At last: an Indian haggis (from the Telegraph)
January 25th, 2012
As Burns night draws closer, Scots everywhere are getting ready to lift a dram in honour of the bard. However, another literary great is also having an anniversary this year, as India marks the 150th anniversary of great poet Rabindranath Tagore.
Like Robert Burns, Tagore became an icon of his native culture. A poet, philosopher, musician, writer and educationalist he was explicitly inspired by Burns, and his own well-known song ‘Purano shei diner kotha’ (Memories Of The Good Old Days) was an Indian response to Auld Lang Syne.
In celebration of Scotland’s connections with India, award-winning Scottish Indian chef Tony Singh – known for his fresh and innovative approach to food – has created a fusion menu blending some of Scotland’s best produce with authentic Indian spices.
“As a Scot myself and a lover of all things food and drink, Burns Night is a date on the calendar I always look forward to,” says Tony. “As I also raise my glass to Rabindranath Tagore, it seemed appropriate to design a Burns menu which combines the two gastranomical traditions.”
Scots and Indians, he argues, have much in common. “We both love a tipple and a good laugh,” he says, “and haggis has always had a spice to it.”
James Joyce’s Ulysses: The beginning of an epiphany (from the Independent)
January 25th, 2012
Nine decades ago, on February 2 1922, Ulysses was born. It arrived in a handsome turquoise cover, its face embossed in gold. (At least, it did in Paris. In the UK it remained banned for a further fourteen years, on account of a masturbation scene.)
Over the years, this iconic Modernist text has been written about and written about. But one of its most important lines is not often enough discussed. It occurs in Episode 3, Proteus: “remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world.”
By the time he scrawled those words, James Joyce had long been working to claim the term “epiphany” on behalf of secular literature. Hitherto, the word had an ancient, and predominantly religious, history. It has its genesis in ancient Greece (ἐpιfάνeιa), where it was used beautifully to refer to the first glimmer of dawn, the first sight of the enemy in battle, or the first vision of a god. It became Judaised in 2 Maccabees, when it was used to describe the God of Israel, and was Christianised in 2 Timothy, where it mainly referred to the Second Coming; thereafter it came to describe the personal realisation that Christ was the Son of God. In AD 361, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus used the word for the first time to refer to a Christian feast (epiphanion). In the centuries that followed it was mainly used in connection to a variety of Christian festivals, which were celebrated differently, and at different times, by the different Churches.
Joyce, however – an atheist with profoundly Catholic roots (which he described as “black magic”) – felt that the term could more usefully be applied in a humanist context. Each of his Dubliners stories is structured around a central epiphany. Moreover, his less widely read autobiographical novel, Stephen Hero, contains an explicit exposition. Epiphany, Joyce writes, means “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” It is for the “man of letters” to “record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”
(Several years prior to writing this passage, Joyce himself had begun to create a group of seventy-one fleeting, disembodied epiphanies, ranging in content from the supoernatural to the mundane. Forty of these survive in manuscript form, and are collected at the American Universities of Cornell and Buffalo; they were reprinted in the early nineties by Faber.)
On a bicycle made for broods (from the Sunday Telegraph)
January 23rd, 2012
My family and I live at the top of a short but very steep hill. Bowling down it on an eco-friendly Dutch cargo bike – a 2.6m-long pushbike that can seat up to four small children in a box at the front – was surprisingly easy. I had expected the weight of my four-year-old daughter and two-year-old twins to make the bike difficult to handle, but in the event it was smooth and responsive.
Now, however, I had to cycle back up. The sweat beading on my brow, I gritted my teeth and nosed the bicycle, laden with the three children, up the hill. As the gradient began to increase, some neighbours went past in their car and paused to ask what on earth I was doing. “Sorry,” I yelled, “can’t stop!” And made a mental note to apologise later.
The hill was getting steeper and already my legs were burning. But then I pressed a button on the handlebars, the electric motor kicked in, and 40 per cent of the load was taken away. The remainder of the hill was a breeze. As I reached the crest, I glanced back; my neighbours were staring at me, open-mouthed. To them, I looked like a superman.
