cadbury. We've all got a great deal of fondness for it. It's one of the few home comforts you miss while you're abroad, like the BBC or Marmite or self-deprecatory humour.

Considering how much imagination the Americans have, and how much they like food, it's surprising we're so much better at making chocolate than them. And we are better. I can still vividly ­recall trying Hershey's chocolate for the first time. The name held a certain glitzy allure: after all, I'd heard it mentioned in countless Hollywood movies. Like Oreo cookies and M&Ms, it was one of those brands you faintly revered even though – at the time – it wasn't available­ in British shops. So when I eventually got my hands on an authentic Hershey bar, it was quite an event. I stared at the iconic packaging for about five minutes, as though it were a prop from the set of Ghostbusters, before unwrapping it with care, breaking a bit off and preparing to savour what would surely be the most powerfully glamorous chocolate ­experience imaginable.

But the moment the product itself hit my tongue I was plunged mouthwards into an entire universe of yuk. In terms of flavour, it tasted precisely like I'd swallowed a matchbox full of caster sugar five minutes earlier, then somehow regurgitated it into my own mouth. And the texture was crumbly, dusty – slightly old even, as though this was a chocolate bar that had been found in the pocket of a civil war soldier and preserved specifically for my disenchantment. It was so ­horrible, I charitably assumed there was something wrong with it. I was eating it in England (someone had brought it back from the States), so perhaps it had gone off somehow in transit. But no. Subsequent encounters proved I'd got it right the first time. Hershey's tastes downright bad.

But then American mass-market snack food is downright bad in general. They can't do crisps either. In addition to 900 varieties of Walkers, we Brits produce Frazzles and Chipsticks and Monster Munch and all manner of wacky corn shapes, in flavours ranging from pickled onion to polar bear. ­Virtually all American crisps – or "chips", as they doggedly insist on calling them – are prosaic constructions tasting vaguely of watered-down bright orange cheese. We do bright orange cheese too, in the form of Wotsits, but we only did it once because we nailed it first time. They've got Cheetos in every shade of orange you could wish for (Spicy Orange! Smokey Orange!), but they're all a bit weak; no match for the confident chemical oomph of a Wotsit.

A new range of uniquely British chocolate snacks

Anyway, the thought of the ­Americans – so good at so many things, so bad at snack foods – meddling with the Cadbury formula is too much for many of us to bear. Hence the protest signs outside the factory in Bournville. We've been told the flavour won't change – but that isn't enough. Kraft needs to go one better, and reassure us that our national identify will remain intact by launching a whole new range of Cadbury's snacks that simply couldn't exist – or sell – anywhere else in the world. Chocolate bars with a uniquely British flavour. Here are some suggestions:

Cadbury's Full English Breakfast. Walkers have had a stab at a "full ­English breakfast" flavoured crisp, but the result was disappointing, to say the least, because it relied on various ­flavoured powders. Cadbury's Full English Breakfast bar would contain the real thing: fried egg, bacon, chips and beans, mashed and compacted into a Crunchie-sized slab, covered with a layer of ketchup, then swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate. It'd look and weigh about the same as a Double Decker. And yes, it sounds disgusting – but you'd have to try it once, wouldn't you?

Cadbury's Real Ale Eggs. Creme Eggs are all well and good, but there's ­something vaguely continental about them. How about promoting the real ale industry with a chocolate egg ­containing 2fl oz of Bishop's Finger? If that fails to catch on, how about a range of special "Binge Drinker's Eggs" – available only in "Happy Hour" packs of six – filled with sugary blue ­alcopop swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate.

Cadbury's Tardis Bars. Nothing fancy: these are just Tardis-shaped slabs of chocolate – part of a range that includes Caramel Cybermen and Toffee Daleks. But the proceeds go straight to the BBC, to help keep it afloat after Cameron gets in and sets about dismantling it to impress Rupert Murdoch. Other BBC-themed snacks could include Holby City Liquorice Bandages, Panorama Mint Crisp Curls, and a disturbing 100% edible lifesize replica of Terry Wogan's head, replete with crunchy shortbread teeth, praline eyeballs and a brain made of nougat. Swaddled in thick Dairy Milk chocolate.

As you may have noticed, the above suggestions work on the assumption that everything tastes nice when it's swaddled in Dairy Milk chocolate. Which it does. A bloated, over-ripe corpse dredged from a polluted canal would taste nice if it was ­encased in a Dairy Milk shell. If it was coated in Hershey's, you'd find yourself glumly picking the chocolate off to get at the sludgey grey flesh ­beneath. And that's a FACT.

--

Charlie Brookner, The Guardian, 7 January 2010

Comments in chronological order

Showing first 50 comments | Go to all comments | Go to latest comment

  • LabourStoleMyCash LabourStoleMyCash

    25 Jan 2010, 12:12AM

    This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.

  • Scarey2001 Scarey2001

    25 Jan 2010, 12:17AM

    I completely agree with the Hershey's description. I had some once and instantly described it to coleagues as 'coffee grounds floating in bile'.

    Revolting guff.

  • Gummibarchen Gummibarchen

    25 Jan 2010, 12:21AM

    ok, no I wasn't first *grumble*

    But charlie is absolutely right about american chocolate. Now, don't even get me started on American cheese (can we have that for next week's article?)

  • Kibblecross Kibblecross

    25 Jan 2010, 12:25AM

    Crappy British chocolate is "one of the few home comforts you miss while you're abroad"? God spare us. Not if you've lived in Belgium or a dozen other places where they have food that's judged on its taste not on the familiarity of some brand name. Nostalgie de la boue? Just because there are things the Americans do even worse than us doesn't give us the right to feel good about being not as rubbish as the most arrogant nation in the world.

  • Darryl Darryl

    25 Jan 2010, 12:35AM

    Hersheys DOES taste rubbish. I assume it's because they haven't changed the recipe since the war. A sort of compounded pound of chocolate grease stirred in with a gallon of sugar. Vile. Hershey kisses are the worst of them all.

  • Zadokk Zadokk

    25 Jan 2010, 12:36AM

    It's funny, Charlie, I always thought our chocolate was sweeter than theirs but admittedly I haven't sampled much in the way of American 'candy' so perhaps my sample size was too small. But one things is for sure is that it was a horrible experience. Like you I used to get excited when relatives or friends brought chocolate back from America... until you taste it. It's the sort of thing that sits lurching at the back of your cupboard, which you only eat when there's no other chocolate in the house and you would go out to get some proper stuff if it wasn't raining. Hell I'd probably go out if it was raining to avoid having to eat it.

