Guest Blogs | Broad Conversation

February 1, 2013 • 1:15 pm 1

Top Tips for Couples from Lucy Beresford

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, author of ‘Happy Relationships at Home, Work and Play’, Psychologies agony aunt and psychotherapist, Lucy Beresford divulges her top tips for couples.

Lucy will be joining us on Tuesday 5th February at 7pm to talk about her new book with broadcaster, David Freeman. Tickets cost £3 and are available from our Customer Service Department, Blackwell’s Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford. Telephone: 01865 333623.

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner and so the thoughts of some of us turn to love and intimacy. Some of us will be in relationships, some of us are looking for a partner, but all of us need to be reminded that long-lasting love must be worked at, consciously, every day.

To begin with, we need to recognise that we often have unmet needs or hopes left over from childhood. Without realising it, we could be trying to repeat a childhood relationship in which we felt unloved or rejected or disrespected. By unconsciously repeating the same kind of relationship as grown-ups, we are trying to repair it. By taking responsibility for what needs we bring to our present-day relationships, we can stop blaming our partner for failing to meet that need.

We also need to pay attention to what happens in the bedroom. For example, porn is having a negative effect on relationships. Recent research has shown that women of all ages are feeling under increasing pressure to look a certain way in the bedroom, and that men speak of being bored by ‘ordinary’ sexual activity. As a result, couples are becoming increasing dissatisfied with their love lives.

But of course, porn is not an accurate representation of intimate relationships. So even if we are newly married, we need to find time to talk sensitively to each other about sex in general and our sex life in particular. Sex isn’t about recreating the same excitements which existed at the beginning of your relationship, but about maintaining a sexual journey, which fulfils and nourishes you and your partner.

beresford Criticism corrodes relationships, so we need to keep cross words to a minimum. It’s helpful to bear in mind how we would feel if someone criticised us all the time. Even if we grew up being criticised in childhood and therefore believe we can’t help ourselves, we do possess the capacity to change. By catching ourselves about to criticise, we can make a choice about whether to carry on doing so. Instead of always looking for the negative, we can try competing with our partner to be the one to say positive, encouraging things, and do loving or helpful things.

Above all, whether we are currently in a relationship or looking for that someone special, remember that the more we put in, the more we put ourselves on the line in a relationship, the more rewarding our intimate relationships can be.

Filed under: Bookshop news and events, Guest Blogs, Literary Events

January 10, 2013 • 3:09 pm 0

It’s a Dog’s Life : Capturing Animal Behaviour Through a Lens by Andy Hughes

In his first guest blog for Broad Conversation Andy Hughes, the author of ‘I, Jack Russell’, writes about the human-animal bond from a photographer’s perspective. All images are taken from Andy Hughes’ book, ‘I, Jack Russell’.

Andy will be joining us in conversation with renowned author of ‘In Defence of Dogs’ Dr. John Bradshaw, next week, on Wednesday 16th January at 7pm. Tickets cost £3 and are available from our Customer Service Department, or over the phone on 01865 333623.

Photographers, artists, writers and other ‘creatives’ are diverse in motivation, interests, experiences and insights. Much of my photographic practice deals with issues concerning the marine and coastal environment, however recently, I realized or perhaps discovered by accident that I had many more images of my two dogs than I did of my family and friends and this lead to a new field of research. I began this project about Jack Russell dogs by looking to find as many family snapshots, which included our dogs. I found a few and these are included in my recent book I Jack Russell which attempts to encourage readers to think about their own snapshots of dogs and about the dog human bond.

Many people come across images (photographic ones) in their daily life. Ubiquitous to some and unique to others there are millions of photographic images in the word today. In Roland Barth’s seminal book Camera Lucida he coined the term punctum, this denotes a type of ‘wounding’, a sort of personal touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it. The re-discovery of my own family snapshots containing images my own pet dogs as a young child brought Barth’s concept sharply in focus and led me to enquire further leading me to a number of books which became key in my search to understand the relationship between people and dogs.

For instance, after reading John Bradshaw, Alexandra Horowitz and Mark Derr it became clear to me that my thinking about my own dogs and dogs in general was far from complete or fully developed.

As well as published material, social networks such as DogBook that have photographic images of dogs seem as important to us as do images of other humans on Facebook. Collections of these images can often be found in our own albums or more readily in this day and age on our mobile phones or via our personal webpages. One very interesting historical survey can be seen in the book Dogs by Catherine Johnson where one can look at hundreds of images of dogs; it is a book filled with amateur, anonymous snapshots of dogs from the turn of the century to the early 1950s.

