Hannah Swithinbank

In which I talk fuzzily about Ryszard Kapuściński

The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński

I’m having a moment of interested consideration about the new biography of Ryszard Kapuściński which claims that much of his reporting was heavily fictionalised and about some of the outrage about this.  As outrage goes, it’s fairly mild and seems mostly confined to those working in journalism (for example in Jon Snow’s latest blog post)  – but then Kapuściński is hardly a household name in the UK, and I’d be prepared to bet that the majority of people here who have read his work have come to it as travel literature, where the line between ‘truth’ and ‘atmosphere’ is more easily, and perhaps more legitimately, blurred than in journalistic reportage.    I came to him through his collection of essays/reportage, The Shadow of the Sun, which I thought sounded interesting based on a review I read and which I then bought with some Christmas money and enjoyed immensely.  It’s been a while since I read it, but I’m still inclined to think that it’s one of the best collections of writing about Africa that I’ve read – not necessarily factually, but in terms of painting a picture and capturing an atmosphere.

So, assuming that this biography is right about the level of fiction in Kapuściński’s work, I want to ask how much it matters.   And I want to suggest that how much it matters depends on two things – what the audience is reading it for, and what Kapuściński sold it as.   With regard to the second point, if you were a reader of Kapuściński’s work in newspapers in which it was presented (by him, or by the paper) as news reporting then yes, you’re right to be concerned about the level of fiction involved.  The standard convention now is that journalism represents accurately what is going on, and you can be challenged on your sources and evidence.  I’m ok with that.  However, if you’re coming Kapuściński’s work as travel literature, then the level of importance of absolute fact in telling the story is, arguably, less important.  It’s important to emphasise that this does depend upon what you, as an individual member of the audience, want from your travel writing, but I want to suggest that you as a reader shouldn’t just assume that a travel writer is just ‘telling the truth’ in some abstract, definable sense.   A writer is always going to shape the narrative they’re presenting, it’s going to involve subjective choices, and yes, it may deviate from what some people will say is true of the place being written about (and yes, you should probably go and read some Hayden White now).     The ‘rules’ of journalism might be said, to steal from Captain Barbossa, “More like guidelines.”  They’re conventions – just like the rules of historical writing or travel writing – and your understanding of them does depend, frankly, on what you’re used to.   I would argue that Kapuściński’s work isn’t journalism like BBC’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ is journalism, or like Fergal Keane’s Season of Blood, about the Rwandan genocide, is journalism, and yes, I would argue that his work doesn’t belong in the ‘news’ section of the newspapers. I would argue that his books are travel writing and that yes, the reader should probably be aware that the writer has shaped his narrative to tell a story that might not be absolutely ‘true’ under the modern, western demands of factual reportage.    But I don’t feel like Kapuściński sold me down the river by not fulfilling these demands.    I like my travel writing to bring me a sense of time and of a place, and I accept that such work may not be 100% accurate, or even as accurate as it’s possible for it to be, and that if I want to start talking factually about the times/places/events I’ve read about in such work, I’m going to need to do some more research.

Here’s the thing.  People writing non-fiction narratives about things they have experienced have always shaped these narratives to work as stories. People always will.  Even historians do this. Within the rules of modern, ‘scientific’ history, with its demands for evidence and proofs, historians still have to interpret evidence and shape an argument, a narrative of cause and effect, and any historian who says their personal perspective on the world doesn’t influence the way they do this isn’t thinking self-reflexively enough.  I’m not going to start arguing that all historians insert a declaration at the front of their work stating their personal background and subjective positions, if only because I think their readers ought to be smart enough or get smart enough to think about these things for themselves.      I’m an ancient historian, and from the beginning of my education as such, I’ve been taught that you have to ask questions of your sources, and I’ve learnt that you stand a much better chance of getting somewhere close to an objective understanding of what went on by understanding what conventions story the writer was trying to tell – and this goes for ancient historians (whose conventions, btw, were nothing like those of modern historians).  If you want to ‘know’ what happened in, say, in Iran around the time of the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, which Kapuściński wrote about in Shah of Shahs, you’re going to need to compare it to other sources and be aware that it is one writer’s take on it.  I don’t think it invalidates Kapuściński’s book as a perspective on those events – it’s just not the only perspective.

