Archive for the 'literature' Category

Best free iPhone apps

Published
by
blogmywiki
on March 10, 2010
in Apple, TV, internet and literature
. 1 Comment

   Captain Haddock

The shame of it… I had my brain surgically removed by a very nice man in the shop and he gave me a shiny new iPhone 3GS in exchange. In case you’ve not heard of the iPhone, it’s a bit like an iPad only it is not only conveniently pocket-sized, but all models come with 3G internet access and it includes a camera and something called a telephone. This is a point-to-point mobile voice telecommunication technology that, due to high take-up, could give Skype a run for its money.

Anyway, get an iPhone, you got to get apps. Five days in, here are my favourite free ones:

Gorillacam - camera that includes a spirit level, zoom, self-timer, time-lapse, anti-shake mode etc.

BBC iPlayer - I got confused by this as it’s not an app, it’s not in the Apple App Store - it’s a web page. But the iPlayer works on the iPhone!

Calendar - okay, this is built-in, but it syncs beautifully with iCal on my Hackintosh and my Google calendar.

iCarRadio lite - it’s an internet radio app. Not sure why you’d pay for a radio app when this seems to work just fine.

Stanza - free eBook reader. Lovely.

FileApp - allows you to get stuff on your iPhone like Word documents and browse them. Needs a computer on the same wireless LAN as the iPhone and an FTP client on the computer. It does not allow you to transfer files by USB (to be fair I think Apple do not allow this). But it’s free and it works.

TVCatchup - like the iPlayer, this is a web site not an app: http://iphone.tvcatchup.com. It allows you to watch live Freeview-type TV. Brilliant! Already used this to catch the top of Newsnight while snoozing.

I also bought my first two commercial apps this morning - the rather stupidly-named iSaidWhat?! (it’s marketed as a toy but is infact a sound recorder and editor) and The Grauniad. The Grauniad app is nice but I was listening to their tech podcast happily on my way to work, about two thirds of the way through, needed to snap a photo and then went back to The Guardian and I seemed to have to start downloading it again - so I’d have been better off downloading the podcast in iTunes and using it as an iPod…

Don’t forget to be awesome!

Published
by
blogmywiki
on March 3, 2010
in fiction and literature
. 2 Comments

Photo on 2010-03-03 at 20.05 Photo on 2010-03-03 at 20.06

I forgot to put my book in my bag today, and so bought a new copy of Before I Die by Jenny Downham in Waterstones on my way in to work.

Inside it there was a handmade, hand-written Valentines card - four felt red hearts and the inscription “to you, Happy Valentines Day, Don’t Forget To Be Awesome! Lots of love!”. Which was a bit odd. How did it get there? Does every copy of this book have this card in? Which teenage girl am I depriving of her card? And how much trouble could this have caused?

Hangover Square

Published
by
blogmywiki
on November 5, 2009
in fiction and literature
. 2 Comments

Just started reading Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton this morning. It’s a much darker, more modern book than Craven House. So far, it’s wonderful. I stopped reading it on the train when I got to what I thought was an unimprovably good sentence:

Then he remembered, without any difficulty, what it was he had to do: he had to kill Netta Longdon.

Then on the way home I found that the sentence that followed was even better:

He was going to kill her, and then he was going to Maidenhead, where he would be happy.

How many dragons did you kill today?

Published
by
blogmywiki
on November 3, 2009
in literature and nostalgia
. 0 Comments

by Giles Booth, (then) aged 19 and three quarters

How many dragons did you kill today?

‘How many dragons did you kill today?’
Asks Philip Larkin in his turtle-like way,
Scarcely believing he’s worse off than most
Imprisoned by toads and his library post.

But last night I dreamt of his over-grown snakes,
Of clubbing his dragons. I reckon that makes
Six before breakfast, though it might soon be more;
Number seven lies bleeding on his office floor.

I’m researching an essay, but time after time
I’m totally flummoxed by the opaque last line.
His curriculum vitae might yield a clue
As to which of these poems is explicitly true.

Wellington, Leicester, Belfast and Hull,
How could he be so incredibly dull?
I can’t understand what he’s trying to prove,
Getting nearer the scrap-heap with every move.

He’s been out of tune with the Modernist sages
Since, expecting a Pevsner, he scoured the pages
With thick specs and torchlight under the bedding
Of Ezra Pound’s guide book, the one about Reading.

Graphic novels without super-heroes

Published
by
blogmywiki
on September 18, 2009
in literature
. 0 Comments

Now don’t get me wrong - I think Watchmen is a work of utter genius. And it has more superheroes than you can shake a big, shiny stick at. But I’ve found myself immersed in some great graphic novels lately that don’t match most people’s idea of what a graphic novel should be.

First there was Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds. I loved her cartoon in the ’80s and ’90s in The Guardian about middle class family life, the academics and business people portrayed so insightfully and with a gentle but slightly savage edge were so much like the parents of some of my school friends back in Bristol. I tried but failed to follow Tamara Drewe in the paper, and one day I found it in a bookshop and treated myself… devoured it in a day or two, unable to tear myself away from it. Such a compelling story, such wonderful artwork.

Today I had to go shopping to buy a present for someone, found myself in Waterstones, looking at graphic novels. Trying to find to find a new graphic novel by Shirley Hughes. She breaks the stereotype a bit. She is female, she is famous for her picture books for young children and she is 82 years old. Bye Bye Birdie is a sinister, wordless, black and white story of a man being consumed… by a creature he takes to be a woman, a bird… but who is actually a bird.