In I Jack Russell my motivations were driven by something more than simply capturing a sense of likeness. Something more akin to Barth’s concept. In a wonderful precise and short essay titled ‘Dogs’ Robert Adams [1] beautifully describes various relationships between artists and their dogs. Two sentences in particular resonate.

‘Art depends on there being affection in its creator’s life, and an artist must find ways, like everyone else, to nourish it. A photographer down on his or her knees picturing a dog has found pleasure enough to make many things possible.’

‘Artists live by curiosity and enthusiasm, qualities readily evident as inspiration in dogs. Propose to a dog a walk and its response is absolutely yes.’

The bond between creative enterprise, artistic interpretation and the sciences are re-bonding and revealing new insights. Research into the relationship between the dog and human is set to continue – we should all keep our nose to the blogosphere and bookshelf to help fully understand the dog and human world.

[1] Robert Adams: Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews, Aperture (1994)

Andy Hughes January 7. 2013-01-07

www.andyhughes.net

http://cabiblog.typepad.com/hand_picked/

Filed under: Guest Blogs, Literary Events

December 7, 2012 • 4:57 pm 2

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: a 21st Century Bestiary

Guest blogger, Caspar Henderson, writes for Broad Conversation on his new book, ‘The Book of Barely Imagined Beings’. We will be holding an event with Caspar on Wednesday 12th December at 5pm. See below for more details.

In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Luis Borges maps a good part of the terrain of myth and story that humans have ever dreamed up. Amongst his inspirations was the medieval European bestiary, or ‘book of beasts’, a genre that reached its full flowering in beautifully illuminated manuscripts, in the decades before the Black Death.

Bestiaries are full of allegory and symbol because, for the medieval mind, every natural creature was believed to embody a religious or moral lesson. Hume and Darwin discredited this way of looking at nature. Our new reality, however, is that as we humans increasingly shape the world through science, technology and our sheer numbers, such other living things as do thrive and evolve are increasingly becoming corollaries of what we love, value or neglect. In this sense, the world is becoming allegorical again.

Our times are more like the Middle Ages than we like to think. We still routinely mix rational thinking, mythology and spirituality, which can be good for us, with delusion and lies, which never are. We may have a vastly greater store of knowledge, and have made enormous strides in human health and political liberty, but it is far from clear that we are capable of using this knowledge wisely, as continuing blockages to rational action on climate change show.

Self-styled techno-optimists such as Stewart Brand, author of Whole Earth Discipline, suggest that we are as gods so we might as well get good at it. Agreed, industrial civilisation has given us awesome powers, but a better characterisation of how we handle those powers is made by Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz in The Techno-Human Condition: We are as gods? No, for we have created the power but not the mind. We have got used to, even blasé about, the possibility of nuclear winter, in the way a two year old gets used to a loaded .357 magnum lying on the floor within easy reach.

A good starting point for a life well-lived is continual effort to enlarge the boundaries of one’s imagination and knowledge to all the dimensions and details of the real world. Henry Thoreau may have written that in wildness is the salvation of the world, but this environmental visionary and political radical was not a wooly thinker. It was Thoreau not the supposedly practical folk around him who refused to believe that Walden pond was bottomless and actually took the trouble to measure its depth with a plumb line. As Richard Feynman later said, our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

We know that the oceans, for example, contain creatures stranger than anything you will find in a medieval bestiary: beings as tall as men that have no internal organs and thrive in waters that would scald us to death in moments; others which are highly intelligent but able nevertheless to squeeze their bodies through spaces the width of their own eyeballs. We know that there is a vast world of cold darkness on this planet in which almost every creature glows with its own light. Some of the creatures you might find also appear in The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, a work inspired both by medieval bestiaries and the newest discoveries in science. I hope you can join us for the talk at Blackwell’s.

Caspar Henderson’s The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is published by Granta. @casparhenderson and barelyimaginedbeings.com

Join us as Caspar will be discussing his book and signing copies on Wednesday 12th December at 5pm. This is a free event, all are welcome. We advise that you arrive early to avoid disappointment.

Filed under: Bookshop news and events, Guest Blogs

November 20, 2012 • 11:43 am 0

30 Great Myths About Shakespeare

Guest bloggers, Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith, write for Broad Conversation on their new book, ’30 Great Myths About Shakespeare’. We will be holding the launch of their new book on Tuesday 27th November. See below for more details.