And here’s a question – should we even be surprised that Kapuściński’s work contains a strong fictional/fabulist element?  This is, after all, a man who wrote a book called Travels with Herodotus and who apparently travelled with a copy of Herodotus’ Histories, which are hardly the most scientific or factually accurate even of ancient historical texts.  Herodotus is a writer who likes to say, ‘Oh I saw this,’ or ‘Oh, this guy told me this,’ and who, alongside his account of the Persian Wars, includes stories of flying snakes and giant ants.  If you put all the Classicist and Ancient Historians in one building and divided them up by subject area, ‘understanding what’s going on in Herodotus’ Histories’ would take up an entire wing.   Why would we be surprised that someone who appears to have enjoyed and felt some connection to Herodotus’ work didn’t hew to strict journalistic conventions in his work?  Surely it’s more interesting to think about what Kapuściński was doing with his work and what its success or otherwise says about our interaction with the world outside our own borders than it is to hold our arms up in the air and wail about how a writer wasn’t really where he claimed to be at a particular time.  That said – it’s also interesting to think about what that particular tendency says about us and our relationship with journalism.   Jon Snow isn’t necessarily wrong to dislike the idea of a journalist being a ‘fake’ – but isn’t it important to be aware that that is a subjective position and think about what we want journalism to be?

Do I think Kapuściński was a ‘journalist’ under the majority of expectations of the term? No.  Do I wish he’d left a nice, helpful little document outlining his position on what he thought journalism was, and what he thought his work was? Yes.  But do I think he should have had to? Not necessarily.  I think he should probably have been aware that it didn’t meet a lot of journalistic convention, and not sold it as journalism – but honestly I don’t know enough about him and his work to know what he did say about it or how he did sell it.  Should we challenge his narratives and discuss them? Absolutely – but not just in terms as polar as ‘true’ and ‘false’ – can we please be a little more nuanced about things?

ETA: This piece in the Guardian is interesting on the subject – drawing a line between Kapuściński’s despatches and his books.

#save6Music – My letter to the BBC.

Dear BBC Trust,

I would like to add my voice to the many protesting against the BBC’s planned cuts, in particular the cutting of 6Music, and to echo the many tributes and plaudits that this service has received over the past few days.    To quote Jon Ronson, “The station is everything the BBC should be about: nurturing intelligent talent (both musical and presenting). Whilst some parts of the BBC (like BBC 3) seem at times nothing more than copies of certain independent channels, there is nothing out there like 6Music. It is a unique and very BBC station. Brilliant sharp, funny presenters like Adam and Joe, Lauren Laverne, The Queens of Noise, Phil Jupitus, Sean Keaveny, etc, have been entertaining loyal, grateful fans like me for years. These are intelligent people who aren’t afraid to be passionate about good, not particularly populist music. 6Music is the Radio 4 of music channels.”

I have long been a defender of the licence fee, as I feel that the BBC provides journalistic and entertainment services that the commercial sector cannot provide.   I fully agree with Mark Thompson’s statement in the Guardian today, that the BBC’s remit is ,”To inform, educate and entertain audiences with programmes and services of high quality, originality and value. It strives to fulfil this mission not to further any political or commercial interest, but because the British public believe that universal access to ideas and cultural experiences of merit and ambition is a good in itself.”  BBC 6Music, I believe, epitomises the BBC’s potential to succeed in fulfilling this remit.  The way that its wonderful presenters are allowed to employ their own judgement and share their tastes has enabled them to make brilliant use of the BBC’s unparalleled archives as well as  to discover and support a wide variety of new music.

Through the licence fee BBC has an incredible ability and a responsibility  to provide a service to the whole population and not just to the majority.   I sincerely hope that it will not betray the public’s trust in its willingness to fulfil this promise and that it will continue to support exciting and innovative media services such as 6Music.

