The Literary Travel BlogA blog on all aspects of literary travel and literary tours, with the latest news from thewordtravels.com
Subscribe PS If you are not sure what RSS and blogging is all about, click on the 'What's an RSS Feed?' link (also in the bottom left margin). Malik vs Sardar - The UK/Asia DebateAs part of the Asia Literature Festival in London, Kenan Malik and Ziauddin Sardar go head to head in a war of ideas as they debate contentious issues that affect Britain today: the Rushdie affair and its repercussions, contemporary Islam, terrorism, free speech and Western values. Malik's 'From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy' tells the full story of the Rushdie affair and considers its resonance in modern Britain. In 'Balti Britain: Journey through the British Asian Experience' Sardar explores the main Asian communities in the UK in a quest to understand his own diasporic experience. These two authors are guaranteed to provide a thought-provoking, revealingdebate and a lively evening. Moderated by Boyd Tonkin Tuesday 12 May, 6.45pmTickets: £8Asia House Friends/Concessions (students/60+): £5 Laurence Sterne and Shandy HallI was just updating some information on Yorkshire and the Brontes, and saw that there's an interesting series of exhibitions at Shandy Hall this year: An exhibition of County Maps celebrating the work of J L Carr, author of 'A Month in the Country', opens the weekend of 16/17 May with a sermon in Coxwold church by lay-canon Ronald Blythe (author of Akenfield) and the publication of a Pocket Book of the Quotations of Sterne. In July/August there is an exhibition of the original drawings for The Illustrated Tristram Shandy by Martin Rowson - Guardian political cartoonist. The exhibition will include new work by Rowson entitled Yoricks Progress. In September/October there is an exhibition for the 250th anniversary of the Black Page in Tristram Shandy. Also, for those who like to plan ahead, put 15-18 July 2013 in your diary: Plans are underway for The Tercentenary Conference, Laurence Sterne 1713 – 2013, to be held in York. Permalink -- click for full blog post Yorkshire: The Bronte sisters and beyondA literary guide to Yorkshire, including the Bronte sisters, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and many other writers Permalink -- click for full blog post Tailor-Made ToursTailor-made literary and cultural tours in the UK and Europe Permalink -- click for full blog post The Asia House Festival of Asian LiteratureThe only Festival in the UK dedicated to writing about Asia, The Asia HouseFestival of Asian Literature celebrates the newest and best of writing across abroad spectrum of Asian countries in a series of talks, debates anddiscussions. With over 25 authors covering ten Asian countries, The 2009 Asia House Festivalof Asian Literature provides a unique, accessible way to interact with andunderstand these diverse cultures. The 2009 programme, running from May 11 - 22, offers a unique opportunity to engage with both prominent writers and emerging voices in the intimate and beautiful atmosphere of Asia House in Marylebone, central London. Among the authors speaking are: AravindAdiga, Amit Chaudhuri, Tash Aw, Kenan Malik, Ziauddin Sardar, Kamila Shamsie,Nadeem Aslam, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Alice Albinia, Martin Jacques, John Man andChristina Lamb. For booking call 020 7307 5454 or email enquiries@asiahouse.co.uk Asia House, 63 New Cavendish Street, London W1G 7LP www.asiahouse.org Literary Festivals in the UKA guide to literary festivals in the UK, with link details Permalink -- click for full blog post George Herbert and BemertonThe poet George Herbert spent his last years his life as rector of St Andrews Bemerton Permalink -- click for full blog post thewordtravels: literary tours, literary travel and inspiring journeysFor inspiring journeys in the literary landscape. We specialise in literary travel, literary tours, creative writing and walking holidays, city breaks, and trekking adventures. Permalink -- click for full blog post Literary ToursLiterary tours in Britain and Europe Permalink -- click for full blog post The guardian Hay Festival in SegoviaThe guardian Hay Festival in Segovia takes place 27-30 September 2007 The programme includes: Edwin Williamson, Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College, speaking on: how do you write a biography of Borges?