    If the Americans have any sense (not holding my breath) they won't change a thing about Cadbury's; if they do then they should know that the fickle British public won't stand for it and they'll buy something else.

  • NeoPunk NeoPunk

    25 Jan 2010, 12:38AM

    I concur on Hershey's and Cheetos, the former tasted like cardboard and the latter tasted like corn, just corn with cheese dust on.

    Mountain Dew however is brilliant, probably due to all the chemicals in it that are banned here.

  • jaymonte jaymonte

    25 Jan 2010, 12:51AM

    Cadbury's Dairy Milk (20% solids) 49g, 55p, widely available no stars
    Not real chocolate. It's sugary and thick, without a prominent taste of cocoa. It's just sugar and fat.

    Guardian article by chocolatier Paul A Young
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/13/the-best-chocolate-bars

  • RomeAnthem RomeAnthem

    25 Jan 2010, 1:02AM

    Nestle totally ruined the Kit Kat (remember when it came in a foil wrapper and had nice chocolate on it?). Kraft have totally ruined the Terry's chocolate orange. Don't get me started on the pale imitation of Opal Fruits that Starburst are either.

    It's only a matter of time before some foreign idiot ruin the taste of Cadburys as well.

    Unfortunately it is not just foreign companies that ruin old favourites but supposedly British companies as well.

    What Walkers have done to their crisps is an abomination. The new ish oil they cook them in has totally ruined the taste and texture of the crisps. I do not believe for one second that it is any "healthier" either.

    What they have done to brands they have brought is even worse. Frazzles are now terrible. Quavers used to have a very pleasant understated cheese flavour, now it is ridiculously ovepowering. Smiths crisps are nothing like they used to be.

    The only expception to this are Monster Munch which are now brilliant again.

    Can these companies please go back to the old much better recipes please?

  • BlackChat BlackChat

    25 Jan 2010, 1:05AM

    Very good, Mr Brooker, but you don't go far enough. We need a concerted campaign to Keep Kraft out of Kadbury's (for I fear the loss of that initial C, Kharlie, is only a matter of time..) and we need it fast. Not only might a loss of taste - in every sense of that word - ensue, but let's not forget the whole Quaker work ethos and the delightful 'village' of Bournville. I had a bunch of great aunts and uncles who worked all their lives at Cadbury's and lived in Bournville. It's very special.

    @Kibblecross - I fear you miss the point a little, though I understand what you are trying to say. Of course there are many brands of chocolate around the world that might taste better than Cadbury's, but for its price, availability and wonderful history, I think it is worth trying to preserve the company that makes it.

    Hershey's tastes like it has been left in a shop window for 5 years. Nasty stuff. And don't get me started on Kraft cheese... total Krap.

  • RossMcRoss RossMcRoss

    25 Jan 2010, 1:05AM

    Hmmm, every since the "My inbox overflowed with blood-curdling death threats" following the 'assassination'...er...request incident, you've been uncharacteristically nice as pie about the United States....

    "the thought of the ­Americans ? so good at so many things"

    Yes. Invasions. Human rights. Health care. Wal Mart. Rush Limbaugh. Enormous cars. The 'Holidays'. Economic catastrophe. 'Freedom'. Guns. Executing people. Fox News.

    Come on Charlie...what happened to you man, you used to be cool...

  • bedfont bedfont

    25 Jan 2010, 1:11AM

    "Kraft had bought Cadbury came as a bitter blow."

    It can't leave a bitter taste with so little you know actual cocoa in it?

    No doubt they'll replace all the milk with vegetable extracts. What does a glass and a half mean in reality BTW?

    Really aside from the old history of Cadbury as a decent company there is no reason to be upset here. Except if like Man United it's being bought with junk bonds.

    Comparing the merits of Cadburys Nestle (what they sell here) and Hersheys is like talking about the best team in the football conference for a chocolate lover.

  • MainlyConfounded MainlyConfounded

    25 Jan 2010, 1:11AM

    It's not even universal - New Zealand has had a Cadbury's factory since the 19th century, and even Kiwi Cadbury's is cack. Even foreign Cadbury's can't do Cadbury's. People have their rellies in the old country bring Dairy Milk with them when they visit (as well as gravy granules).

  • Jehenna Jehenna

    25 Jan 2010, 1:18AM

    I totally agree about Hersheys - cannot understand what the fuss is about.
    (Reese's Pieces now... that's awesome.)

    I quite like Australian Cadbury's chocolate and of course the UK Cadbury's.

    But having lived in France for a few years with more than ample access to all the delights of mass produced 'swiss' chocolate and hand made stuff, including suchards, which are to die for, I would still buy Cadbury's every time I made it back to the UK for a sanity break.
    (and cheddar, could never get decent cheddar in France)

    Sometimes you don't want an amazing taste sensation that's going to blow your socks off and cause you to start having cravings akin to heroin addiction. You just want some chocolate. And Cadbury makes nice chocolate, which is consistently good.

    Marabou (Swedish) is nice chocolate too, but I really hope Cadbury chocolate stays the same.

  • HolidayPirate HolidayPirate

    25 Jan 2010, 1:24AM

    Indeed, Mountain Dew was something the Americans got right and we never seemed to take to enough. As for Hersheys, well, it DOES taste like sick (which you can remotely taste in M+M's, by the by), but then, maybe American sick tastes different? Like copper coins or styrofoam or something.

  • theunknowing theunknowing

    25 Jan 2010, 1:25AM

    i'm from the seattle and i've had your cadgberry candy before. you brits are whackos. that stuff tastes like solidified liquid proteins with a heap of sugar poured in and colored brown. shit, you guys should visit america where they grow the real stuff. heck! go to an american cocoa farm and watch them make the stuff. cadgberry is a vile candy that only the primitive brit tongue could describe as a chocolate bar. heck! you guys are whackos. can't you visit a county like paris or another european state like switzerburg. they make real chocolate. is britain really part of Europa. you guys seriously lag behind in the culture stakes!!

  • BarringtonWomble BarringtonWomble

    25 Jan 2010, 1:25AM

    You said eating crisps was like a cat doing a fart in your mouth, Charlie.

    You're a bit of a drama queen.