Sincerely,

Hannah Swithinbank

Tears for the Past

Water from melting snow drips down one of the stelae in the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

I think the fact that I don’t really understand the Holocaust Memorial’s artistic/architectural nature and yet was still affected by it speaks to how well done the memorial is.  I don’t get how or why a field of concrete stelae is supposed to or can memorialise the Holocaust – but it *does*.    You walk between the rows of these blocks, which are of various heights – in the middle you are completely dwarfed by them – taking turns as and when you want to turn to find your own way through the field.  If it is a metaphor for history, then it’s almost scarily effective – each turn has its own impact on the trail you leave behind you, and can cause you to end up emerging somewhere else around the edge of the field – and with no distinguishing features on the blocks there is very little to aid you in picking out a very specific path as you go through or reaching a specific destination.  You could walk through in a straight line and miss a lot.  You could very deliberately count your way through, taking certain rows, and still miss a lot.  You could aim for an exit point and wander as vaguely as you liked towards that goal. Or you could wander at will, and end up anywhere, or get completely lost.  It’s dislocating and chilling – especially in the snow.

The day I was there the sun was starting to melt the snow that had settled on top of some of the stelae, with water droplets running down the sides of the blocks like tears.   I wanted to capture some of these drops – but also to give a sense of the memorial as a larger structure that you can get lost in.  It was a little tricky to get both, since the stelae are laid out in straight lines – which means it was hard to get them into the background of a photograph whose focal point was some small drops of water on the face of a block.  In the end, this is what I managed to capture.  Now I have it, I feel like, in a way, the ‘tears’ of the melting snow in focus in front of the bright white snowy, straight path up out of the maze of stelae might say something about the importance of tears, grief and memorialising in finding a way through the maze of history as it impacts upon us.  Which isn’t at all what I was initially aiming for – which was the tears caught in the middle of the field of blocks.  Maybe my camera is smarter than me.

Camera Toys!

It’s funny.  I bought a DSLR because it was easier to learn how to get photos right – it recorded all the settings you used and you could check the photo right away rather than getting home, having the film developed and then realising you’d totally blown your shots of sunrise over the desert (or whatever).   And now, one of the photography things I enjoy the most is the lo-fi wonder of lomography.  Point, maybe adjust your aperture to one of about three settings, shoot.

I figure that after nearly three years of DSLRing I’ve probably saved money on film purchase and development (although, lens shopping might have offset that…).  Except now I’m using up old 35mm film and investing in 120mm, and desperately trying to find somewhere that processes 110mm for less the price of O negative on the black market in a war zone in order to play with a whole variety of lomo cameras, and planning to dig out my old SLR when I get home, get it some new batteries and go play with film.

A part of it is that I can’t quite escape the feeling that film is how ‘Real Photographers Do It.’  I don’t think I’ll feel like I’m actually properly good at photography until I can load a film into a camera, shoot on manual and have the photo come out the way I want, without getting to check as I go. I’d like to be able to develop films as well, but I think that’s fairly unlikely.  Well, I think I could do black and white (I was once taught), but I would need a dark room (I don’t think I have the mad skillz required for developing photos in a bathtub – or a suitably dark bathroom either).  But anyway, I’m determined to work on the first part.   I’m getting better – I could quite comfortably shoot entirely manually on my DSLR.   I don’t forsee film overtaking digital for me, especially when I’m travelling – given that I never know if/when I’m going to get back somewhere I prefer to have the safety net of digital, and I don’t think that’s going to change.  In the same way, because I mix travel with photography, rather than travelling for photography (there’s a difference – I’m unlikely ever to spend three nights sleeping in a car near the Grand Canyon waiting for the perfect sunrise, I’ll take the best I can get whilst I’m there), I tend not to shoot manual – I use aperture priority and let the camera do the rest the majority of the time.    But I do want to start spending more time playing and improving when I’m not travelling – I sometimes forget how much fun it can be – especially after a year when I’ve travelled so damn much!  So, given that it looks like I’m going to be spending most of the summer in Cornwall, I’m going to get back to practice – out with the film cameras.

I want to play with the film SLR and see what I can do.  But I do also want to get to play – and this is where the lomos come in. You don’t really have to worry about getting it right, because there aren’t many (or any) settings and you get to play with composition and atmosphere more than perfect representation. So it’s good for practicing those things.  That’s mostly why I just picked up my latest toy – an adaptor that lets me attach lenses for the fabulous Diana+ cameras onto my DSLR and get a lomo effect in digital.   It’s not quite the same – for a start you don’t get the fun square medium format photo at the end – its more like you end up with a slightly more imprecise and soft-focus shot, but it can be very cool, IMO.  And you get photos like the one above (of the Berlin Wall).