We are thrilled to be launching our book Thirty Great Myths About Shakespeare at Blackwell’s on 27 November. We wrote the book to explore what we think we know about Shakespeare and why these beliefs are important to us. For us a myth is a widely-held perception or assumption, which is not necessarily untrue but which exaggerates, speculates, constructs or simplifies some aspect of Shakespeare’s life, theatre, and works. In our book we try to evaluate evidence for and against these myths to show not just how historical material – and the lack of it – can be interpreted and misinterpreted, but what this reveals about our own personal investment in the stories we tell about our national poet. Myths about Shakespeare, we discover, recapitulate deeply held ideas about genius and popularity, but also about emotions including love and grief.

Our short chapters scrutinise issues such as ‘Shakespeare was a Catholic’ or ‘Shakespeare detested his wife’ or ‘Queen Elizabeth loved Shakespeare’s plays’. Where possible we try to redirect speculation away from biography and back towards the works – the real reason Shakespeare is important to us today. At Blackwell’s we’ll be talking about some of the myths and discussing them with you. Who knows… maybe we we will get the material for the next thirty.

Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith on ’30 Great Myths About Shakespeare’. Tuesday 27th November at 7pm. Tickets cost £3 and can be obtained by telephoning or visiting the Customer Service Department, Blackwell Bookshop, Oxford. 01865 333623.

Filed under: Guest Blogs, Literary Events

October 19, 2012 • 5:58 pm 1

Biography of Nancy Astor– the birth of an idea

Adrian Fort is an acclaimed historian and biographer. His new book Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor tells the remarkable tale of this most fascinating women. Being the first woman elected to Parliament ensured her place in History but she was equally well known for her sharp-tongued quips ‘I married beneath me. All women do.’, her involvement in German appeasement, her friendships with the likes of George Bernard Shaw, her Christian Science beliefs and her stewardship of the magnificent Thames-side stately home Cliveden

Adrian kindly recounts what gave him the idea to write Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor

The idea of writing the story of Lady Astor came to me originally while I was researching for my book on Lord Wavell, the famous WW2 general and Viceroy of India. Studying the approach of WW2 I became intrigued by the attitudes of the many in the upper and influential classes who believed that Britain should make friends with Germany. This view was prominent among Conservative MPS – no touchy-feely soft centres in those days – and echoed in the City. Anything, they felt, was better than another war, which would threaten our wealth and estates, and England as we know it.

I began to read of strange references to ‘The Cliveden Set’, which led me to accounts of the influence of the country’s leading political hostesses, the most prominent being Lady Astor. At countless luxurious parties at Cliveden, her magnificent mansion above the Thames, she entertained leading members of the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments, and the movers and shakers at the German embassy, people like von Ribbentrop, Reinhard Spitzy and Prince Bismarck who, though Nazis, had the beguiling and civilised veneer that went down well with the upper classes – or at least with those who were supposedly pro-German. The fact that much of the talk about the Astors and Cliveden was exaggeration and lies did not stop the mud, especially that slung by ‘The Week’, a Communist rag run by a Communist ragamuffin, the very able Claud Cockburn.

My interest in Nancy Astor grew rapidly once I had looked into her history, heard her on radio, seen her on TV. Her lifetime spanned a period of phenomenal change: she was Virginian, born in the lingering ruins left by the American Civil War, yet when she died, in an unrecognisably different world, the Rolling Stones were playing at gigs in West London, and the Beatles’ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ was No. 4 in the Hit Parade.

Between those two poles lay the grace and opulence of Britain’s Edwardian Age, the carnage of WW1, the great depression, the years of appeasement, ‘The Cliveden Set’, and the final eclipse of the old world in the ashes of WW2.

In all these passing scenes Nancy played a fascinating and prominent role; partly because she was so rich, and partly because through her dynamic talents and character she became the first woman MP, and then the champion of numerous controversial if moral crusades. Yet the unpopularity for a time heaped upon her was redeemed by her legendary wit and humour, and also particularly by her inspiring courage as Mayoress of Plymouth, her Parliamentary seat, during the devastating German Blitz of 1941, which consumed the old city in a Biblical storm of fire and brimstone.

