Kerraway

New York in miniature

Michael Kerr — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:26:06 +0000

Sam O’Hare wanted to show “the rhythms, pulses and movements” of a day in the life of New York, so he combined 35,000 still photographs, shot from rooftops, penthouses and balconies, into a single film. Watch out for the diggers, which seem less like machines than greedily pecking mini-dinosaurs. For all the technical details, see his Aéro Film blog.

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

Doing without the word ‘iconic’

Michael Kerr — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:27:57 +0000

“Iconic” is one of the words banned by the Telegraph Media Group style book, on the grounds that it’s used too often and inappropriately. Surely there are times when we need it, some of my colleagues complain. Fewer than you might think. This morning I heard a former prison governor on the Today programme on Radio 4 describe the murder of James Bulger as “one of the most iconic crimes of our recent criminal past”. What’s wrong with “notorious”?

Writers first, godparents second

Michael Kerr — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:09:04 +0000

Sympathy for Martin Amis — accused last weekend by Anna Ford of failing to do his duty as a godparent — from AS Byatt. At the Harvill Secker day (see below), she confessed that she has been similarly neglectful. “I’m a godmother to three, and I’ve never done anything godmotherly for any of them,” she said.
In the past she had said that she felt guilty for having spent time on her writing that she could have spent with her children. Asked if she had come terms with that, she answered: “I still feel guilty. I’ve moved from feeling I’m a bad mother to feeling I’m a bad grandmother.”

Manuel Rivas and the art of signing books

Michael Kerr — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:46:40 +0000

The publisher Harvill Secker held an “International Writing Day” yesterday at Foyles bookshop in London, where contributors included AS Byatt, Joseph O’Connor, Tim Parks and Nicholas Shakespeare. But it was the Galician writer Manuel Rivas who sat longest at the signing table afterwards.
In part, this was a tribute to his performance earlier. A handsome man with a shock of silver-and-black hair, he manages to combine the presence of a rock star with the delivery of a poet. As he spoke, at first about his new work, Books Burn Badly — inspired, if that’s the word, by the Spanish fascists’ attempts to “save civilisation” by
consigning even Plato’s The Republic to the flames — he was followed in English by Jonathan Dunne, so fluently that they seemed less writer and translator than a couple of singers who have been harmonising for years.
The other reason Rivas spent so long at the signing table was that he didn’t just squiggle his signature; with a few strokes of the back and sides of his fountain pen he turned each dedication (see above) into a little work of art.

Listening to Global Voices

Michael Kerr — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:18:20 +0000

I came across Global Voices the other day while doing some background reading about Colombia. The point of the site is to shine light “on places and people other media often ignore”. It does a good job at that. Its Spanish section, complete with summaries and translations of blogs, could also prove extremely useful to students of the language.

Ian Moore: Mod man in France

Michael Kerr — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:23:18 +0000

“How long before Ryanair starts charging for emotional baggage?” The question was asked by Ian Moore, one of the comics on the bill at Sway in Covent Garden on Thursday. Then he went on to muse on the conversations that would follow at security: “Did you pack this baggage yourself, sir?” “No, my family had quite a big hand in it.”
Moore’s shtick is that he’s an English mod who fell for a French woman and lives in a country where he depends on his small sons to do the translating. He tells a great gag about the aftermath of a crash in which he finds himself hanging upside down in the car. His first thought is not to thank God that the children aren’t with him; his first thought is that the approaching peasant with the helpful face is going to test his vocabulary to the limits by asking how it all happened.
I’d never heard of Ian Moore before, but I’m sure it won’t be long before I’m seeing his name everywhere. I found myself giggling long before he’d got to his punchlines.
Sway was good value, too: £8 a head for tickets booked online, then £16 for a decent bottle of white and a Mediterranean platter to share. Six out of 10. I’ve docked two points for their failure to wipe tables in the bar and for the way they try to bully new customers into sitting in the front row.

Broken news

Michael Kerr — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:20:50 +0000

Another day, another desperate attempt by another travel website to get itself mentioned by publishing a so-called survey.