Some reasons why you shouldn’t go to Trier in winter

1. It will be COLD.  And Trier is a town where the things you want to see are largely outsidey things that involve wandering around. Apart from the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, which is obviously an inside thing, and the churches the main sights are the Roman ruins like the Kaiserthermen and the amphitheatre, and the town itself.

2. Cold itself isn’t too horrible, it’s when you start adding in wintery weather like rain, sleet or snow. ALL of which it did at some point on Friday when I was there.   This is what town looked like from the Porta Nigra on Friday afternoon.  ‘Twas lovely.  You could sort of see that Trier is actually a really lovely town, but by the time you’d got wet ankles a cold head and cold hands, you weren’t really in the mood to appreciate it.

3. There is an additional problem that arises when you add cold and wet winter weather to a collection of outside sights. It’s called ICE.   Apart from the Porta Nigra and the Viehmarktthermen (which is under a big glass box) all the Roman sites I wanted to see were shut due to icy surfaces.  So I stood outside them and whimpered, and took photos through the fence.

5. Photos. Aha, yes. Cameras and sleet are two unmixy things.  Snow, oddly, isn’t so bad, for it feels dryer (don’t ask, I have my own personal science going on, clearly) but sleet and rain don’t make my camera feel comfortable.  So on Friday I took few photos and fewer that I liked. Saturday was better as, although it had snowed overnight, it wasn’t whilst I was out and about, and there was even a smidgen of blue sky and sunlight, which made for better photography.

6. Other things indoorsy things will also be closed, because there is restauration work being done (the Liebfraukirche), or because it’s January (the Landesmuseum).  ‘Twas at the discovery of this last, on Saturday morning that I just starting laughing at my comedy of woe.  Trier in January FAIL.

That said, it wasn’t actually a complete bust.  Saturday morning, despite the snowy and icy conditions meaning that things were shut and that I kept trying to do the splits whilst walking on, well, pretty much every possible road surface (the GRAVEL in the park was frozen and slippy, seriously), the town looked really lovely in it’s snow dusting.  For example – the cloister behind the Dom and the Liebfraukirche.   There’s a lovely little coffee shop in the House of the Three Kings, which does amazing bagels and is open from seven am, which is great when your hostel doesn’t do breakfast.  The walk along the Mosel River past the windmills to the Römerbrücke is rather lovely.

There’s also a really really nice little wine cellar-restaurant across the road from the Liebfraukirche.  It’s called Weinstube Kesselstatt and is a really beautiful place with lovely wine and yummy food, and it totally made up for the fact that Friday was cold and wet and miserable and filled with shut things I wanted to see.

Slightly More Positive Reflectiveness.

Yes yes, the iPad.  No, no, I’m not an Apple Fanboy or Apple Evangelist.   After all, yesterday on the Twitters I did declare: “@Rage_DyingLight I just hate Apple Evangelists. I’m quite attached to my iPod touch, but it’s hardly curing world hunger.”   And later yesterday evening I did declare: “I have to say, I can see nothing that tempts me towards an iPad. Even the ‘ooooh shiny’ isn’t really working for me right now.” And then I got scolded and down I was a cold, heartless person, and I got cranky and yelled back – because that’s what I mean by Apple evangelism, the assumption that everyone should want an Apple product and if they don’t there’s something wrong with me.  And no, not everyone who owns Apple is an Apple Evangelist, it’s just that those who are are SO LOUD.  And that puts my back up, and I get stubborn and declare that ‘I don’t want anything Apple except my iPod.’

But here’s the thing, when I’m really honest that’s not entirely true, and I do get why people like Apple tech so much.  A few years ago my first iPod died.  I’d only had it 18 months, which was annoying, but then I had dropped it quite a lot so I wasn’t completely blaming the tech, and I wanted to buy a new one.  I was going to the States in the next couple of months, so I figured I’d survive a few weeks without one and pick up the new one on the other side of the Atlantic.  When I got there, I stopped into a general electronicsy store when I had some free time and asked if they stocked any. No, they said, insulted and proceeded to try and sell me a Zune instead. No, said I, I’ve actually thought about this, I want an iPod. But why, they said, and reeled off a bunch of flaws. But, says I, I know all that and I still want an iPod. I like the feel of them. And they laughed and said, “Feel?! What’re you going to do, stroke it?”  I blinked, slightly baffled, and  left, realising later that they just didn’t get the intuitiveness and sheer shiny appeal of the iPod, which, yes, you do actually stroke.