The more I read of this controversial dynamo, surrounded by glamour and wealth, laughter and luxury, yet nobody’s fool and a pure steel champion of women’s causes, the more I realised what a mark she had made on Britain’s history in perhaps its most enthralling and dramatic period.

Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor has been Radio 4 Book of the Week which can be listened to here

Filed under: Book Reviews, Guest Blogs, Adrian Fort, Cliveden, Lady Astor

August 17, 2012 • 10:06 am 1

And Other Stories

On Tuesday 28th August at 7pm Christoph Simon appears at the shop in conversation with Barbara Trapido talking about his new novel, Zbinden’s Progress.

Winner of the Bern Literature Prize 2010, Zbinden’s Progress is the newly translated fifth novel from Christoph Simon. Described by Barbara Trapido as “a little Odyssey, a little Ulysses”, Zbinden’s Progress is both heart-rending and hilarious.

The publisher , And Other Stories, has already earned a glowing reputation for publishing interesting, exciting novels and producing them beautifully. We love them.

I asked them if they would write a piece about their journey so far for the blog – Matthew Crockatt, erstwhile bookseller at Daunts and Waterstones and co-founder of cracking indie Crockatt & Powell, is one of their very small team, here’s his take on an exhilarating, success-filled and no doubt exhausting year:

And Other Stories is a very young publisher. Its first books were only published in September 2011. As the most recent person to join And Other Stories, I’ve been pretty curious to know how it started. In case you’re interested, here’s the story so far.

It all started in 2009 when Stefan Tobler wrote an article titled Supply + Demand + Magic for the British translation journal In Other Words.

Would you agree that a lot of the best contemporary fiction gets passed over in favour of reasonably good books that present publishers with less of a risk?

A commercial publisher has to balance its books, whether it is one of the ‘big boys’ with shareholders or an independent. Sales figures are naturally the driving concern (survival concern), and the sales and marketing people have a larger say than ever in determining publishers’ book choices.

This was especially true for translated fiction, he argued. The extra costs involved made it even less likely that challenging books from other languages would be published in the UK. When the article appeared Stefan was contacted by a number of people in the translation community and realised he was not alone. Stefan began to explore ways of drawing on this core group of people and using their support to raise advance funds that could then be used to publish books. This led to his founding And Other Stories Publishing as a Community Interest Company and the development of the And Other Stories subscription model.

Although the idea of paying for something before you know what it is completely opposes the normal laws of consumer markets – put the products out there and let people choose what to buy – it attracted enough subscribers to make starting And Other Stories possible. What’s more, these subscribers were not passive but very active members of the reading community.

Discussions were held and people were invited to suggest books that deserved to be published. Many but not all of these were in other languages. Some, such as Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, were simply excellent books. Sophie Lewis, a translator of French literature for publishers including Pushkin Press, Saqi Books and Hesperus Press, andwho established the European office of independent publisher Dalkey Archive Press, was by now fully involved in an editorial role. By consulting a pool of like-minded people who all felt passionately about books and were prepared to back the process of getting them into the world by subscribing, offering helpful services or advice, or giving their time and expertise, the quality of And Other Stories’ titles became, and remains, extraordinarily high.

In fact, I first discovered the publisher through reading Swimming Home – a book that was such a real relief after reading some dire books – here’s my review on my blog. I then went on to read and review Carlos Gamerro’s crazy mash-up The Islands for the Huffington Post – and was just as amazed. (When the chance came to join the publisher, of course I jumped at it!)

The first book released was Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos. This book was brought to And Other Stories’ attention by Rosalind Harvey, who then went on to translate it. It was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, ensuring immediate publicity for the fledgling enterprise.

The First Book Award’s impact is ongoing. Our handsome trade paperback edition of Villalobos’ book has gone to three printings so far. As a result of all the publicity, it was picked up by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and by other publishers around the world. And it continues to attract attention: Down the Rabbit Hole was one of five books chosen for the 2011 Summer Reads promotion run by Writers’ Centre Norwich in Norfolk’s libraries. The 100 copies purchased for library use were all borrowed within a single week.

Recently Swimming Home has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, perhaps the most prestigious literary prize in the world. Seeing people’s reactions now, we have our fingers firmly crossed for the shortlist! And in the meantime of course we continue to hunt out new and surprising books and writers that are worth taking a risk on – for us as a publisher, and for you as readers.