According to this one, “59% think the English bars and tourists in Spain make the destination ‘not foreign enough’”; “nearly half would take a trip to the USA on the off-chance of meeting a celebrity”; and “2 respondents were put off the idea of going to Tunisia because they were scared of camels”.

Fifty-nine per cent of how many? Nearly half of how many? If the travel site’s PR firm knows, it isn’t telling. I hope its staff are better at maths than they are at English. The survey, with its revelations about “Tourist’s reasons for their destination likes and dislikes”, is “FOR IMMEDIARTE RELEASE”. Hold the front page.

Wild Essex: a sample

Michael Kerr — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:19:00 +0000

If you missed Robert Macfarlane’s programme last night on BBC Two, here’s a sample. Now you’ll probably want to watch the whole thing on iPlayer.

Wild Essex, minus white stilettos

Michael Kerr — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:13:50 +0000

If the phrase “wild Essex” calls nothing more to mind than a hen party in stilettos draining bottles of Bacardi Breezer, maybe you need to read the piece Robert Macfarlane wrote for yesterday’s Review section in The Guardian. It’s what he calls an alternative account of the Essex landscape. Having travelled around Britain and Ireland for his book The Wild Places, he was invited by the BBC to make a film in which he confined his explorations to that single English county. The result is due to be screened on Wednesday. It should be worth watching.

British writers on Spain at the Cervantes Institute

Michael Kerr — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:33:52 +0000

I went to the Cervantes Institute on Friday for the first of a series of conversations between Paul Preston, historian of the Spanish Civil War, and British writers who have lived in Spain.
He started with Michael Jacobs (a contributor to the Telegraph’s Saturday magazine and our travel pages), who laid into the stereotyping that fills so much travel writing about Spain. He said he would “rather die of poverty” than reinforce some of those stereotypes, among them the notion that “the real Spain is Andalusia” or that the country as a whole is fundamentally Moorish. He had no time for mysticism, and found duende “a particularly irritating concept”.
I thought he was a little unfair to newspaper travel sections, which may perpetuate some of the clichés but have also given space in recent years to those who challenge them — including himself.
But he’s right that many who go in search of the “real Spain”, a place they perceive as rural and unchanged, have failed to record and reflect the effect that immigration is having on the country. Jacobs said he had grown used to the sight of shepherds in out-of-the-way parts chattering into mobile phones. But on a walk recently in the footsteps of El Cid, he was startled to meet a shepherd who didn’t understand Spanish — he turned out to be Romanian. In Jacobs’s own corner of Andalusia, Frailes, he was living in a community that included not only Romanians but Moroccans, Ecuadoreans and Bolivians.
The conversation touched on the legacy of the Civil War, on the question of whether Spain is one country or many, and on the largely one-way movement of travel writers between Britain and Spain.
When asked why he did not write more about the Basque Country, Jacobs said that it was a lovely part of the world but that when he had last written about it he had received emails telling him that he wouldn’t be welcome to return. “On top of my Jewish-Catholic paranoia, the prospect of being threatened by a Basque is not particularly appealing.”
Someone in the audience asked why no British writers were interested in the Canary Islands, prompting Jacobs to point out that Galicia, too, had been neglected as a subject. And why, someone asked, were Spanish writers not examining the weird ways of the British as energetically as everyone from Richard Ford to Chris Stewart had reported on the Spanish.
Jacobs said: “The Spanish have taken a great interest in what the British say about them, but the British have taken no interest whatsoever in what the Spanish say about them.”
Preston noted that there was a similar imbalance in academic study. “There are Spanish academics who think they know about Britain,” he joked, “but this takes the form of wearing dicky bows.”
Judging from this one, the next couple of sessions should be worth hearing. On February 26 Professor Preston will be talking to Jason Webster (writer, among other things, of a bestseller entitled Duende) and on March 18 to Chris Stewart, author of Driving Over Lemons. For details see the Cervantes Institute website under “Cultural Events”.