LADIES IN LAVENDER

A couple of nights ago the lovely little film Ladies in Lavender appeared on TV, so we recorded it and watched it, for perhaps the third time.  Directed by Charles Dance, and starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, featuring lots of beautiful Cornish seaside, and rich with folksy nostalgia, it is a gem.

Somehow, though, the plot seemed thin.  The beautiful country scenes, lovely shots of seagulls flying, and -- of course -- the wonderful acting, seemed very necessary to bulk out a very simple plot.  It was not a surprise to note in the credits that it was based on a short story.  So I did a little research, to find that "Ladies in Lavender" is the second story in a 1916 collection called Far-Away Stories by William J. Locke (1863-1930), a writer who featured in the NYT bestseller list a long time ago, but is now forgotten. 

Charles Dance, it seems, found the story by accident.  He was working on a film in Budapest at the time.  This book was one of a pile used as set dressing, and he picked it up and leafed through it, to fill in an idle moment.  And he very shrewdly deduced that with the right actresses and the right treatment, "Ladies in Lavender" could turn into a hit.

So what is the short story like?  Luckily for my curiosity, Far-Away Stories has been digitized.  My first reaction is that Dance paid great respect to the story and the author, capturing its special ambience, even using quite a lot of the dialogue.  It is one of the reasons the film works so well.

The ending is not true to Locke's intention, which was to draw a grittily sad conclusion (in the story, after Andrea flits off to London, the sisters never hear from him again), but he judged his audience well, because in the film the gently sentimental leavetaking, accompanied by Joshua Bell's superb violin playing, is a wonderfully warm-and-woolly conclusion.

There are a couple of other departures from Locke's story.  The "old maids" in the story are in their forties, so are not old ladies.  They both (not just Ursula) fall in love with the beautiful young man, and vie jealously for his attention, so suffer equally at the end.

And "beautiful" he is indeed, which I found amusing.  Witness the paragraph where Ursula finds out that the young man speaks in some incomprehensible foreign tongue.  She tries him out in her bad German -- at which "his face lit up with a smile so radiant that Miss Ursula wondered how Providence could have neglected to inspire a being so beautiful with a knowledge of the English language."

But as a hint of the rather brutal ending to come, it worked.  The style seems pretentious now, but William J. Locke knew exactly what he was doing. 

Summer nights on National Radio

It occurs to me that I really should announce that I will be on radio tonight, a guest of radio presenter Liam Ryan.  The program is called "Summer Nights" and is billed as the alternative to listening to cicadas.

I believe it will be streamed (or whatever the right techo word might be) for some time, so overseas listeners can catch up.  I might even listen myself!

What will we talk about?  Right now, I do not have a notion, but imagine it will have a lot to do with ships and the sea, and maybe even female pirates and other seafaring women.  And then there are Tupaia and Wiki Coffin ...

Will 25 minutes be long enough?  We shall see.

The Tanenbaum/Gruber ghostwriting saga

I came across this six-year-old story by accident, when I bought a book at the Wellington Public Library book sale.  It was a book called FURY, by a writer I thought I might have vaguely heard of, Robert K. Tanenbaum.  The blurb assured me that Tanenbaum is a NYT bestselling writer, and the price was just fifty cents, so I was sold and the well-thumbed book was bought.

I took it home, and tried to read it.  I couldn't believe how awful it was; the writing was inept, the characters cardboard stereotypes, the main plot thin, and the many sub-plots bewildering.  There was also a constant nasty thread of racism.  It was like trying to read several comic books at once, all of them compiled by someone who watched Fox News too much.  I lost patience a third of the way through, looked at the predictable ending, and tossed the book into the trash.  How, I wondered, did this bloke make bestselling status, churning out this kind of rubbish?

So I looked up the book on amazon.com to see what other readers thought, and found out, to my amazement, that the bestselling books weren't written by Robert Tanenbaum at all!  I had just been dead unlucky, picking out one of the few that had been penned by the fellow himself.  If I had read one of the previous many that had been ghostwritten, I would have had a much more enjoyable experience.