    CHARLEY SEZ I MUST NOT EAT THESE BISCUITS IT'S LIKE ARMAGEDDON ON THE TASTEBUDS WITH A DOG POO

  • JoeBrownridge JoeBrownridge

    25 Jan 2010, 1:26AM

    yep, as said above, herseys tastes like sick. it literally does.#

    and as said above, again, mountain dew is the only thing we should import from America.

    now i'm going to go and eat my 230G bar of Cadburies :)

  • MarkAnthony MarkAnthony

    25 Jan 2010, 1:28AM

    have gregs stop giving you free stuff charlie?
    but your bang on ... Nothing compares to cadbury chocolate...
    those damn brussel twats said it wasn't chocolate because it didn't have enough soild coca powder... and we said no ... cadbury's is brillant and your wrong johnny so fuck off
    its one of our proudest accomplishments ...
    chocolate so good it makes you proud to be british

  • BTM1 BTM1

    25 Jan 2010, 1:28AM

    Love dairy milk but it's true it tastes terrible elsewhere. Down under and on the sub-continent it's just rank. The most dis-heartening change to British snack food is cheese and onion in blue packets and salt and vinegar in green. Still just wrong 15 or 20 years later.

  • ThomPaine ThomPaine

    25 Jan 2010, 1:32AM

    Hear, hear re: Hershey's chocolate being disappointing.

    Many years ago, almost the first thing I did on setting foot in America was to buy a big bar (having emerged from the Subway at the New York Port Authority building, as I recall).

    I had seen adverts of it in comics and magazines all my life, so imagined it must be the manna of the Gods themselves.

    But instead it turned out to be crumbly, brittle shite that tastes of chalk. (Actually milk power, which is what it mostly is, apart from sugar).

    Mrs Paine, an American, can't stand Hershey's-anything, or most American sweets. It's Sour Patch Kids for her, or nothing.

    Still, they have dark chocolate Mars Bars.

    And constitutional democracy with a division of Church and State, the sweetest thing of all.

  • phild1 phild1

    25 Jan 2010, 1:38AM

    This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.

  • lewkeo lewkeo

    25 Jan 2010, 1:50AM

    Holidaypirate i'm a Brit living in the states, I have American children and i've had the misfortune to taste their Yank vomit(don't ask how). i can confirm that.

    A - American puke tastes just like our Great British vomit.

    B- Hersheys tastes like sugar plastic with a Puke/vomit finish.

    They love Hershey's over here my Rush Limbaugh loving in laws get all touchy cos my kids only like Brit chocs like Crunchie,diary milk ,Aero, flake etc which they score from our local rather twee, Brit themed shop(Barbours and Marmite etc). The owner of the store says all the tweenie hipsters in town spend their candy allowance on Brit chocs.

    Hersheys is shite imagine being a young, half starved Euro waif during WW2 and being throw a bar of chocolate from a passing, bullishly handsome American GI , only to sink your teeth in to the confection of liberation and taste vomit!

  • annon101 annon101

    25 Jan 2010, 1:56AM

    Does anyone think it's a tad grim that Philip Morris (aka Altria) has bought Cadburys?

    Do we care that one of the world's largest cancer providers now owns some more of what made blighty famous?

    Well done Britain.

  • JohnnyLilburne JohnnyLilburne

    25 Jan 2010, 1:58AM

    @MainlyConfounded

    It's not even universal - New Zealand has had a Cadbury's factory since the 19th century, and even Kiwi Cadbury's is cack

    Have you ever tasted Kiwi Marmite? It's cack on steroids and seems to have more sugar than a bar of chocolate.

    It's not easy to get real Marmite here in Aus. I make a twice yearly very-long-drive to a shop that specialises in UK food imports to stock up. Apparently they aren't allowed to retail it because of the licensing agreement with the people that make Marmite in NZ.

    The actually purchase process is hilarious. You have to wait until there are no other customers around and then ask in a suitably conspiratorial whisper if they have any proper Marmite. The assistant glances around and if it's all clear she goes to the stockroom and comes back with the jar in a brown paper bag. It's like some tacky Hollywood representation of a drug deal or a gangster film about prohibition.

  • littlesecrets littlesecrets

    25 Jan 2010, 1:58AM

    Im heading out to buy as much "real" Cadbury's chocolate as possible before they start Americanising (or is that Americanizing...ho ho) it and keep it forever in a my chocolate castle only whipping it out to impress the ladies.

    "Daddy, what's a Euro?"

    "I dunno"

  • Thetwelfthdoctor Thetwelfthdoctor

    25 Jan 2010, 1:59AM

    My Mum is a spy so she gets about and, on one of her jaunts that wasn?t behind the Iron Curtain, she went to New York and, fittingly, brought me back a single Hershey Bar. Brooker ain?t wrong: I couldn?t even finish it. So, to appear cosmopolitan, I took it into work and passed it around beloved co-workers offering them the chance to taste genuine foreign ?chocolate?. Even then I couldn?t give it away.

    I imagine that, as it got chucked, good old British bacteria, who still have standards, will have tuned their flagellums up at it as well. I suspect that to this day, like all of Disney?s Flubber merchandise produced for the 1963 film Son of Flubber (made from rubber and mineral oil and eventually all recalled because it was harmful ? who?d have thought, Disney?) it?s now terminally clogging up the planet and seeping through concrete from the hole it was buried in. Undying.

    So America has that muck and all of Europe seems intent on us reclassifying our beloved chocolate as a cocoa-deficient processed milk product. Talk about under siege.

    On a separate note I was in a Co-op shop in the centre of Manchester the other day and saw the shop sign ?potato chips? on a stand of crisps. I fear we?ve entered the final days? and someone needs to take a stand now.

  • decisivemoment decisivemoment

    25 Jan 2010, 2:01AM

    Charlie, you're right about Hershey's. They use a higher cocoa content than the British and yet still they manage to screw it up. But you've obviously not delved deeply enough into American crisps/potato chips. Have you had Pringle's? Have you had Kettle Chips? Have you gone into the snack food section of a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's in the US and partaken? All kinds of good stuff.

    But with the image of vomit flavored Hershey bars stuck in my head, I'm now off out to Walgreens to buy some Lindt milk chocolate with hazelnuts and clear both the palate and the mind. No chances taken here, folks.

    PS. The best, absolute number one British milk chocolate is Galaxy Minstrels. No contest. Completely addictive.

  • HelwynBallard HelwynBallard

    25 Jan 2010, 2:04AM

    american artificial junk food is so rubbish because their real junk food is so cheap and plentiful. You can't walk down the street without being blasted with ads for double steak/bacon/cheese/butter/ham/chicken burgers for about $1.50. Who needs wotsits when you've got prime hormone-reared beef and 19 million kinds of cheese?

