Tag: Books

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How water instilled a dream city

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Back in Nineteen Thirteen, William Mulholland completed the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 233-mile engineering masterwork transporting water from the Owens Valley, a dry lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada across the desert to a barren south-western corner of California that would become the home of filmmaking, and transformed the land’s fertility. In Aqua, award winning, Italian filmmaker and writer Chiara Barzini gives insight into the founding of Hollywood, the building of great water systems. Her hometown Rome, abound with empty aqueducts and pipes, representing someone’s dream of turning dry soil into a fertile lucrative and fertile agricultural … Continue reading How water instilled a dream city

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Imaginations: Connections between real life and art

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This is the amazing memoir of one of the greatest storytellers of our time, over six decades of writing, from 1961 onwards, with her towering influence, who wrote New York Times bestseller’s and modern classics like The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), or The Testaments or Alias Grace (1996) are a reproach to the Swedish Academy. In 1939, with a world war under way, born in Ottawa and raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents- Carl, an entomologist father, and Margaret Dorothy, a former nutritionist mother. She and her siblings were taken by their mother to throw tin cans at a large … Continue reading Imaginations: Connections between real life and art

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Restoration or Erasure: Old ways are erased by the new

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The Palace of the Republic, that once housed the East German Parliament, is demolished. A grandmother’s laughter passes from life into memory and the furniture that once made a home is taken to the tip. A friendship drops into silence. Old ways are erased by the new  In this fascinating collection of essays, most of them written for her column in the Frankfurter  Allgemeine Zeitung, Winner of the International Booker Prize Jenny Erpenbeck meditates, with a sense of both deep melancholy and wry humour, on the disappearance and impermanence of things. Recalling the shop that used to darn tights in the … Continue reading Restoration or Erasure: Old ways are erased by the new

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Good writing evokes sensations

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Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, an English literature professor at the University of Oxford, reveals his love of reading with his students, and collating twenty years of teaching, his book Look Closer explores the iconic works of literature that have formed, sustained and entertained him, from timesless classics like Wuthering Heights and Dracula to modern masterpieces like Normal People and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as children’s books, poetry, plays, short stories, and even comics. Douglas-Fairhurst explains how to slow down, take note and bring a text to life, Look Closer makes clear how literature works and why in these turbulent times, reading … Continue reading Good writing evokes sensations

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Love Triangle

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Lily King’s understands good love stories- their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls, suffused with love triangles that even the narrator’s 12-year-old son at some point tells her that he has been invited to be part of a thruple which he declines. His mother, the narrator whose name we are not told until the final lines of the book. In the fall of her senior year of college. She meets two students from her 17th century Lit class: Sam who had coppery brown hair and Yash with a thick black pontytail. Best Friends living off-campus in the elegant … Continue reading Love Triangle

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Do You want to be a filmmaker

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BECOMING A FILMMAKER – THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT MAKING ITIN LONDON By Krish Pinto – London BA Film Graduate. Book available to order on Amazon.It is rare to find a writer with the talent of chronicling a guide andcommentary so successfully and imaginatively as Krish Pinto. Thatknown, I have suggested to him that he might be good writing novelsand maybe a screenplay to go with each one. Krish reacted bystating that AI is ahead of us writers – and can be programmed towrite novels and screenplays for us! However, I thought of this overtwenty five years ago regarding a novelist … Continue reading Do You want to be a filmmaker

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Lyra’s fate…

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Philip Pullman’s use of language of fantasy to illuminate our world and to explore the deepest question of what it means to be alive and awake to all the splendors and horrors around us.  In volume one his follow up triology which referenced John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The next volume depict Lyra at 20, battling anti-liberal forces, and the final volume published this week, those forces are confirmed to be multinational conglomerates that overdevelop erstwhile wholesome communities and even threaten to buy naming rights to Oxford colleges. Lyra Silvertongue was new Eve, Her “Fall” into sin reframed as a victory … Continue reading Lyra’s fate…

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How we end up saying things that relate to an idea rather than experience

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An unnamed 40-year-old, Protagonist writer of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, who grew up in the South West of England before moving to Ireland, struggle to explain to her lover why she can’t explain how she feels: “ Somethings are resistant to words maybe, and when you start trying to apply them you end up with something else, another thing a theory, I suppose” Claire-Louise Bennett clarify – how easily language falls into pre-formulated phrases that fail to capture our intended meaning- how we “end up saying things that relate to an idea, rather than to the experience itself”. The protagonist’s unorthodox … Continue reading How we end up saying things that relate to an idea rather than experience

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Abandoned by fathers, betrayed by lovers

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Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters is about intergenerational trauma and female kinship. The Falodun family have been cursed for generations, since an ancestor’s affair with a married man provoked the vengeful wife to declare that the woman and her female descendants would never prosper in love: “men will be like water in their palms.”   Setting her story between 1994 and the present day, Braithwaite braids together the fates of three women bound by the curse. A young woman must shake off a family curse, and widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny, brilliantly perceptive … Continue reading Abandoned by fathers, betrayed by lovers

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Pursuit of truth from the other side of the camera

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Werner Herzog, the legendary filmmaker and author’s deeply personal exploration of art, philosophy, and history that unravels one of our most elusive and contested questions: What is truth- and how to find it in out “post-truth” era? We wade through the troubling realm of what we see and read, and wonder what AI might have in store for us. For over half a century, Werner Herzog has challenged, enriched, and expanded our understanding of the truth. His films and books have mixed fiction and non-fiction, documentary and drama, reality and imagination. Herzog definitely goes beyond the appearance of what is … Continue reading Pursuit of truth from the other side of the camera