The Muslim Woman, Sufism and Literature
Literary Creation and the Politically Incorrect
A Parrot in the Pepper Tree A. C. Grayling speaking on The Concept of Liberty Wole Soyinka in conversation with Landry-Wilfred Mampika and 'In Conversations' with Hanif Kureishi and Arnold Wesker Gods, Heroes and RomanticsGods, Heroes and Romantics is a unique adventure in the classical world. A journey into history, myth and legend Permalink -- click for full blog post Ancient Greece and the Classical WorldA literary travel guide to Ancient Greece and the Classical World Permalink -- click for full blog post King's Sutton Literary FestivalThis year's King's Sutton Festival takes place on Saturday and Sunday 10 and 11 March in this charming village just outside Banbury in Oxfordshire. Writers appearing include Salley Vickers, who on Saturday 10th will be talking to Winifred Robinson about her latest novel The Other Side of You, and Margaret Drabble, who will be talking about her life and work on the Sunday. Full details and booking at www.kslitfest.co.uk Permalink -- click for full blog post The Journey‘A vast platform appeared before us, lit up by reflectors. A little beyond it, a row of lorries. Then everything was silent again. Someone translated: we had to climb down with our luggage and deposit it alongside the train. In a moment the platform was swarming with shadows. But we were afraid to break the silence: everyone busied himself with his luggage, searched for someone else, called to somebody, but timidly, in a whisper.’
From If This Is A Man by Primo Levi, trans. Stuart Woolf Permalink -- click for full blog post Throw away other people’s mapsThe second part of Zadie Smith’s beautiful and challenging article on writers and readers was published in The Guardian on Saturday. In the article she re-connects style with morality and life lived, and with it reclaims the actual experience, as felt, of reading - and why writing fiction, and reading it, matters. A truly thrilling read. ‘What unites great novels is the individual manner in which they articulate experience and force us to be attentive, waking us from the sleepwalk of our lives. And the great joy of fiction is the variety of this process …’ ‘Both the writer and the reader must undergo an ethical expansion – allow me to call it an expansion of the heart – in order to comprehend the human otherness that fiction confronts them with; both fail in varied, fascinating ways to complete this action as ideally it might be completed. …’ Follow the permalink to read more about The Word Travels unique creative writing journey in Prague and Krakow. Permalink -- click for full blog post T S Eliot and East Coker
‘Home is where one starts from’ he wrote in 'East Coker', one of the Four Quartets, and his burial here marks his return to the parish of his forefathers. The church is set on higher ground just above the village of East Coker, on the Dorset / Somerset border and provides magnificent views of the rolling countryside beyond. There is something moving in the simplicity of the plaque, and the omission of his honours in favour of the simple description, ‘Poet’, that is wholly fitting of the kind of man, and poet, that he was. The stone includes the first and last lines from ‘East Coker’ - ‘In my beginning is my end ... In my end is my beginning’ and the one simple request that the beholder, of his or her charity, might pray for the repose of his soul. As the wind blows through the trees skirting the graveyard, it is a perfect place to rediscover, as lines in ‘East Coker’ have it, ‘Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter.’ New Year’s Eve, Clavell Tower
The Tower was built in 1820 as an observatory by the eccentric occupant of nearby Smedmore House, the Revd John Clavell. After many years standing empty and neglected, and in increasing danger of falling into the sea due to coastal erosion, it is now being painstakingly dismantled and re-erected 25 metres back from the cliff face.
The Black Tower ‘The view, spectacular and frightening, made him catch his breath … below, the cliff tumbled into a broad fissured causeway of boulders, slabs and amorphous chunks of blue-black rock which littered the foreshore as if hurled in wild disorder by a giant hand ... As he looked down on the chaotic and awe-inspiring waste of rock and sea and tried to picture what the fall must have done to Holroyd, the sun moved fitfully from behind the clouds and a band of sunlight moved across the headland lying warm as a hand on the back of his neck, gilding the bracken, marbling the strewn rocks at the cliff edge. But it left the foreshore in shadow, sinister and unfriendly. For a moment Dalgliesh believed that he was looking down on a cursed and dreadful shore on which the sun could never shine.’