  • Thetwelfthdoctor Thetwelfthdoctor

    25 Jan 2010, 2:15AM

    > But then American mass-market snack food is downright bad in general.

    It goes further than that. We had coach-loads of American school kids come over a few years ago (with medicine-drug chests that would have matched Olympic athletes) and they complained that the beef in McDonald?s burgers tasted funny. Now, as a vegetarian, I?m certainly not one to stick up for those spreading-like-cancer plastic restaurants, but it turned out the difference was that Yank cows are so pumped full of steroids that it affects the taste and all the heifers must resemble Sylvester Stallone.

  • RobTaylor RobTaylor

    25 Jan 2010, 2:22AM

    Mr Brooker,

    For all your skills of rhetoric, you have the palette of a singed arsehole.

    Certainly, British chocolate is superior to any American product. However, it does not compare with such delights as Valrhona, Amedei or Cluziel.

    The enjoyment of Cadburys by so many Brits is purely a matter of nostalgia: what seems great in childhood memories will be great when tried as an adult (even if not). Hence the reason adults fondly remember such atrocities as Cadburys, Thundercats, Pong, Space Invaders and much of the 80's music and fashion scene.

  • suedeblade suedeblade

    25 Jan 2010, 2:46AM

    Don't worry, Kraft will soon be peddling a "chocolate style" Cadbury's product made from "genuine" lard byproducts, just like Kraft cheese.

    "In 2002, the FDA warned Kraft that Velveeta was being sold with packaging that described it as a "pasteurized processed cheese food," which the FDA claimed was false ("cheese food" must contain at least 51% cheese). Velveeta is now sold as a "cheese product," using a term for items that contain less than 51% cheese."

  • clutterbot clutterbot

    25 Jan 2010, 2:51AM

    I lived in Canada for a year. So desperate did I become for british chocolate (which I thought I didn't even like that much) I would spend the equivalent of over a quid to get a specially imported Twirl (not quite as mad as the £2 I spent on a tin of ambrosia creamed rice with my eyes almost filling with tears of joy). I didn't realise it, but whenever I live overseas the first things I crave when back in the land of WHSmiths are a) a Twirl b) a cheese sandwich-any old crap plastic cheese one will be better than most cheese abroad.

    Nearly all north american chocolates seem to have a lot of caramel and peanut in them. However, I did come around to Reeses cups which I became addicted to. These are now sold in the UK so I now have no reason to ever leave the land of proper trash food.

    I agree cadburys is not high quality chocolate. I like fancy chocolate, but thats not the point of cadburys. The point is, you are hungry, you are at a train station, a cadburys twirl is the only thing that will take away the pain of your train being delayed by an hour. Hersheys would make you chuck yourself in front of a train.

  • suedeblade suedeblade

    25 Jan 2010, 2:53AM

    "Ghirardelli Chocolate Company is a United States division of Swiss candymaker Lindt & Sprüngli" Calif. no more!

Bookmark and Share
Posted by Matt Fullerty at 9:43 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , , ,


Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Letter from London: My American friends


The first thing I ever heard about Americans was that they all carried guns. Then, when I came across people who’d had direct contact with this ferocious-sounding tribe, I learned that they were actually rather friendly. At university, friends who had traveled in the United States came back with more detailed stories, not just of the friendliness of Americans but also of their hospitality (which, in our quaint English way, was translated into something close to gullibility). When I finally got to America myself, I found that not only were the natives friendly and hospitable, they were also incredibly polite. No one tells you this about Americans, but once you notice it, it becomes one of their defining characteristics, especially when they’re abroad.

This is very strange, or at least it says something strange about the way that perception routinely conforms to the preconceptions it would appear to contradict. The archetypal American abroad is perceived as loud and crass even though actually existing American tourists are distinguished by the way they address bus drivers and bartenders as “sir” and are effusive in their thanks when any small service is rendered. We look on with some confusion at these encounters because, on the one hand, the Americans seem a bit country-bumpkinish, and, on the other, good manners are a form of sophistication.

Granted, these visiting Americans often seem to have loud voices, but on closer examination, it’s a little subtler than that. Americans have no fear of being overheard. Civic life in Britain is predicated on the idea that everyone just about conceals his loathing of everyone else. To open your mouth is to risk offending someone. So we mutter and mumble as if surrounded by informers or, more exactly, as if they are living in our heads. In America the right to free speech is exercised freely and cordially. The basic assumption is that nothing you say will offend anyone else because, deep down, everyone is agreed on the premise that America is better than anyplace else. No such belief animates British life. On the contrary. A couple of years ago a survey indicated that British Muslims were the most fed-up of any in Europe: a sign, paradoxically, of profound assimilation.

If the typical American interaction involves an ostensibly contradictory mixture of the formal (politeness), the casual and the cordial, what happens when one moves beyond the transactional? Like many Europeans, I always feel good about myself in America; I feel appreciated, liked. It took a while to realize that this had nothing to do with me. It was about the people who made me feel this way: it was about charm. Yes, this is the bright secret of life in the United States: Americans are not just friendly and polite — they are also charming. And the most charming thing of all is that it rarely looks like charm. The French put a rather charmless emphasis on charm, are consciously or unconsciously persuaded that it is either part of a display of sophistication or — and it may amount to the same thing — a tool in the service of seduction.

You can see all of this in operation on flights back across the Atlantic from America to Euroland. At first we are under the spell of America. Instead of plunking ourselves down next to someone without a word, we say “Hi.” Maybe even indulge in a little conversation, though this American readiness to chat is counterbalanced by the fear that once we’ve got into a conversation we might not be able to extricate ourselves from it. By the time we’re mid-ocean, a kind of preparatory freeze has set in. As the flight stacks up in the inevitable holding pattern over Heathrow, we begin to revert to our muttering and moaning national selves. But, for a week or so after landing, a form of what might be called Ameristalgia makes us conscious of a rudeness in British life — a coarsening in the texture of daily life — that had hitherto seemed quite normal.

For example. I pay a considerable sum of money to play indoors at Islington Tennis Centre. Eighty percent of the time, the next people to play indicate that your time is up by unzipping their racket covers and strolling on court, without saying a word, without a smile, without acknowledging your existence except as an impediment. In America that would be not just unacceptable but inconceivable.

