A great pleasure - Cultural Exchange

Is the feature on Front Row called Cultural Exchange where famous personalities talk about a work of art which has inspired them. I always love to hear Mary Beard enthusing about the ancient goings on which she is so comfortable with, and I love to hear Will Self's voice - he could make anything sound fascinating, and I love Diana Athill and Germaine Greer - all the right people have been able to contribute - even the wonderful Anne Tyler!!! and today I was at home and able to hear a part of a reading of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler which made me think - I am going to read that one again.

All Anne Tyler's books have got a point to them, it may be about the family dynamic being worked out over time, or it may be about the contribution that women who don't work (or work part time and informally) make to society, it may be about  the way you really can't escape your own personality wherever you go, even if you try to make your like work out differently (Ladder of Years), it maybe the fact that a marriage might not work, and end, but still continue in some shadowy way (The Amateur Marriage) but there is always something to take away from her novels, and maybe something funny, true and ridiculous to make you laugh along the way. On Cultural Exchange she contributed an old photograph. You can see it on the Radio 4 website and you can see how a person with some imagination (Anne has loads) would get a lot out of it.

Anne Tyler rarely gives interviews - I expect she thinks they are a waste of time - but she did a good one in the Guardian a year ago, and you can see from the comments how people love her writing but not in an uncritical way - we are disappointed with her occasional bland and twee novels. She is usually not afraid to confront the evil that men do - think of the beginning of the Accidental Tourist, the image of the innocent young boy being shot and killed in a MacDonald's. Oh, and she is popular with men, and Nick Hornby is a fan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/13/anne-tyler-interview

Prozac and other SSRI's

Will Self made a very good radio programme on this topic. He didn't suggest, as I have in previous posts, that the way we have organised our society is not healthy - too stressful, too competitive, not enough community activity - and therefore we are unable to cope emotionally with living in it without medication, but he did mention Aldous Huxley, so probably the thought had crossed his mind.

He talked to people who think this medication saved their lives, psychologists who prescribe it and those who don't, and one mum who lost her daughter to suicide although she (the daughter) was on Prozac, and people who think placebos work just as well!

Go here for the programme - bbc 4 Will Self has a great voice and he talks to people who should be experts in the subject - but it won't be available for longer than a week I think.

He mentioned a film called Prozac Nation that sounded very interesting.

Moby Dick again

I love Moby Dick. I am on Chapter 40 something now. some of the readers are amateurs who only read fairly well, and others are brilliant readers who make every word interesting. Will Self had a seemingly very boring chapter to read about the colour white, and how it struck fear into Ishmael, and all the connotations and anecdotes from history about the colour white, which is nothing on the page, but when Will Self read it aloud it was splendid, magnificent and joyous. I do recommend this audio book because the prose is strong, designed to be heard, like Shakespeare, or the Bible.

Because I listen sometimes inattentively, and the prose is very difficult in places, I wanted to have the book to refer to. Well, I thought that the book was in the Great Pile of Unread books, in the bedroom, along with some Dickens novels and Joyce's Ulysses. It was not. I decided I must have given up on the idea of ever getting through it, and I must have taken it to a charity shop. So I ordered it again, on Amazon, and have been reading it a little here and a little there. And yesterday I found that I had the unread copy all the time! It is in the American section of my little library. So I shall have a spare copy to give to someone.