I also saw Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds. Had to get it. Man on till asked me if I’d read it. Said no, just read Tamara Drewe, loved it so much. This is better, he said. And from the first page I’d say he’s right. Perfect first page. Perfect opening paragraph:

Gemma Bovery has been in the ground three weeks. People have begun to forget - or anyway I don’t hear talk in the shop any more. But I - I never stop thinking of her. The nights are the worst. If I sleep, I dream of her eyes which are the blue of stained glass.

Whirl up, sea

Published
by
blogmywiki
on September 2, 2009
in literature and nostalgia
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I was clearing out some of my old stuff from my mum’s house - my name’s Alex Drake and this box of old papers has taken me back to 1989 - and, amongst other things, I found this untitled poem I’d written out several times on both sides of an envelope addressed to my then-girlfriend’s mother. I had to look it up to find out who it was by. Good, though.

Oread by H.D.

Whirl up, sea -
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us -
Cover us with your pools of fir.

old NMEs

I also found stashes of NMEs, lots of newspapers from the 1980s, most of which I have no idea why I kept, so I’ve binned them. And a shoebox full (okay, half-full) of letters and cards from an ex-girlfriend. An entire relationship in a box. The one where she tried (unsuccessfully) to end our relationship was a good read. Even better the one where, later, she explains why she cheated on me. Reading between the lines now I think I deserved it and she was doing me a favour. At any rate it made me smile and it’s quite a thing to think that it’s taken twenty years to get from there - standing, alone on Stockport station waiting for a train back home, my life falling apart around me, to now - standing alone in a loft reading her letter about her night with Andrew - with a big, silly grin on my face.

The moon is a she unless it’s a he

Published
by
blogmywiki
on June 18, 2009
in cinema and literature
. 0 Comments

It has been suggested that I and a colleague may have now become the Pete and Dud of our office. Tragically I have to admit that Doug probably makes a better Peter Cook than me, although that means he has to go through a couple of bitter divorces and spend his twilight years pretending to be a Swedish fisherman, while I have to develop a club foot and bed a succession of nubile young women. It’s a work in progress.

Anyway, the other day he was on top form. Somehow we were talking about languages which give nouns gender and he said that the moon is not always female - the closer to the equator you get the more likely the moon is to be male. I was amazed by this. “You could write a book about it” he said, generously offering me his idea, “one you get for Christmas with a fake old-style leather cover. Could even be a film. KENNETH BRANAGH is COPERNICUS!”.

Genius, up there with Andy’s “Robert Plant and the Seedlings” line. You read it here first. Hollywood here we come.

If you like music and you like graphic design…

Published
by
blogmywiki
on June 15, 2009
in literature, music and nostalgia
. 0 Comments

…you’ll love these.

Ain’t no cure for the wintertime blues

Published
by
blogmywiki
on January 1, 2009
in literature
. 0 Comments

I don’t do poetry.

There’s a famous definition of poetry - Professor Bergonzi’s definition - that says that if the words go to the end of the line, it’s prose; if they don’t, it’s poetry. This must be hard-wired into my brain because even if a few lines of a poem are quoted in a novel, my eyes skip those lines and jump straight to the nearest available bit of prose.

Shocking admission for an English graduate, but there you go. And hence I was a bit surprised this morning when a few fragments of a poem drifted unbidden into my head. Not any old poem either - a really rather difficult one.

I remember studying it at university and I really wonder if I understood it then as well as I think I do now. It seems to capture perfectly the peculiar depths of midwinter gloom. It also sums up how I’ve been feeling for the last few weeks. Hey, maybe John Donne merely suffered from SAD and needed some UV therapy…

So here we go. If you have a problem with poetry too, you are not alone. But read the first stanza at least. “The world’s whole sap is sunk / The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk” is a fantastic bit of writing.

Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day
being the shortest day
by John Donne

‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death - things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death - which word wrongs her -
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.

The Owl Service

Published
by
blogmywiki
on December 26, 2008
in literature
. 2 Comments

A few weeks ago for some reason I kept thinking about The Owl Service by Alan Garner, a book I’d not read since I was at primary school. I used to have a boxed set containing that, Elidor, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and so on - long since lost.

I’m not generally a fan of fantasy and perhaps I liked this one of his books best because it’s grounded in reality - in some ways it’s just a cracking good ghost story. A girl called Alison on holiday in Wales hears scratching noises in the roof. When the housekeeper’s son investigates he finds a dinner service in the loft with a pattern that looks like flowers but Alison sees that they are really owls. She starts making paper models of the owls and very odd things begin to happen.

Browsing in a bookshop I spotted a single copy - the only Alan Garner book they had. So of course I had to get it. It was as good as I remembered but paradoxically it seemed to be rather devoid of the sexual jealousy between the three main characters that I’d remembered.

Then The Owl Service I discovered that it had been adapted for TV by Granada in 1969 - the first colour drama they ever made. There’s an excellent article on the making of the programme - scripted by Alan Garner himself - and all the owly coincidences that dogged (owled?) its making.

I’m pretty sure I never saw the TV series, but having watched the first two episodes on DVD I’m struck how it looks exactly like I pictured it in my head; and the sexual jealousy is all there again. Am going to ration myself the rest over the next few days like a box of chocolates.