What is the relevance of this anecdotal trivia to a serious debate about the status of America in the world?

Most of my American friends were depressed and gloomy about the Bush years. Several said that if Bush were re-elected in 2004, they would leave the country. He was and they didn’t. The bottom line is that given the choice, Americans love it rather than leave it. Day to day, American life remained as pleasant as could be expected, even in the midst of considerable economic hardship. There was even a bonding, anti-Bush feeling similar to the kind of consensual opposition that we experienced under Margaret Thatcher. A visiting American artist like Patti Smith found that while the usual torrent of name-­dropping — Rimbaud, Mapplethorpe, Kerouac et al. — got a smattering of appreciative applause, a single gibe about Bush brought the house down.

At the same time, either sterling went up or the dollar went down (I don’t really understand this stuff), and as a consequence, Americans felt poor when they visited our rainy little island. So, for a brief period, we felt richer — planeloads of us went to Mannahatta and bought up everything in sight — and ideologically and ethically superior. Man, that felt good. We had a less blinkered attitude to Israel, didn’t drive big gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s, and if we were chilly of an evening we put on a sweater rather than turning up the heating (or, more accurately, turning off the A.C.). Sure, Blair went along with invading Iraq, but wasn’t that partly because he hoped to restrain the crusading fundamentalism of Bush? Now the dollar is back up — or down, or whichever it is — Europe is no longer expensive, and with the election of Barack Obama, the brief cushion of political superiority has been permanently deflated.

The Obama election was a real kick in the teeth, because although we Britons still seethe with class hatred, we pride ourselves on our highly evolved attitude to the question of race that has consistently undermined the American dream. The slight problem is that racial intermingling in Britain is most conspicuous in the ethnically diverse makeup of the groups of yobs — Asian, black and white — who exercise their antisocial behavioral skills without any kind of discrimination as to whom they happen to be terrorizing. In this regard, as in so many others, we seem to be leading from the bottom up.

Across the board, the grounds for all our feelings of superiority have been steadily whittled away. It turns out that the qualities that make us indubitably British — that is, the ones that we don’t share with or have not imported from America — are no longer conducive to Greatness. They actually add up to a kind of ostrich stoicism that, though it can be traced back to our finest hour (the blitz, the Battle of Britain), manifests itself in a peculiar compromise: a highly stylized willingness to muddle on, to put up with poor quality and high prices (restaurants, trains), to proffer (and accept) apologies not as a prelude to but as a substitute for improvement. We may not enjoy the way things are, but we endure them in a way that seems either quaint or quasi-Soviet to American visitors.

A tiny example. There’s a fashionable gastro pub near where I live. You scrum at the bar, desperate to get the attention of the barman. After a while, he will raise his eyebrows and glare at you. Unschooled in our rough ways, a visitor from America might assume he is being threatened, but actually the glare means that your order can now be taken — as long as you’re quick about it. When a friend from California had managed to order, he was handed the credit card terminal, which showed the amount and the option to add something for service. Americans are predisposed to tip, but my friend was slightly taken aback because, far from being in receipt of anything that might be described as service, it felt as if he had been fighting for a place aboard the last lifeboat on the Titanic. “Welcome to England,” I said.

--

Geoff Dyer, The Guardian, 31 December 2009

Geoff Dyer’s latest book is a novel, “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.”
Bookmark and Share
Posted by Matt Fullerty at 9:41 AM 2 comments
Labels: , , ,


Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Spats, symbols and posthumous publications: 2009, a year in books

Copies of Dan Brown's Lost Symbol

Copies of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol on sale in London. Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images.

It was the year when poetry made the front pages - for good and bad reasons - when Dan Brown broke publishing records and when everyone from Mark Twain to Vladimir Nabokov brought out books from beyond the grave. We take a look back at the literary events that hit the headlines in 2009.

January

2009 was the year of Dan Brown, e-readers and poetic spats. Thankfully, Dan Brown is still a few months away, but the other two hit the ground running right at the start of the year. The first sales figures for the Sony e-reader are released and show that Waterstone's sold almost 30,000 of the readers since the launch in September, while downloads of electronic books from the chain's site passed the 75,000 mark. And the Oxford professor of poetry contest kicks off. Names under discussion at this stage include British poets Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion, Simon Armitage, Jon Stallworthy, JH Prynne and John Wilkinson, along with Australian poet Les Murray, US poet Jorie Graham and New Zealand native Fleur Adcock. There is nary a mention of Ruth Padel and Derek Walcott. If only it was to stay that way ...

Meanwhile, Wendy Cope rules herself out of the running for the poet laureateship, calling it a poisoned chalice that should be abolished. In other, less fraught, poetry news, Jen Hadfield wins TS Eliot prize for poetry with her second collection, Nigh-No-Place. Sadly, the poet Mick Imlah, who was also shortlisted for the prize, dies this month, aged 52. We also say goodbye to Pulitzer prize-winning poet WD Snodgrass, Rumpole of the Bailey creator Sir John Mortimer and Rabbit writer John Updike. Neil Gaiman makes a start on what will be a vintage year by winning the Newbery for The Graveyard Book while Sebastian Barry wins the £25,000 Costa book of the year award. Joseph O'Neill only won plaudits for his novel about cricket and post-9/11 New York, Netherland, but it does turn out to have been the literary critics' read of choice last year.

2009 is also set to be the year of intriguing library news and it gets underway this month with the jailing, for two years, of an Iranian academic who stripped pages out of ancient books from the British Library.

Overseas, there's strife in Asterix world as Albert Uderzo's daughter, Sylvie, accuses the Asterix co-creator of betraying his hero, selling out to the businessmen and denying "all the values" she was brought up with - "independence, fraternity, conviviality and resistance" - after he authorised the series to continue after his death. He responds by calling her accusations "undignified" and an insult to Asterix readers. Turkey restores the citizenship of its most famous 20th-century poet, Nazim Hikmet, over 50 years after it branded him a traitor. And finally, Mills & Boon and the Rugby Football League team up to publish a series of books featuring tall, dark and handsome rugby heroes - minus cauliflower ears - and their glamorous love interests. They promise "jet-set locations, hunky alpha male heroes and hot sex, but in a rugby context."