Please visit our website for more details: www.andotherstories.org

Remember, without our subscribers none of this would have been possible…

We would love for you to come along on the 28th, enjoy a glass of wine and celebrate with us the heartening story of And Other Stories. Tickets cost just £2 and are available from our Customer Service Desk or by phoning 01865 333623

Filed under: Bookshop news and events, Guest Blogs, Literary Events, And Other Stories, Barbara Trapido, Christoph Simon, Zbindens Progress

July 27, 2012 • 10:02 am 3

Seeking fulfilment in the post-skill world or Why I still choose film over digital – a guest blog by Jasper Fforde

We recently hosted Jasper as part of his bookshop tour for his new novel ‘The Woman Who Died A Lot’ I asked if he fancied writing an exclusive piece for broadconversation – being one of the loveliest men in the world he agreed and here it is:

I built my first darkroom in the cupboard under the stairs when I was ten. I couldn’t afford a safelight so painted a domestic bulb with red paint, and used salt as a fixer. Forty years later I’ve moved on a small amount, but the magic – and I really mean that, for chemical photography is magic – is still very much with me. Sure, I possess digital cameras, and they are superior in almost every way to my old Nikon F. Convenient, fast, lightweight, and with a host of features that was unimaginable in 1971.

I should be embracing this glorious new technological age, but the reason I am not is far from straightforward since there is essentially one point that makes the ongoing Film versus Digital argument utterly fallacious – the method of capture is immaterial. It’s the photographer, not the camera. Some of the finest pictures on the planet were taken with the ropiest film cameras, while some of the worst pictures ever captured were on a top-of-the-line Nikon D800. Yes, sure, you can argue until blue in the face about the feel of film and the look of film, but it’s all really about The Capture – the frozen slice of time that exports the unique worldview of the photographer to that of the viewer. And that does not, cannot, hold sway on the type of camera. It’s the finger, the framing, the timing.

So why am I not digital, since there is no earthly reason for me to still embrace the old technology? This is why: Digital leaves me utterly cold. I take no real enjoyment using it, and any decent picture I take on digital seems, to my mind, not to count. The attraction of film photography to me is not only that old feel and look nonsense plus a smattering of habit and nostalgia, but this: it’s tricky, fiddly, annoying, unforgiving, prone to error, and you have no idea of the results for perhaps a month. It’s right first time or no cigar. Dodgy focus? Tough. Wrong exposure? Camera shake? Wrong Film? Forget to take off the lens cap? Bad luck.

To take a good picture on film requires just that tiny bit more … skill. An acquired expertise. You have to know what you’re doing, and that Placement, Timing and Access – the three amigos of the truly great picture – are not quite enough. And that, for me, is what separates the two with the most yawning of chasms. That something gained with a modicum of skill is worth having so much more, and with that worth, comes a sense of pride, and fulfilment. I don’t think I am alone in this. A film camera repairer I know tells me he’s never been busier, and film stock sales, despite yearly tales of doom, are actually increasing. It can’t be film’s lack of immediacy and certain ropey and granular feel, since that can all be added in Photoshop. No, I think people are wanting something more in what is increasingly becoming a post-skill world, and in this final comment I throw open the argument beyond photography and into any creative pursuit that can now be done by an app, a smartphone or by selecting menu-option-six on a laptop. I think people are finding that the array of skills now available to them without training is while no doubt convenient, less fulfilling. People are increasingly wanting challenges, and through experience and practice, do a difficult thing and make it look easy.

You remember, like we used to.

Jasper Fforde July 2012

Jasper’s twelfth novel ‘The Woman Who Died A Lot’ is now avalable in the shop. If you are looking for a perfect summer read that is funny, well-plotted and written with verve and panache we highly recommend the Thursday Next series that starts with ‘The Eyre Affair’

Filed under: Guest Blogs, Film, Jasper Fforde, Photography, The Woman Who Died A Lot, Thursday Next

July 6, 2012 • 2:55 pm 0

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN by Frank McLynn

Thursday 5th July is publication day for a new book by historian Frank McLynn. Author of over twenty books he has written about such varied historical figures as Richard the Lionheart and Captain Cook, and such varied historical events as the Burmese Campaign and 1066. His new book focusses on the seven moments when Britain has come closest to revolution and why, each time, it has chosen the non-revolutionary path. Very kindly Frank has written a piece exclusively for Broad Conversation:

Happy is the country that has no history,runs the old adage. While it would be absurd to claim that Britain has no history – arguably its past is even more intriguing than that of its world competitors – it is true that Britain has never experienced a true revolution,in the sense of a profound,seismic root-and-branch transformation of its social and economic system. Such world-shattering changes have been attempted in many societies – notably France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Mexico and in a few cases (Russia, China and Cuba) successfully carried out. Nothing like this ever happened in Britain,and I wanted to find out why not.I have always been interested in revolution.The subject features largely in my account of the rise of Napoleon in my 1997 biography of the emperor and is the core of VILLA AND ZAPATA (2000),dealing with the Mexican Revolution,which I actually subtitled A BIOGRAPHY OF A REVOLUTION.