Spills on wheels (from the Sunday Times Magazine)
January 21st, 2012
Saturday morning, and I’m in a sports hall in the shadow of Wembley Stadium. Two dozen grown men are swooping round an oval track on four-wheel roller skates, barging their opponents to the floor. Meet the Southern Discomfort men’s roller derby team. Buoyed by their first international game — last October they played the Quad Guards from Toulouse, whom they “beat handsomely” — they are now preparing for the biggest game of their careers. Against women.
“The girls have experience on their side, and will be a much better functioning machine,” one of the team’s organisers, a Johnny Depp lookalike going by the name of Kinky Stuntz (real name Matthew Heales), told me over a pre-training full English breakfast in the nearby bikers’ haunt, the Ace Cafe. “They have a lower centre of gravity, so they can absorb the knocks without going down. And they can hit pretty hard too.” Just how hard remains to be seen.
Roller derby, a full-contact game featuring two teams of five skaters, is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world. The rules are notoriously complicated. The bout is split into two-minute “jams”, during which each team nominates a “jammer”, who — wearing a helmet emblazoned with a star — tries to lap the opposition, gaining one point for each opponent they lap. The rest of the skaters try to block those on the opposing side while allowing their own jammer through.
Huge in 1950s America, when it attracted crowds of thousands, roller derby became over-commercialised in the 1960s and died out. Then, in 2000, it was resurrected in Texas by the feminist punk counterculture. There are now 1,135 teams worldwide, spanning every inhabited continent, with 73 in Britain.
This tough new generation of skaters wear Gothic clothes, paint their faces like horror-film extras, and take on outlandish alter egos like “Fishnet Stalker” and “Attila the Nun”. Bouts take place to blaring heavy metal music and frequently result in injury. The game has an anti-corporate “DIY” spirit, open to everyone, regardless of athletic ability. Last December, the England team came third in the first ever Roller Derby World Cup, in Toronto.
Crucially, modern roller derby is all about third-wave feminist girl power, where women present themselves as a dominant force, sexually in control. Until now, the sport has been strictly women-only, with men restricted to refereeing and coaching. One popular joke is that the only difference between a rollergirl and a lesbian is two drinks. But things are starting to change. The bout I’m to witness between Southern Discomfort and the London Rockin’ Rollers, one of the top British women’s teams, marks the first time in Britain that women have lined up against men.
Read the full article on the Sunday Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)
Podcast recording of Jake Wallis Simons at Blacks
December 21st, 2011
On 28th November 2011, Jake Wallis Simons spoke about his work at the Soho club, Blacks. He also read from The English German Girl, as well as a work-in-progress. A recording of the session can be heard here.
Review: Out of It, By Selma Dabbagh (from the Independent on Sunday)
December 3rd, 2011
At first glance, Out Of It, a debut novel by the short story writer Selma Dabbagh, seems – stylistically – more easy reading than literary fiction. It is set aside, however, by the weight of the material: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Or rather, the Palestinian side of it.)
The story centres around a pair of twentysomething boy-and-girl twins, Iman and Rashid. We first meet them in Gaza in the midst of an Israeli barrage (although the precise details of place and political context are curiously obscured). Rashid is excited that he has won a scholarship to London, giving him the opportunity to finally get “out of it”. Iman, meanwhile, traumatised by the death of a friend, resolves to take a more active role in the hostilities. Read more on the Independent website
Review: British Comics, a cultural history (from the Sunday Telegraph)
November 17th, 2011
Beano, Dandy, Topper, Beezer; Bunty, Judy, Jackie; Roy of the Rovers,Commando. If that delicious string of titles hasn’t warmed the cockles of your heart, then either you did not grow up in the UK or your parents kept you wrapped in a paper bag.
Comics were – and still are – an integral part of our nation’s childhood and, increasingly, adulthood. In British Comics: A Cultural History, Professor James Chapman sets out to explore this “valuable but neglected source of social history” and discover what comics tell us about ourselves.
Traditionally, British comics have received nothing like the approbation of their French and American cousins. While France, Chapman tells us, subsidises her comics industry “to the tune of €4.5million a year”, and while the Americans regard their comics as “a vibrant form of mass popular culture, comparable to motion pictures”, we British traditionally see them as disposable at best, childish at worst.