Much later, the tower is the setting for the novel's chilling climax as Dalgliesh, engulfed in a dense sea mist and with his face against the tower, hears ‘the spine-chilling scrape, unmistakable, of bone ends clawing against the stone ... ’
We wish all our readers and literary travellers (and travelers!) a very happy new year. Creative Writing BreaksCreative writing breaks that combine walks in some of the most spectacular landscapes in Britain with the time and space to respond creatively in poetry, prose, photography or drawing Permalink -- click for full blog post More thoughts on PragueIt is perhaps only in a city so full of paradoxes that, within the space of several weeks, two vastly different but brilliant writers could have been born. One was a Jew who would write in German, a vegetarian, teetotal and self-absorbed ascetic, a man so obsessed with the knowledge of his own responsibility, his mission as a writer and his own shortcomings, that he dared not have most of his works published while he was alive. The other was a drunk, an anarchist, a bon vivant, and extrovert who ridiculed his profession and his responsibilities, who wrote in pubs and sold his work on the spot for a few beers. Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hašek, author of The Good Soldier Švejk, lived their brief lives (they both died prematurely, within a year of each other) separated by only a few streets. They each drew on the same period to create works of genius, but those works seem separated not just by ages, but by continents as well. Since then the people of Prague have used the word Kafkárna to describe the absurdities of their lives, and have called their own ability to make light of such absurdities, to confront violence with humour and utterly passive resistance, Švejkovina. Ivan Klíma The Spirit of Prague Permalink -- click for full blog post Ian Fleming and James BondA guide to Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, in London Permalink -- click for full blog post Ivan Klima and The Spirit of PragueI'm just re-reading Ivan Klíma’s wonderful collection of essays The Spririt of Prague, returning to one of my favourite writers partly in preparation for our creative writing trip to Prague in May 2007 (follow link for details). Klima writes very simply, with a wonderful carity and quiet authority. In the first essay, entitiled with characteristic understated irony A Rather Unconventional Childhood, he writes of his childhood which coincided, in Eastern Europe, with the triumph of Nazism and his confinement (as a Jew) in the transit camp of Terezin. The wry, observational tone of the writing works to devastating effect: ‘I also experienced my first real friendships at this time which , as I later came to understand, were really only prefigurations of the adolescent infatuations that transform every encounter, every casual conversation into an experience of singular importance. All those friendships ended tragically; my friends, boys and girls, went to the gas chamber, all except one, the one I truly loved, Arieh, a son of the chairman of the camp prisoners’ self-management committee, who was shot at the age of twelve.’ His experiences in the camp, and later under the communist regimes of the post-war years, lead him to the conclusion that ‘fanaticism of any kind is a psychological precondition, a precursor, of violence and terror, and that there is no idea in the world good enough to justify a fanatical attempt to implement it.’ A thought that resonates today. The Spirit of Prague and other essays, by Ivan Klima, translated from the czech by Paul Wilson (Granta Books, London, 1994) Permalink -- click for full blog post Faik Bey Konitza in LondonNovember 28 2006 is the 94th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of Albania in 1912. In 1903-4 Faik Bey Konitza, one of Albania's greatest scholars and writers, was resident at 3 Oakley Crescent in Islington, London. Here he continued to edit and publish, under the pseudonym Thrank Spirobeg, the dual language (French/Albanian) periodical Albania that he had founded in Brussels in 1897. He contributed bitingly sarcastic articles on what he saw as the cultural backwardness and naivety of his compatriots. Albania helped to spread awareness of Albanian culture and the Albanian cause across Europe, and was highly influential in the development and refinement of Southern Albanian prose writing, which in turn would form the basis of modern Albanian literary language (gjuha letrare). In the words of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Konitza ‘turned a rough idiom of sailors’ inns into a beautiful, rich and supple language.’ Whilst in Brussels Konitza had corresponded with Apollinaire regarding an article published by the poet in L’Européen. When Apollinaire came to London seeking to regain the affections of Annie Pleyden, an English governess he had met and fallen in love with in Germany, he stayed with Konitza at Oakley Crescent. Apollinaire published a memoir of Konitza in the Mercure de France on 1 May 1912, which begins ‘Of the people I have met and whom I remember with the greatest pleasure, Faik Bey Konitza is one of the most unusual.’ He recalls that: ‘we would have lunch the Albanian way, which is to say, endlessly … The lunches were so long that I could not visit a single museum in London, as we would always arrive when the doors closed,’ and the attention and care with which Konitza edited his articles: ‘meant that the journal always came out very late. In 1904, only the issues for 1902 appeared; in 1907, the issues for 1904 came out at regular intervals. The French journal L’Occident is the only one that could compete with Albania in that respect.’ More on the literary history of London in London: City of Words. Follow the link for details. Permalink -- click for full blog post B S JohnsonNovember 13. Today is the anniversary of the death of writer B.S. Johnson. On this day in 1973 he died by suicide at his home in Myddleston Square, Islington, North London. Deeply influenced by writers such as Sterne, Joyce and Beckett, he was dedicated to technical innovation and experimentation in the novel form. After the relatively conventional Travelling People (1963), his first novel, Johnson wrote Albert Angelo (1964), in which the fragmentary and episodic narrative concerning Albert, a frustrated architect who lives (as B.S. Johnson did at the time) in a rented room in an early Victorian square not far from the Angel, is interrupted by an authorial outburst, ‘an almighty aposiopesis’ in which Johnson revolts against the requirement of a novel to tell a story: -I’m trying to say something not tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth about me about my experience about my truth to reality about sitting here writing looking out across Clarement Square trying to say something about the writing and nothing being an answer to the loneliness to the lack of loving … Bleak and exuberant by turns, in Albert Angelo Johnson also played with the physical form of the novel. The book was produced with a hole in page 149; this is later claimed to represent the knife-cut that killed Christopher Marlowe, and is also presented as a chance to read the future, through the past. For more about writers in London, see London: City of Words Permalink -- click for full blog post Blake, Jerusalem and Mayfair203 years ago William Blake moved to 17 South Molton Street in Mayfair, central London, where he lived from from October 1803 until spring 1820. Here he wrote and etched Milton (1804-8), Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-20) and revised and extended Vala (1797-1804) into the more sexually explicit The Four Zoas, rediscovered in 1889. Revised against a backdrop of war and bread riots, The Four Zoas offers a vision of renewal and restoration through a complex and private visionary system. Bad harvests, the Luddite protests of 1812 and 1813, and the intensification of the reform movement saw Blake more engrossed in Jerusalem. He saw the task of Jerusalem ‘To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes / Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity.’ An eternity he saw in the streets of London:
In Felpham I heard and saw Visions of Albion. Blake saw London as ‘a Human awful wonder of God!’ and called for London and Albion to awake, evoking the wandering dead souls of Oxford Street from Hyde Park to Tyburn (the bones of Tyburn victims had been dug up in 1811 during the construction of Regent Street). Jerusalem takes the form of journeys made by Los (Blake) through the darkness that is mythic London and Britain. Los essentially walks the boundaries of the city that Blake sees as ‘blind & age-bent begging thro the Streets / Of Babylon, led by a child’, coming to sit and listen to ‘Jerusalems voice’:
My Streets are my Ideas of Imagination.
Read more in London: City of Words. Permalink -- click for full blog post Cock Tavern, Bow StreetToday's destination: The Cock Tavern in Bow Street,Covent Garden, London. In June 1663 three court poets, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir Thomas Ogle and Sir Charles Sackville, later Lord Brockhurst, caused a riot by stripping naked and blaspheming from the balcony of the Cock Tavern. Fined, imprisoned for a week and bound over to the keep the peace for three years, they nevertheless continued to get drunk at Oxford Kate’s (the proprietess of the Tavern). In 1668 Pepys records them running naked through Covent Garden, fighting and getting locked up for the night. Sedley’s verse commemorated his all-night drinking and wenching:
Yet we will have store of good Wenches, Read more in London: City of Words. Follow the link for details. Permalink -- click for full blog post Iris Murdoch Hyde Park WalkA walk in Hyde Park inspired by the novels of Iris Murdoch Permalink -- click for full blog post Iris Murdoch Anax's WalkAnax's walk - one of a series of walks in London inspired by the novels of Iris Murdoch Permalink -- click for full blog post Iris MurdochA series of walks in London relating to the novels of Iris Murdoch Permalink -- click for full blog post Iris Murdoch Thames WalksThese Iris Murdoch Thames Walks trace the magnetic presence of the Thames in Iris Murdoch’s novels, from the Isle of Dogs to Cheyne Walk. Permalink -- click for full blog post Walking the coastAt the weekend I was walking at Ringstead and White Nothe along the Dorset coast. The wind was billowing and the waves crashing against the cliffs far below. Llewellyn Powys, who lived in one of the coastguard cottages at White Nothe in the 1920s, created a resonant body of essays inspired by his close knowledge and experience of the local landscape. In this extract he captures the excitement of winter at White Nothe: On White Nose cliff after a November gale I have often picked up sea-weed, though the top of the headland stands 600 feet above the waves. The winds there would be so violent as to blow in the windows of the coast-guard cottages and to send slates from our roof flying over the ploughlands behind the houses as lightly as though they were sycamore leaves. And then, as soon as ever the wind went down, a sea mist would suddenly descend upon us enveloping us utterly … The Distracted Preacher, a short story by Thomas Hardy, is also set nearby. Permalink -- click for full blog post |
T S Eliot died on 4th January 1965. We visited East Coker and the Eliot Corner of St. Michael's Church, East Coker, where his ashes are buried below the memorial plaque set in the wall.
New Year’s Eve, and a visit to the Dorset coast in bracing wind where the dogs rushed into the churning waves before we climbed up to The Clavell Tower, which stands high on the cliff above Kimmeridge Bay.
Today the bright morning brought strong winds and waves crashing onto the shore, not ‘cursed and dreadful’ but still awe-inspiring in its raw, elemental power.