I like my iPod. The one I eventually bought that trip is still working, four years later, although it has largely been superseded by my iPod Touch.   When they first came out I said, ‘Oh I don’t want an iPhone’ – I didn’t want that kind of phone bill, or long contract, and I wouldn’t make use of all it could do. However, after six months with an iPod Touch I now do want an iPhone, because I will make use of all that it can do.  Or at least, I’m going to want a smartphone of some kind, and the iPhone is currently frontrunner because I like it’s iPoddy music playing skills (I like iTunes and the iPod, they work very well for me).

But this isn’t the opportunity for an Apple Evangelist to start cackling and rubbing their hands, and preparing to welcome me to the ‘light side’.  I don’t want an Apple computer. Not ‘not ever’.  Perhaps if I had a small fortune bundling up somewhere at some point I would consider it – they are pretty, and they do work well, and I’d like to try Aperture for my photography.  But I object to paying twice the price for the same specs of my current laptop, and I can’t afford to get all the software I use in Mac-friendly versions.  It would be the equivalent of a photographer moving from Canon to Nikon and having to re-buy all of their lenses.  It’s hardly financially sound.   I also like the fact that, with a little bit of learnin’, I can metaphorically hammer my Windows-7-running Dell into doing a many many different things.  If I had more learnin’, I’d go linux.  Apparently my dad’s installed linux on my old laptop, so I’m going to play with it when I go home and get some of this learnin’.   A Macbook is actually not what I want in my computing life right now.

So, here’s the thing with the iPad. Stephen Fry, bless his apple-labelled cotton socks, has reminded me of something – game changing importance isn’t always evidence on first appearance, and it’s what Apple do to the iPad from here that’s really going to mark out what it’s going to become.  It has to grow up and become a real boy. Or something.   It may be in time, the iPad becomes something I do find a use for in my life – or more likely, another company’s tablet will become something (although I am glad that the tablet is not so outrageously expensive as I find Apple’s laptops to be).   On closer examination, where the iPad looks less like a giant iPhone (whilst the rows of icons on the iPhone work for it, I like a clean screen on my computers, all the icons squirrelled away in docks and toolbars), the shiny begins to work for me. I can see the appeal a bit more than I could last night.   But right now, it is absolutely nothing I want.  I have no use for it.  If I want 24/7 information, I want it in my pocket, so I want an iPhone or iPod touch.  If I’m at home, I’m happy with my laptop and a bunch of external harddrives – and as an amateur photographer I want more than 64gigs of storage, thank you very much.  If I’m trekking my larger-than-an-iPod-Touch computer around with me, I want it to have a cover for the screen – preferably a lid, because I do drop stuff.  If I’m typing a lot, I actually want a keyboard, because I like the feel and sound of a keyboard buttons going up and down – it makes me feel like I’m writing.  And – and in a lot of ways this is what might keep me away from this tablet for a while – if I’m using it for photo editing and displaying them, I DON’T WANT greasy finger smudges all over the screen (or the screen protector, if you go in for them).  I hate having smudges on my laptop screen enough when I’m editing photos.  That’s going to get exponentially worse on a computer that is all about touching it – is it a bird, is it a cloud, is it a spot on the sensor, NO, it’s a bloody great finger smudge.

So, whilst I’m starting to get the sense of ‘Oh shiny’ and the fact that they might be joyously intuitive to use, I still have absolutely no use for an iPad, and I’m not yet ready to succumb to the marketing and rhetoric of ‘Oh but your life will be better if you have one.’  No it won’t. If for no other reason than that I’ll hate myself for falling for the rhetoric and spending money I could have put to good use somewhere else (seriously, that’s a return plane ticket to Kenya right there).  So go buy one and play with it and love it, but STOP trying to tell me I should want one.

Narcissism, Vanity, Selfies.

I promise, I’m not about to fall in a pond and drown or anything.  I got bored of just plotting further travel and decided to take some self-portraits.  At the moment I’m the only person who’ll pose for me, so I’m the only model I can practice on.   And right now, I like being curled up on the bed reading, so that’s my modelling location (also, right now I seem to only like photos with only bits of my face in – clearly full-frontal portraiture is not my thing).  I have Jasper Fforde’s newest, Shades of Grey, and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point on the go.    I’m also reading the Lonely Planet Encounter Guide to Berlin.