Revolutions usually end in tears,invariably in the form of a ‘strong man’ or man on horseback who subverts the hopes and aims of the original revolutionaries.We see this in the case of Russia (Stalin), China (Mao), Cuba (Castro) and even Mexico (the 70-year long one-party rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional). People often ask me what is the essential difference between the French Revolution and the so-called English Revolution of 1642-50, given that both were unsuccessful in the long run. My answer is that left-wing solutions were actually attempted in France, that profound changes in property holding killed off the Ancien Regime for all time, and that Napoleon appeared on the scene only quite near the end of a titanic ten-year struggle. In England the strong man, Cromwell, was there from the very beginning. He was essentially a conservative who wanted the old regime minus the king and all non-Presbyterian religions. When the Levellers and Diggers tried to turn the civil war in a leftward direction after 1645, Cromwell promptly stamped on this. Nonetheless,the years 1645-50 represent the nearest Britain ever came to revolution.

In my book I analyse seven ‘revolutionary moments’ when the chance of revolution was,albeit fleetingly,genuinely present. The seven occasions are: the Peasants Revolt of 1381, the Jack Cade rebelion of 1450, the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, the ‘English Revolution’ of 1642-50, the Jacobite Rising of 1745, the Chartist agitation of 1838-1850 and the General Strike of 1926. While I leave it open as a possibility that the avoidance of revolution on these occasions might have been pure chance or contingency, I suggest that a number of factors might provide a general explanation. In the first three cases,the revolutionaries could not think outside the box and were hamstrung by the myth of ‘good king, bad courtiers’ when it was the monarchs themselves that were the problem. From the seventeenth century, at least a dozen major factors seem to have been salient: Britain’s island position which saved it from invasion; the unimportance of the Army in British politics (except for 1645-50); the elimination of the peasantry as a major social problem (in contrast to the French, Russian, Chinese and Mexican revolutions where the peasantry was the central issue); the export of revolutionary energies via the British Empire; the role of heterodox Protestant religion,especially Methodism; and the failure of Masrxism to make an impact in the crucial period 1848-1918.

Filed under: Guest Blogs, Bodley Head, Frank McLynn, Revolution, The Road Not Taken

July 1, 2012 • 4:34 pm 1

Jen Campbell tells us why Alice means so much to her

This coming weekend Oxford dons top hats, blue dresses and all sorts of other weird and wonderful garb to celebrate all things Alice. Visitors flock from all over and the city becomes a wonderful hub of eccentricity, fun and activity. It is clear that Alice holds a very special place in the affections of people from all over the world, but why? Who better to answer this question than our very own Alice – author, poet, blogger and all around ball of loveliness Jen Campbell. Ahead of the day itself hear what it is about Alice that created such an impression on Jen:

I came to Alice (and Peter Pan, come to think of it), rather late in life – well, in my teenage years. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I should sue my parents. I did see the Disney version of both but, as we know, what Disney portrays is not really what the books are all about. The 1950s Disney Alice is good, but if you want to see something as weird, wacky and (quite frankly) screwed up as the book, then you should check out Jan Svankmajer’s ‘Alice’ Here’s the Jabberwocky If that doesn’t mess with your head then I don’t know what will.

I wrote my English Literature dissertation on growing up as a sin in children’s literature [so: Peter Pan, Narnia, His Dark Materials, all that jazz]. It’s a fascinating subject. Is it the children who don’t want to grow up, or the adults who wish they hadn’t?

‘”Be a man, Michael,” Mr. Darling said.

“Won’t, won’t!” Michael cried naughtily.

Both Alice and Peter Pan have an underlying darkness. In the play of Peter Pan, stage instructions insist that Mr. Darling is played by the same person as Captain Hook, and that Peter is played by a girl. So, Peter is Wendy’s youth, fighting her father because he wants her to grow up and move into a single bedroom. A bit twisted, no?