Sarah Weinman, blogger of the Idiosyncratic Mind (see recommended blogs in the RH column) provided more of the story, and her links led me into a world of wonderful commentary, written by bloggers such as Jules Older.   To put it in a nutshell, Tanenbaum, an astoundingly successful lawyer, was asked by a publisher to write a legal thriller, a la John Grisham, and he accepted the job and set to -- to find that it was harder than he imagined.  He showed his efforts at opening chapters to his close cousin, Michael Gruber, who informed him (kindly, of course) that it needed a lot of work -- to be entirely rewritten, in fact.  Then he offered to do it for him, in return for half the advance.  It was a system that worked well, reaping megabucks from megasales (shared strictly fifty/fifty) for more than a dozen books.  And then the cousins fell out.  The partnership was broken, and books started coming out under Gruber's own name, while Tanenbaum either took to writing himself, or found another ghostwriter, with unfortunate results.

Then the secret of the collaboration was exposed -- by Gruber, who claims that it was due to the astute detective work of a reporter with (for heavens' sake!) Romantic Times, but could well have been a publicity stunt by Gruber himself, to help the sales of his books.  It makes an interesting discussion point -- should Gruber have gone public?  After all, it is the job of a ghostwriter to be just that, a ghost, something for which he is paid -- and splitting advances and (presumably) royalty payments down the middle was a very fair arrangement, particularly when the books sold as well as these apparently did.

To my intense amusement, Tanenbaum's latest effort -- which, judging by the editorial comments on amazon.com, is as bad as Fury -- is called Betrayed.

Welsh Poet Gillian Clarke awarded Queen's Gold Medal

The BBC reports that Gillian Clarke, national poet of Wales, is now the second Welsh winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

It is quite an honor-list to join, one that contains names like WH Auden, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, and RS Thomas (also Welsh).
Gillian Clarke admits that she feels "humbled" and "stunned" to be included.

The award recognizes her whole body of work, the latest of which is a collection called A Recipe for Water, published last year.

Cardiff-born Clarke was named Wales' third national poet in 2008.

That "Alix Bosco" theory

Greg McGee addresses the rumor that he is the enigmatic author Alix Bosco

Well, there's another theory blown out of the water.

In a very well-crafted column in the latest issue of Booknotes, (the newsletter of the New Zealand Book Council), well-known playwright Greg McGee reviews the crime fiction on his bedside table.

"I've been flattered by a rumour that I am Alix Bosco," he remarks, Bosco being the pseudonymous author of Cut and Run, and winner of the inaugural Ngaio Marsh Award.

McGee knows the book well, as he is one of the team that is working it up for TV, and, he says, "can vouch for it as a beautifully structured whodunit.  I thought," he adds thoughtfully, "I should read Bosco's follow up, to see if I should still be flattered."  And lo, he proceeds to review this second book, Slaughter Falls, in succinct, thoughtful prose.

Well, he decides at the end, he is still flattered, but not, alas, "as flattered as I'd be if I'd been mistaken for Justin Cartwright," author of To Heaven By Water.

Love that sense of humor!  And cause for thought, as well.  If you, dear reader, had a chance to be mistaken for some famous, infamous, or moderately known writer, which writer would you choose? 

ARCHITECTURAL BLUE

Catalogue of wonderful cyanotypes of India and Germany released

ROBERT A. SCHAEFER, JR. photographer

Zig-Zag wall of Roof Garden, New Delhi (2009)

I was honored to receive a copy of the catalogue of an exhibition of photographs that was held at the Goethe Institute in New Delhi late last month, following a show at the Government Museum and Art Gallery in Chandigarh.

The artist is our good friend Robert Schaefer, who lives in Manhattan, but travels frequently to Germany and India.  Quite apart from its visual brilliance, his photography has historic significance.

The cyanotype process was invented in England in 1842 by Sir John Herschel, as an improvement on its predecessor, the daguerrotype.  The medium, which may be cloth as well as paper, is coated with light sensitive chemicals.  The negative is placed on top of the paper, then a sheet of glass to weight it down, and then placed in a source of ultraviolet light, usually the sun.  The result is the beautiful shade of monochromatic blue that you see in the illustration above.