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. BERLIN.

OK. Shrieking done.

I have just over two months left in Germany before the lease on the apartment is up/the scholarship money stops coming in and I have to head back to the Cornwall (where I plan to carry on exactly the same way I am now – writing, job hunting, and taking photos, except with less wurst and more roskilly’s ice cream).  So I’m trying to make the most of it.  I’m going to Trier for a couple of days at the end of the week to see Roman stuff. Trier’s nearly three hours by train, so a day trip is pushing it, giving me an excuse to stay overnight, hurrah.   Then, before I finally head home the Maternal Unit is coming out to visit so that we can go down the Rhine to Mainz, the Loreley and Koblenz – and so that she can give me a hand yanking my hefty suitcase on and off the trains on the way home.  Aaaand, Berlin.

I’m going to Berlin for six days.   I’m a little nervous.  Berlin’s always scared me off a little – it always sounds like it’s Way Too Cool for the likes of little old me.  I don’t much go in for partying either, especially not when I’m travelling solo, so a bit of me feels like I’ll be wasting something big that Berlin has to offer.   Still, I *do* want to see all the historical stuff – after years of modern history in school and university I’m ready to put faces to names, as it were.  I’m itching to see the Pergamon Museum and the altar – even though it’s clearly only going to make me want to go to Turkey all the more and actually see the ruins of Pergamon.  I’m going to go up the Reichstag dome, and photograph the Brandenburg Gate at night.  I might go to Schloss Charlottenburg. Or I might go to Dessau to see Bauhas stuff.  I’m going to take a day trip to Sachsenhausen, because yes I am that kind of traveller.  And the nerves are starting to become excited nerves rather than slightly scaredy-cat nerves.  I’m reading the guidebook and thinking, ‘I want to see that, and that, and that.’ And this is why I like Lonely Planet’s Encounter guides – they work around neighbourhoods and atmospheres and sights that aren’t necessarily the big things that you go into and ’see’ (though they do cover those things), and I like to walk when I’m visiting cities. Rather than just going from highlight to highlight on buses and trains, I like to walk my little feet off (seriously, I think seeing Tokyo might have actually stress-fractured every bone in my feet, they hurt so much) seeing what the city looks like as a whole – and taking photos of course.

So, internet, tell me – what should I see in Berlin?   What areas should I explore (or not explore, y’know, if there are those)? What neighbourhoods have funky hidden away bits?  Where can I get a good cup of coffee and a cheap meal? What one piece of architecture will make my camera spin?  If I have to choose between Schloss Charlottenburg and Dessau, which should I choose?  Where can I get a truly fantastic bag?  Advise me!

back at work [cough]

I just came back from California, so I really need to be getting on with writing some stuff about the trip/editing photos/working on my article-in-progress.    However, I got back on Saturday and woke up jetlagged on Sunday to find that it had snowed in Cologne. I promptly put on the wrong pair of trainers and headed out to church, first getting my shoes, socks and feet wet and then sitting in an Anglican church for two hours. It goes without saying that church was cold. All Anglican churches are cold, thems the rules. I think you’re supposed to get so used to it that you become even more afraid of hellfire, because it would be Too Hot.   Anyway, I now have a streaming cold and I don’t feel like doing any of it, so I’m just faffing around, mainlining Fisherman’s Friends and working my way through a box of tissues and several lemons with a lot of honey.

For the time being, take it that I had a great  trip, the conferences was really good, and that exploring the snowy bank of the Merced looking for the spot from which a flickr contact of mine takes his killer El Capitan shots was a highlight.  I’m not sure if I found the right spot (yes, no, maybe they were his footprints from the previous weekend that Iwas stepping in) – but I did find snow, reflection and a good view of the rock, and got this, which I’m really really happy about.

Books and Films of 2010

As ever, if I don’t list ‘em, I don’t remember all of them.

