Happy New Year!

New American Music

I spent what for me is a traditional Boxing Day evening listening to experimental music with my friend Robin Hobbes in his conservatory and musical studio in Bowden, Cheshire. Well, I say listening, but we only enjoyed snatches before our significant others complained that it should be turned off. First we sampled Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) the Communist sympathiser who after fighting in the Spanish Civil War spent most of his adult life writing for player-piano in a garage, holed up in Mexican exile to avoid the CIA. Wonderful up-tempo boogie-woogie almost made the household dogs howl. This is music which is too dense and complex for human beings to perform. Following the first complaints we switched to Morton Feldman (1926-1987) and enjoyed the opposite experience - music which is both quiet, slow, and lasts a long, long time. We didn't get very far into the five hour long String Quartet II before the hints came in thick and fast that we'd better jack it in , or there would be no dinner served. So I resolve to go back to these intriguing artists in the safety of my own office.

Patrick White - a neglected giant

Patrick White was born in Australia but sent to be educated in England. He settled to live in London during the 1930s and served in the RAF during the war. After the war he returned to live in Australia, eking out his small private income by farming. His novels offer great variety in their themes, subjects, and settings - but what they have in common is his use of powerfully rich language, his deeply psychological character portraits, the dramatic incidents of his stories, and a semi-mystical belief system which he invites us to contemplate without making his narratives depend upon it. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, and went on to ... Read more >>

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The Fundamentals of Typography

I like books explaining typography, because they are forced to illustrate the points they are making, and the result is usually pages with plenty of visual interest. That's what makes books such as Eric Spiekermann's Stop Stealing Sheep and James Felici's Manual of Typography so popular. This book covers similar ground in a historically comprehensive fashion. Its first part is devoted to the development of language and the history of writing systems. This shows the gradual evolution of alphabets and the gestation of what we now call typefaces or font families. These expand after the invention of printing in the Renaissance then explode into a galaxy of styles following industrialisation. Gavin Abrose and Paul Harris trace this development in particular detail during the second part of the last century, following each step of recent digital ... Read more >>

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Neglected writers - Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier was a Cuban writer who straddled the connection between European literature and the native culture of Latin-America. He was for a long time the Cuban cultural ambassador in Paris. He was trying to place Latin-American culture into a historical context. This was done via a conscious depiction of the colonial past - as in The Kingdom of This World, and Explosion in a Cathedral (title in Spanish El Siglo de las Luces - or The Age of Enlightenment). His literary style is a wonderful combination of dazzling images and a rich language, full of the technical jargon of whatever subject he touches on - be it music, architecture, painting, history, or agriculture ... Read more >>

Alejo Carpentier - study resources

Un-read Writers

Glancing through a weekend literary supplement at ecstatic reviews for what were quite clearly mediocre books, my thoughts turned to one of my favourite dinner table discussion points - neglected, unread, over-rated, and forgotten writers. Plunge into the bowels of any second-hand bookshop and go to the shelves marked either 'literature' or 'novels'. The same books will be there waiting for you. Oliver Wendell Holmes' The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, George Bernard Shaw's Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, Anatole France's Penguin Island, and maybe just Arnold Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns. And that's the good stuff. Doesn't your soul groan inwardly at these tired and faded spines? Don't you feel like running out to the nearest Waterstone's? Well don't bother - because they are only full of the stock which will replace this array of the great un-read.

What you have hit is the literary stratum of titles which were once important, or fashionable, or even considered 'great'. But about which nobody gives a hoot now. You would be doing the bookseller a favour by offering him tuppence for the lot so that he could refresh his stock. Don't you believe me? Well, when did you last read George Meredith or Anatole France?

The Nobel Prize for literature has been won by the unforgettable Henryk Sienkiewicz, Selma Lagerlof, Verner von Heidenstam, and Carl Spittler. And it was won as recently as 1974 by Harry Martinson. Have you ever read any of these writers? No - I thought not. And neither have I.

This is not to say that they might not have fine qualities as human beings - but for literature to endure we need something more than that. And yet the list of people who did not on the other hand win the Nobel Prize, even though they were eligible, is not endless - but it's pretty long. Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka. So even the august bodies which pontificate on literary merit get this judgement wrong - and continue to do so.

What does all this prove? Well, that taste changes; that figures thought important in one period are considered insignificant in the next. [Incidentally, this applies in the fields of art and music, as well as writing.]

The pantheon of the very great changes less rapidly than that for the also-rans. Nobody but a fool would suggest that Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, Dickens, and Virginia Woolf were suddenly due to vanish from the canon. Yet all their reputations have been under attack at one time or another. Now, if my friend across the table would circulate the Port, I think we could move on to consider some unjustly neglected names.

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A 2 Z and More Signs

This is a compilation of the best-selling albumns of quirky typography, 130 Alphabets and Other Signs and A B Z: More Alphabets and Other Signs, with new materials added. Basically, it's a sample book of fonts, characters, trademarks, logos, and what we would now call dingbats. But what gives the book its remarkable attractiveness is that the collection is both eclectic and suffused with a period charm of the inter-war years. Many of the designs and fonts are drawn from that period - with more than a hint of colonial nostalgia in labels from products destined for Africa, China, and India. Even the pages are printed in a pre-faded manner and cut with rounded corners to enhance this effect ... Read more >>

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