February

James Patterson remains Britain's most borrowed author, with the top three positions unchanged from last year - Patterson is closely followed by children's author Jacqueline Wilson and the author of the Rainbow Magic series, Daisy Meadows. She may not get much in the way of public lending rights dosh, but JK Rowling can bask in with the adoration of the French – this month the country honours her with the title of knight of France's prestigious Legion of Honour. She also wins Stephen King's approval, albeit in comparison with Twilight's Stephenie Meyer. "The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good," opined the horror writer, for whom it's a busy month: King also writes a novella, Ur, exclusively for the new version of Amazon's Kindle.

It's a good month for protests, too: Margaret Drabble lets rip about about WH Smith's new deal with BAA, which will see it running all the bookshops in BAA's seven UK airports and Margaret Atwood pulls out of the Dubai literary festival over the 'blacklisting' of Geraldine Bedell's The Gulf Between Us, before declaring that she had been misled, and agreeing to take part in a debate on censorship by video link. It is, as she herself puts it, a "dog's breakfast".

In poetry, Ruth Padel emerges as frontrunner for the prestigious post of Oxford University professor of poetry and Carol Ann Duffy is now odds-on favourite to get the laureateship.

In library news, the British Library spends £83,000 on The Tin Book, the futurist manifesto co-authored by a fascist-sympathising Italian artist who, 100 years ago, said all libraries should be destroyed.

There are wins for Julia Gregson with the romantic novel of the year award for East of the Sun and Naomi Klein with the inaugural Warwick prize for The Shock Doctrine.

We say a sad farewell to one of the best-known Arabic novelists of the 20th century, Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, and Whitbread-winning author Christopher Nolan.

March

This month's controversy comes courtesy of Julie Myerson and her book, The Lost Child, which deals with the author's decision to lock her 17-year-old son, Jake, out of the family home over his use of cannabis. In a battle played out in the national newspapers, Jake describes his mother as "insane" and "obscene" and the book is published two months early due to the uproar. And uh-oh - Derek Walcott joins the Oxford professor of poetry race.

There is plenty of unexpected publishing news: lost Mark Twain stories are to be released, two new Roberto Bolaño manuscripts are found among his papers in Spain, and an unfinished David Foster Wallace novel, The Pale King, will be published. However, distinguished Russian scholar Orlando Figes's latest book on life under Stalin won't be published in Russia due to "political pressure".

This month's British Library story reveals that the library has "mislaid" 9,000 books with some not having been seen in well over half a century; the Bodleian, meanwhile, moves millions of books from dreamy Oxford to Swindon.

Matt Haig wins the Blue Peter award for Shadow Forest, controversial Egyptian novel Youssef Ziedan's Beelzebub wins the International Prize for Arabic fiction and Seamus Heaney wins the £40,000 David Cohen prize. The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais wins the Diagram prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year.

Ben Okri releases a new poem on Twitter and 65% of those polled in a survey admit lying about reading classic novels with Nineteen Eighty-Four coming top in a poll of the UK's guilty reading secrets. Finally, novelist Colm Toíbín tells it like it is when he says that the only aspect of the writing life that gives him any pleasure is getting paid.

April

Fancy living in Peach Pie Street? Wincanton in Somerset, twinned with Ankh-Morpork, names streets on a new housing estate after Terry Pratchett's fantasy series Discworld.

Birmingham plans the UK's largest ever lending library, and the earliest-known book jacket is discovered at the Bodleian.

Amazon finds itself at the centre of a censorship row after a number of gay and lesbian titles, by authors including Annie Proulx, EM Forster and Jeanette Winterson, were taken off the online sales charts. It was "embarrassing and hamfisted" said a shamefaced Amazon in a suitably grovelling apology. A Pride and Prejudice and Zombies 'mash-up' becomes an unexpected bestseller, and the Espresso Book Machine, which can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait, is launched in Blackwell's in London. Margaret Drabble announces that she will not write another novel because she is worried about repeating herself.

There are SF wins for Ursula K Le Guin, who gets her sixth Nebula, while the Arthur C Clarke award goes to Ian R MacLeod's Song of Time. The SF world has a big loss with the death of JG Ballard and we also say goodbye to poet UA Fanthorpe. There are no poetic barneys this month but don't worry – May is a biggie.

May

It all starts decorously enough in the poetry world, with near-universal support for the appointment of Carol Ann Duffy as the first female poet laureate. And then that pesky poetry professorship contest has to go and ruin everything. As the fiasco reaches its climax, Derek Walcott resigns from the race after earlier sexual harassment claims made against him were brought up via an anonymous letter campaign. Oxford refuses calls to postpone the election and Ruth Padel is elected the first female Oxford professor of poetry. She spends the next week fighting to keep her post after it emerges that she tipped off newspapers about claims of sexual impropriety against Walcott, but finally resigns, at the Hay festival, less than 10 days after her election. Oxford university calls for "a period of reflection" and accepts that it is unlikely that it will have anybody in the post by October when the current incumbent steps down.

The tawdry affair rather overshadowed Alice Munro's well-deserved win of the £60,000 Man Booker international prize, and a Hay festival which saw Rowan Williams and Desmond Tutu call for quiet and tolerance, Sarah Waters apologise for not putting any lesbians in her new novel, The Little Stranger, Kamila Shamsie make connections across the whole of the 20th century and Joan Bakewell return with her first novel.

Elsewhere, Jonathan Ross launches a Twitter book club and sends his first choice soaring up the bestseller charts (but it all seemed to have petered out by the summer), Geoff Dyer wins the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction with Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, and we bid farewell to novelist Marilyn French.

June

Poetry continues to generate controversy, as Carol Ann Duffy chooses as her first subject for a poem as laureate - the MPs' expenses scandal and the corrosiveness of politics on politicians. However, there is also the discovery of Timmy the Tug, a 40-page children's poem written by Ted Hughes in the 1950s. Two unpublished Poirot short stories are also found in Agatha Christie's holiday home.

JD Salinger launches legal action against an author who has purportedly written a spinoff "sequel" to Catcher in the Rye, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.

This month's library news is fun - the British Library's head of modern manuscripts agrees to help with haymaking on John Berger's French farm in return for the donation of the author's literary archive.

Anthony Browne becomes the children's laureate, the Carnegie Medal is posthumously awarded to Siobhan Dowd for Bog Child, Marilynne Robinson wins Orange prize and Philip Hoare's study of whales, Leviathan, wins the Samuel Johnson prize. Debut novelist Michael Thomas beat authors including Philip Roth, Doris Lessing and Joyce Carol Oates to take the €100,000 (£85,000) Impac Dublin prize.

We said goodbye to fantasy author David Eddings.