Books
1. Manhood for Amateurs -Michael Chabon
2. Naked – David Sedaris
3. The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
4. When You are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris
5. Shades of Grey – Jasper Fforde
6. Consider Phlebas – Iain M. Banks
7. Barrel Fever – David Sedaris

Films
1. The Princess and the Frog
2. Invictus
3. Sherlock Holmes
4. A Serious Man
5. Up in the Air
6. The Ghostwriter
7. Shutter Island

Last Year’s Lists

Noughties lists…

I wanna join in! Lists of the year, PAH. Lists of the decade, HURRAH. Though, at the risk of turning into Toby Ziegler, why does the decade end this year, and not next year? Why is the  decade not 2001-2010, rather than 2000-2009?  Can we bring up the bit where there wasn’t a year nought, or is that all cliche and annoying? Anyway, moving on…  Lists! Lists are fun. Top Tens!  I can do books and TV and movies of the decade, although we should all bear in mind that I have not yet started watching The Wire.  I probably can’t do theatre, not sensibly, since I don’t go very often (as often as I’d like), though I can wave my arms up and down and talk about the few things I did see and the plays that really stuck with me, and music. Hmmm, I’ll try, but that might get quite random, and will essentially be ‘Ten records what I have loved with absolutely no critical or aesthetic thought behind it’. I think they’re going to be unordered lists, because, well, trying to rank things like The Assination of Jesse James, The Lord of the Rings, and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind against each other is kinda daft. They’re also going to be lists that mix up the things that I think have been really really good with things that have become a part of my personal furniture. So the Eyre Affair may knock Fortress of Solitude out of the books list because it has been a bigger part of my decade.  Just be warned, it’s going to be a little bit bonkers, and pretty much all about me, with no real grounding in any theories of aesthetics.

Books. Ok, I give up. I’m having a fiction and a non-fiction list. No arguing from the back.
Fiction
Purple Hibiscus – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Algebraist – Iain M. Banks
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon
The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde
A Life’s Music – Andrei Makine
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – J.K Rowling
Anathem – Neal Stephenson

Non-Fiction
Pedant in the Kitchen – Julian Barnes
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
The Zanzibar Chest – Aidan Hartley
Code 2.0 – Lawrence Lessig (I haven’t read Remix yet, but I suspect it’s more important for the noughties and the future).
The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism – Jonathan Lethem (yes, ok, it’s an essay, but do I care? no)
The Audacity of Hope – Barack Obama
An Utterly Impartial History of Britain, or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge – John O’Farrell (well, it’s not fiction…)
A History of Britain – Simon Schama
A Constitution of Many Minds – Cass Sunstein
Consider the Lobster – David Foster Wallace

Movies
The Assassination of Jesse James
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Gosford Park
Infernal Affairs
In the Mood for Love
The Lord of the Rings (I will count three as one, but if you make me pick just one, I’ll go for Fellowship every time)
Pan’s Labyrinth
The Royal Tennenbaums
Shaun of the Dead
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

TV
Band of Brothers
Battlestar Galactica
Black Books
Bleak House
Doctor Who
Firefly
State of Play
The Thick of It
The West Wing
Veronica Mars
(plus a very honourable mention to Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which is not strictly television, but which must go somewhere on the list for being ACE)

Music
Carastini: Story of a Castrato – Philippe Jaroussky
DZf – Guy Barker
The Eminem Show – Eminem
Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes
Gua – Emmanuel Jal and Abdel Gadir Salim
The Lord of the Rings Soundtracks – Howard Shore
The Orpheus Suite – Colin Towns’ Mask Orchestra
Raising Sand – Robert Plant and Alison Kraus
Savane – Ali Farka Toure
Smile – Brian Wilson

Theatre I’m willing to jump up and down and wave my arms about… and I include ballet.
The Bacchae – twice over, Kneehigh’s version at the Hall for Cornwall, and the Alan Cumming starring version at the Edinburgh Festival
Giselle – The Royal Opera House, with Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg.
Jumpers – Tom Stoppard, at the National Theatre
Noises Off – Michael Frayn (I was in actual physical pain from laughing so hard), at the National Theatre
The Nutcracker Sweeties/Orpheus Suite/Shakespeare Suite Triple Bill – Birmingham Royal Ballet.
The Real Thing – Tom Stoppard (I saw it at the Albery in January 2000, ok, so it counts)
Tristan and Yseult – Kneehigh Theatre at the Minack
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett, in Edinburgh with Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart
War Horse – Nick Stafford, at the National Theatre