Lewis Carroll wrote Alice for Alice Liddell, a young girl he was fascinated with. He didn’t want her to grow up and, consequently, Alice never really knows who she is, where she is, or how grown up she should be.

‘I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I must have changed several times since then!’

”Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing–
turn your toes out when you walk— And remember who you are!”

In the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll himself is in the book as The White Knight, an old and frail man who Alice thinks is ridiculous. Alice Liddell herself had grown up and married. She’d hopped over the final gate and turned from a pawn into a queen. He wasn’t happy about it.

On lighter notes, Alice is a fascinating play on language, especially The Jabberwocky and the character of Humpty Dumpy. It’s like an Oscar Wilde feast.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,’ said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

“I see nobody on the road.” said Alice.
“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at such a distance too!”

Wonderland and the land beyond the Looking Glass are places to get lost in. To bury yourself in. To be pleasantly confused and surprised and completely swept away by. We’ve all got little [or large] parts of Alice inside us. Who the hell are we, and where exactly are we going? But, along the way, if there’s cake (hand it out first and cut it up afterwards!) and tea (happy unbirthday!), then uncertainty is quite ok with me.

Jen Campbell
http://jen-campbell.blogspot.com
http://www.twitter.com/aeroplanegirl

Jen will be with us on Saturday taking part in our continuous reading of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, along with a host of other authors, customers and booksellers. That is just one of the events that we have lined up on Saturday – do pop in and say Hi, you just never know who, or what, you might see…

Filed under: Alice's Day, Guest Blogs, @aeroplanegirl, Alice's Day 2012, Jen Campbell

June 22, 2012 • 9:51 am 0

To tweet or not to tweet – is that the question?

You know how much we love Creation Theatre, so when Charlie asked if she could do a guest blog it was our pleasure to say yes, yes, yes. Have a read and then join her conversation…

Amongst the many debates that are fluttering around the theatre world at the moment the issue of ‘tweet seats’ is in all honesty quite a long way behind funding… but nonetheless there are murmurs of debate in auditoriums and marketing departments around the country: Should we encourage audience members to share their responses to shows there and then, or is it just plain rude to give more attention to your smartphone than the professionals slogging their guts out on the stage in front of you?

Guardian readers clearly aren’t too keen on the idea, but I find that quite hard to square with the dedicated tweeter in me, and the fact that the only thing anyone wants to know at the end of the show is ‘what did the audience think?’. Engaging with the show and your fellow audience members in real time means you’ll capture the moment of shock when the apothecary’s plan falls apart (which it always does), and those sparks of ideas ignited by great theatre will be yours to keep.

The Factory (@_factory), who hopefully lots of you saw in their amazing shows Hamlet and The Odyssey in The Norrington Room earlier in the year, are pretty hot on their social media. One of the cast gets back on the stage at the end of the show to entreat the audience to send them feedback through Facebook and twitter, and each show has a public show report wiki that anyone is welcome to join in on.

Which is great when it comes from the cast, but how do we as a theatre company get somewhere towards having a ‘policy’ on this sort of thing? This summer in our Merchant of Venice we’re trialling putting on a special show called Ideas Aloud, where, much like our friends at The Factory we’ll be positively encouraging the audience to tweet during the show – and not just tweet, paint, sketch, take photos, write a poem, do a cross-stitch, you get the idea.

Much like our family shows we want you to be able to see our show in the way that suits you. At these special shows if you need to explain the intricacies of the plot to a four year old, or take a flash photo of the hero, be our guest. Come to an Ideas Aloud show and no-one is going to stop you taking a photo or tut at you for the sound of lead scratching on paper. We know that this isn’t the environment in which everyone wants to take in their Shakespeare but if you fancy live tweeting your first Shakespeare or sharing some of our vintage 1930s costume on Instagram than this might just be the show for you.

This is the first time we’ve offered a specific show like this and I’d love to know what you think: would you rather tweeting and photography were allowed at every show? How would you feel if the person sitting next to you was on their phone all the way through? Do you find it frustrating not being able to share your thoughts on the show with the company and your friends as they happen? Please pitch in by commenting below.

The Merchant of Venice runs from 7July to 1 September at The Said Business School, the Ideas Aloud show will take place on Sunday 29July.

@charliemorley
@CreationTheatre

Filed under: Creation Theatre, Guest Blogs, Oxford, Factory, Theatre, Tweet Seats, Twitter

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