You've seen it many times before -- it was the process used for architectural blueprints.

For a copy of the catalogue, contact the Goethe Institute, New Delhi.

BOOKLIST REVIEW OF TUPAIA

Tupaia, Captain Cook's Polynesian Navigator

Author of maritime histories and the Wiki Coffin nautical mysteries, Druett resurrects a figure encountered on Tahiti by eighteenth-century British explorers Samuel Wallis, James Cook, and botanist Joseph Banks. Named Tupaia, he was recorded in the visitors' journals and in several self-portraits reproduced in this book, sources that Druett reinforces with Polynesian oral tradition to portray what manner of man he was. About 40 years old, he had fled to Tahiti after a war between his native island of Raiatea and attackers from Bora Bora. When Wallis dropped anchor in 1767, he gradually grasped Tupaia's significant status in incidents of parlay between the British and Tahitians, in which Tupaia emerged as intermediary, translator, and explicator of Polynesian society. At Cook's arrival in 1769, Tupaia's talents were remembered. Druett recounts the advantage the British took of them, even taking Tupaia on board for the continuation of Cook's voyage to New Zealand, Australia, and Java, where Tupaia died after falling ill. The only biography of Tupaia, Druett's astute portrait vitally contributes to annals of exploration and cultural contact."
-- Gilbert Taylor, Booklist.

THE NEW ZEALAND EDITION OF TUPAIA

Illustrating the down-under edition

British Library, 15508/12

There was some excitement last week when acquisitions editor at Random House New Zealand, Jenny Hellen, sent in the first draft for the jacket of the down-under edition of Tupaia, due to be launched in May.


The design is still under wraps, so I cannot reveal it. What I can say is that it is brilliant and wonderful and eye-catching and irresistible. I can also tell you that it features Tupaia's iconic artwork, Joseph Banks trading a piece of tapa cloth for a lobster, in a stand-off with a Maori fisherman.

This is how it is described in the text:

Tupaia, who had been entertained by the busy trade in lobsters, made a sketch of Banks trying to barter a piece of tapa for a particularly large crayfish, held firmly by its Maori owner. It is his most famous work, because of the emotions expressed in the humorous little scene. Both figures have their legs braced, and are glaring into each other's eyes; the Maori holds the lobster by a string, ready to snatch it back at the first opportunity, while Banks keeps his piece of tapa just out of reach. The outcome of the battle of wills is left to the imagination of the viewer.


Many years later, Banks noted that this sketch is a caricature, which was exactly as Tupaia intended. Then the scientist dismissed it by saying "all wild people" possessed a "genius for Caricature" -- for him, it was nothing remarkable. What he did not take into consideration was that the sketch is unique.


It is the only surviving portrait of Joseph Banks himself that was made on the voyage of the Endeavour.

MAN SENTENCED FOR SHOOTING BANANA

'Tis the season for odd headlines

Or else the so-called silly season has started really early.  The annual best and worst lists of books, television programmes, films, DVDs or what-have-you have been succeeded by frivolous quotes and headlines.  The latest was sent to me by a friend in Cambridge, England. 

To summarize, a Russian student has been sentenced to three and one-half years in an English prison for shooting a banana in what appears to have been a drunken spree in the student accommodation block of Bell Language School.  Dimitry Palikhata, 19, was subdued by security staff at about 1:30 am on July 21 after firing a revolver out of a window, and then aiming another sniper shot at a banana.

It may seem a rather excessive sentence, but what must be borne in mind is that Palikhata had smuggled the revolver into the country, plus at least 29 live rounds of ammunition.

Tut, tut, security staff at whatever airport he arrived.  They don't deserve the praise handed out to the brave and quick-thinking guards at the language school.

Kissing and Albert Einstein

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

"Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves."

-- Albert Einstein

Quoted by the Dominion Post (tongue in cheek) in a story about a young man who crashed his car while kissing his girlfriend.