July

A quiet month in the books world, but a "sad day for the world of smut" as the women's erotica imprint Black Lace stops commissioning new titles. All is not lost, however: Playboy acquires the first serial rights to The Original of Laura, the unfinished novel Nabokov wanted to be destroyed.

Ernest Hemingway is unveiled as a failed KGB spy.

There were goodbyes to Frank McCourt, father of the misery memoir, novelist Gordon Burn and Booker-winner Stanley Middleton.

August

Much summer silliness on offer as the literati try to guess who inspired Sebastian Faulks to create an embittered literary reviewer whose only joy in life is to destroy the careers of authors by writing excoriating reviews of their books in national newspapers, in his novel A Week in December. But the novelist also has to defuse a row after he is quoted in an interview dismissing the Qu'ran as "just the rantings of a schizophrenic" with "no ethical dimension". Bloomsbury also lands in hot water after Australian author Justine Larbalestie's new novel, Liar, about a short-haired black girl called Micah, is published with a photograph of a long-haired white girl on its jacket. The news that William Golding's private papers, which he gave to his biographer John Sunderland, reveal that he tried to rape a 15-year-old girl as a teenager, is met with shock. Travel writers are furious as the Office of Fair Trading decides against investigating WH Smith's deal to stock only Penguin's overseas guides at its travel stores.

Dan Brown may have topped Oxfam's list of most donated books but there are no Robert Langdon adventures on Obama's holiday reading list which, we learn, contains the rather more high-powered Thomas L Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded – subtitled Why We Need a Green Revolution, and How It Can Renew America – and Pulitzer prize-winner David McCullough's biography of the second US president, John Adams. Wuthering Heights tops the classics bestseller lists after it is repackaged as the 'favourite book' of Stephenie Meyer's Bella and Edward with a cover styled on her Twilight series.

Neil Gaiman's run of success with the Graveyard Book continues with a Hugo award, and Michael Holroyd wins the James Tait Black prize for his book about 19th-century Shakespearean actors, A Strange Eventful History, 42 years after his wife Margaret Drabble won it.

September

September sees the announcement of the Man Booker shortlist, which pits Hilary Mantel, AS Byatt and Sarah Waters against JM Coetzee, Simon Mawer and Adam Foulds, but it's fair to say that the month belongs Dan Brown. The Lost Symbol is published and becomes the best-read adult novel in publishing history, setting adult fiction sales records despite being a steaming pile of clunk. Thankfully, one poll Brown doesn't top is "the piece of writing that has most shaped world literature over the past 25 years": Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude gets that one.

A Google doodle honours HG Wells in a mysterious way but the search engine's $125m deal agreement with US publishers to digitise millions of books is postponed by a judge after widespread criticism. Some upbeat library news: readers can now borrow books from more than 4,000 public libraries regardless of where they live.

Simon Van Booy wins the €35,000 Frank O'Connor award for Love Begins in Winter, Graham Joyce wins the British Fantasy award with Memoirs of a Master Forger and poet Tony Harrison is awarded the first ever PEN/Pinter prize for a writer following in Harold Pinter's footsteps. We bid farewell to Keith Waterhouse.

October

The Booker goes to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall and she briefly pushes Dan Brown into second place on Amazon's sales charts.

The Google digital library row rumbles on with the German chancellor Angela Merkel coming out against it, while Amazon launches the Kindle.

A Winnie the Pooh sequel sees Christopher Robin back in Hundred Acre Wood, and a film adaption of Where the Wild Things Are that leads the book's author Maurice Sendak to tell parents worried that is too frightening for children to "go to hell". Also going to hell, as far as the US religious right are concerned, are readers of And Tango Makes Three. The story of two male penguins raising an orphaned chick tops the US banned books list but also races up the Amazon charts.

The familial upsets of earlier in the year are put to one side as Asterix turns 50 and France celebrates in style.

Don Paterson wins the Forward prize for poetry with his collection Rain, TS Eliot is named the nation's favourite poet, Herta Müller wins the Nobel prize for literature and Mal Peet wins the Guardian children's fiction prize.

November

More poetry shenanigans as Andrew Motion defends his use of 'found' material in a poem against a charge of plagiarism and Nicolas Sarkozy provokes the French left by mischievously suggesting he bestow the country's greatest posthumous honour upon Albert Camus - transferring the Algerian-born author's remains to the Panthéon, the resting place for heroes of France, on the 50th anniversary of his death in January.

The new Nobel laureate comes under fire from a former member of the Romanian secret police who admits spying on her but claims that the writer "has a psychosis and has no contact with external reality." There's much excitement as upmarket callgirl blogger Belle Du Jour unmasks herself as a research scientist, and some potentially cheering news as Stephenie Meyer admits to Oprah that she is "a little burned out on vampires" and may not write another Twilight novel. The latest move in the Google books battle sees the search giant offering some concessions.

This month we learn that Roberto Bolaño would rather have been a cop than an author, that Sarah Palin's Going Rogue has actually managed to sell quite a few copies and Stephen King is plotting a sequel to The Shining.

More library loveliness as a former telephone box is transformed into a mini village library. It's happy 30th birthday to the London Review of Books and more celebrations for Neil Gaiman as The Graveyard Book picks up yet another gong, this time the Booktrust teenage prize. Su Tong's political fable The Boat to Redemption takes the Man Asia literary prize, Evie Wyld's debut After the Fire, a Still Small Voice beats Aravind Adiga and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to the John Llewellyn Rhys prize and Philip Ardargh's Grubtown Tales wins the Roald Dahl funny prize. The American winner of the Prix Goncourt, Jonathan Littell, wins the Bad Sex award for such inspired lines as "I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg" in his novel The Kindly Ones.

And it's goodbye Borders, as the bookstore goes into administration.

December

Petina Gappah wins the Guardian first book award with her collection of short stories about Zimbabwe, An Elegy for Easterly, and poet Kate Clanchy wins the BBC National Short Story award.

Otherwise, the year ends as it starts – with poets, Dan Brown, Google and e-books. Oxford university announces that it will reform voting rules for the poetry professor post, but it's too late for Derek Walcott: he's already accepted the post of professor of poetry – at Essex. Dan Brown is Christmas number one, Ursula K Le Guin accuses the Authors Guild of 'deal with the devil' over its Google settlement, and Amazon customers bought more e-books than printed books for the first time on Christmas Day.

New words this year included jeggings, tweetups, staycation and the absolutely splendid snollygosters.

