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Ella
Harriet’s comment on my last post prompted me to go back to my Ella collection. She really is the consummate jazz singer, and I agree with Harriet that her Rodgers and Hart interpretations are sublime, though my all time favourite Ella album is The Cole Porter Songbook. There was an interesting programme on Ella in…
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The seal
Nearly letting February go by without a post – good job it’s a leap year and I can just sneak under the wire.Now that my profile doesn’t show a seal picture, the tagline, “the faint aroma of performing seals” is a bit redundant, I suppose. But I’ll leave it, as a reminder of one of…
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Monkeys, Tigers and Temples
When not engaged in things Burgessian in Malaysia, we had the chance to wander around Kuala Lumpur. I think the term “City of Contrasts” might have been minted for it. The high tech, ultra-modern cityscape, symbolised by the Petronas Towers, lives cheek-by-jowl with the remnants of the colonial past, and reminders of the cultural diversity…
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Mr Wilson’s Old Boys
…is probably a good title for an article I shall write about my experience addressing the old boys of Malay College on the subject of their old teacher John Anthony Burgess Wilson. I hadn’t anticipated the scale of the event, though I had a suspicion when we arrived early and saw the banners.Here’s one: Sharon…
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East
I’ve been east before, of course. Why, only last year, I holidayed in Aldeburgh. But this is a bit different. I’m in Malaysia as the guest of uberblogger and Kuala Lumpur literary scene maven, Sharon Bakar. My mission is to give a couple of talks about Anthony Burgess, first to the old boys of Malay…
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Cultural Amnesia
“It is so immense, I have no words for it” was T.S. Eliot’s reaction to Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God. Old Tom was possibly just relieved that he had escaped being skewered on Lewis’s satirical blade, unlike virtually everyone else in the precious hothouse world of the London literary scene in the twenties. I…
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This man wants to be president
In a heartwarming Christmas story, Will Smith, an actor (and therefore someone on whose every word we should hang, especially as he has said he wants to be president one day) says that Hitler was essentially a good person. In other news, the Pope suggests that Lucifer wasn’t such a bad guy really, and George…
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Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day
I enjoyed reading this reissue of a 1938 novel, now published in Persephone’s smart grey livery. It’s a tale of one day, but isn’t a Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses. The eponymous Miss P is a timid, dowdy failed governess who finds herself by accident plunged into a demi-monde of bright young things, night-clubs and all…
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More numbing dumbness
Thanks to my Belgian correspondent Yves Buelens for alerting me to this. Incroyable, mon ami…
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Europe is a country and everyone speaks French here
Thanks to Francessa for pointing this out to me. I don’t feel like a genius, and Stephen Fry makes me feel inadequate, Anonymous, but this woman- who is some sort of celebrity in the US apparently- plumbs new depths of dumbness.