Indeed, Chapman points out, we even passed legislation against them. The 1955 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publication) Act forbade the creation of any children’s book that “consists wholly or mainly of stories told in pictures” and portrays “incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature”. Only two people have been prosecuted so far (none since 1970), but the law remains on the statute books. Continue reading on the Telegraph website
NEW! Audiobook offer for The English German Girl
November 15th, 2011
Until 31 December, the brand new audiobook of The English German Girl will be available with a 20% discount! Claim your discount today by visiting www.wholestoryaudiobook.co.uk and entering the following code at the foot of the Order Summary Page: JAKE-WALL-ISSI-MONS.
Bedales School: Does it live up to its reputation? (from the Independent)
November 11th, 2011
Bedales School – a progressive, co-educational public school in the heart of Hampshire – is well-known for its famous alumni. Lily Allen, Sophie Dahl and Minnie Driver were all educated there, and celebrity parents include Mick Jagger, Jude Law, Jeremy Paxman and Boris Johnson.
Such an institution, and such a clientele, will inevitably attract media attention. It is no surprise, therefore, that the school frequently has to endure the ignominy of having its dirty laundry made public. When six students were thrown out for drugs offences last year, the story made the national headlines; when two more were expelled last summer for “having sex in a sandpit,” it caused even more of a furore.
The novelist Amanda Craig – who herself went to Bedales forty years ago – was among the most vociferous critics of her former school. Writing in the Daily Mail, she recounted how she was sexually assaulted by a gang of boys while walking back from an evening assembly. From then on, she writes, she was “relentlessly bullied,” and became “tense, white-faced and desperately lonely.”
Last week, as Bedales’ writer-in-residence, I had the opportunity to assess it from the inside. I spent five days leading workshops, speaking to the literary societies, meeting children of all ages for one-to-one tutorials, lecturing and advising staff. And although I concede that my time there was limited, what I saw had little in common with the Bedales of Amanda Craig four decades ago. Continue reading on the Independent website
#JWSNEWSFLASH: New Face To Launch #Apple #iPen
November 8th, 2011
Media speculation ended today with the announcement that in early 2012, Apple will launch a new device called “iPen.” The face of the campaign will be the British writer Jake Wallis Simons (32), the company confirmed.
Details of the new product are sketchy. According to Apple sources, the device will be “any size and scale between a regular biro and a felt-tip,” and will “come fully charged with iInk, giving users 134 hours writing time right out the box.” iPen will also have an extraordinary idling time of at least two years. It will be compatible with any sort of paper or card, although the internet is buzzing with rumours that Apple will also launch an “iPaper” and “iCard.”
“Just think,” said Jake Wallis Simons, speaking for the first time in his role as an ambassador for Apple. “Within two years we could be writting an iLetter on iPaper with our iPens, putting it in an iEnvelope, and dropping it into an iPostbox. The possibilities are endless. This really is the new frontier.”
But the device is not without its detractors. The American technology website CNET released a statement yesterday welcoming the iPen to the marketplace, but voicing concerns about Apple’s strategy to ship it “only with black iInk for the first six months.” This makes the produce “unnecessarily limited,” and could lead to “user dissatisfaction,” it said. The issue could particularly affect teachers, who “would wait to purchase iPen until red iInk is introduced.” CNET also expressed concerns about “compatibility issues,” shedding new doubts about how well iPen may synch with other Apple products. As for PC users, CNET said, they are “totally in the dark.”
For Apple fans, however, this development marks the next step in Apple’s extraordinary story of innovation. “I can’t wait to get my hands on iPen,” said a chap called Steve, a self-confessed Apple fanatic, from his tent outside the Apple Store in Covent Garden last night. “iPen’s instant-on feature will enable me to make notes instantaneously, without having to boot up my Macbook or unlock my iPhone. iPen is 100% wireless, and can work on anything – even the back of my hand.” He also expressed enthusiasm about the new range of iPen cases which will soon be available online.
“This has come at the right time for me,” said Jake Wallis Simons, the new face of the iPen campaign. “I have long used Apple products in the hope that I will one day regain the usability I previously enjoyed with old-skool paper and pens. Now with iPen and iPaper, Apple has scratched that itch. Thank you, Apple!”