All in all, 2009 was quite a year. Fasten your seatbelts for the sequel ...

---

Michelle Pauli, The Guardian, Wednesday 30 December 2009

Bookmark and Share
Posted by Matt Fullerty at 2:16 PM 1 comments
Labels: , , , , , ,


Tuesday, December 29, 2009

2009 was the year of the short story

Alice Munro

Alice Munro's Man Booker International win boosted the profile of the short story form.

--

Alice Munro won the Man Booker International, Raymond Carver's widow published a revised edition of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and fine collections appeared from old hands and debutantes. This year proved that reports of the short story's death have been greatly exaggerated.

2009 has proved that rumours of the death of the short story – so often forecast that almost every review of almost every collection seems duty-bound to repeat and thus propagate it – are greatly exaggerated. The consensus running through the end-of-year reviews is that it's been a vintage year for short fiction, and I agree. I come here to praise the short story, not to bury it.

Starting at the top, one of the world's greatest living short story specialists, and one of its greatest writers full-stop, took the 2009 Man Booker International prize. Canadian Alice Munro published her 14th collection, Too Much Happiness, earlier this year. A powerful grouping of stories more violent than her normal work, it shows her enormous talent remains undiminished as she nears her ninth decade.

Mavis Gallant is already well into hers, and while no new work is forthcoming an edition of her previously uncollected stories, The Cost of Living, has just been published. As for the brand new, this year saw collections from big names such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, James Lasdun, and this parish's own AL Kennedy.

Good work from the living, then, but notable new collections issued even from beyond the grave. Raymond Carver's Beginners reinstates the writer's original drafts of the stories that made up his definitive 1981 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; stories that his editor Gordon Lish famously and controversially reduced in length, in some cases cutting up to 78% of Carver's prose. I had misgivings before reading it, but Beginners is a fascinating document. The decision to publish these versions is controversial, but the logic behind his widow Tess Gallagher's desire to show the "connective tissue" between his pre- and post-Lish work seems sound. Additionally the endnotes, wherein the editors detail what revisions were made where and when, are like morsels of crack for Carver geeks.

This has also been an excellent year for debuts. I read David Vann's Legend of a Suicide and Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned back to back, and while their shared interests – hunting, ichthyology, destructive rages, divorce, abuse and guns – might lie heavily on their readers' psyches, the quality of the writing precludes any chance of leaving them depressed. Both superb, Vann's book in particular suggests the arrival of a significant talent; one who can marry tremendous plot twists to an appealingly downbeat style that fans of Carver and Cormac McCarthy alike will thrill to.

In case you're wondering what Legend of a Suicide, supposedly a novel, is doing in a blog about short stories, it was originally published as a story collection in America. Vann told the Guardian he prefers the way the book is being sold in the UK, but really it sits somewhere between the two forms: the stories are discrete, but at the same time are all reactions to or descriptions of a single central event. Another book that hovers in this enjoyable and I think fertile space between the story collection and the novel is this year's Pulitzer winner, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, a story cycle set in Crosby, Maine, and presided over by the retired schoolteacher of the title. It's sold upwards of 400,000 copies so far: impressive for a literary novel, extraordinary for short fiction.

Of course, all this jubilation would be Panglossian without some acknowledgement of the short story market's real and present downsides. In the US it's commonplace for short story writers to get a deal for their first collection only on the proviso that a novel follows, a business practice that casts short story-writing as apprentice work. In the UK it's worse still, with story collections treated like dirty secrets to be snuck out in disguise (pace Penguin's strategy with Vann), with only a determined study of the back cover revealing the truth. And I don't know if it's a case of reading practices following publishing's lead or vice versa, but I'm constantly surprised and disheartened by the number of readers who tell me they don't read short stories, as if they were a homogenous type that could be not to your taste like, say, policiers.

I do see more reason to celebrate than to mourn, however. Radio 4 broadcasts nearly 150 stories a year; the Atlantic's recent decision to sell short stories via its Kindle store inspires hope for a vibrant market for individually sold shorter works, while flash fiction and sites dedicated to the short story continue to proliferate online.

This year saw the US publication of the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, a particular favourite of mine, whose sharp, hilarious, often minuscule fictions have long had a small but dedicated following. She's the next subject in the short story series I've been writing for the last couple of years, and in the words of the New Yorker her body of work "will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal." Hamish Hamilton have just picked up the UK rights, so British readers as yet unfamiliar with her will soon have an even better chance to find out how good she is. It looks like 2010's already shaping up to be another good year.

--

Chris Power, The Guardian, Tuesday 29 December 2009

Bookmark and Share
Posted by Matt Fullerty at 1:11 PM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , ,


Thursday, December 17, 2009

Hollywood writer Tweeting from jail

Roger Avary, the Pulp Fiction story writer, is tweeting observations from behind bars.

Sentenced last month and currently serving a year’s prison sentence for driving under the influence and vehicular manslaughter, Avary’s musings could be seen as inspirational to most fledgling writers. In fact, The Scribbler would like to think Avary has already bagged half a dozen ideas for new writing projects.

There are many theories about how Avary is managing to Tweet from Ventura County Jail. One suggests that while serving a year’s custodial sentence and five probation, the Californian justice system saw fit to grant Avary a work furlough allowing him to work on Return to Castle Wolfenstein, his current film project based on the hit computer game, before returning to prison at night. If this was the case we’re sure it would be more widely publicised.

Other reports suggest he’s using his telephone call to phone his 140 character Twitter update to a friend who then updates his profile for him. Or a third idea is that he is microblogging using a mobile phone application. Regardless of how he is doing it, one thing’s for sure, Avary’s Tweets are gradually building a very vivid picture of what life is like inside a correctional institution.

Roger Avary’s other writing credits include; Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Killing Zoe, Rules of Attraction, Glitterati and Beowulf.

Follow Roger Avary’s Twitter account here: @AVARY Let us know if you find it good reading in the comment box below. His website can be found here: www.avary.com

Also follow The Scribbler on Twitter here: @ScribblerBlog

Feast your eyes on a famous example of Roger Avary’s talent below. A drug induced scene from his film Killing Zoe:

Discussion:
What do you think of Roger Avary’s Twitter? Has it inspired you in any way? Is it a good resource for research in life from behind bars? Are you now bitten by the Twitter bug? How can social networking benefit the writing process? Please do discuss below.

--

Words: Dean Samways

Bookmark and Share
Posted by Matt Fullerty at 9:56 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , ,


Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)