chair used and later decorated by author J.K. Rowling while she wrote the first two Harry Potter books on display at Heritage Auctions in New York on April 4, 2016.(AFP)
The chair on which British author J.K.
The chair on which British author J.K. Rowling sat to write the first two volumes of her best-selling “Harry Potter” series sold at auction in New York on Wednesday for $394,000.
The modest, 1930s-era oak chair was part of a mismatched set of four that Rowling was given for free when she was a single mother living in subsidized housing in the Scottish city of Edinburgh.
Heritage Auctions said it sold for $394,000, including taxes — nearly 14 times the price that it last fetched at auction in 2009.
The 50-year-old author used the chair to write “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” and “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” published in 1997 and 1998, respectively.
“This was the comfiest one, which is why it ended up stationed permanently in front of my typewriter, supporting me while I typed,” Rowling wrote in a letter accompanying the chair, said the auction house.
“My nostalgic side is quite sad to see it go, but my back isn’t,” she added.
Rowling donated the chair in 2002 to an auction benefitting the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children after adorning it with words in pink, gold and green paint.
“You may not find me pretty but don’t judge on what you see,” she wrote, along with “I wrote Harry Potter while sitting on this chair” and her signature, the auction house said.
It sold again at auction in 2009 for $29,117, Heritage said.
“A small piece of history connected to the mythology of the Wizarding World and one of the most beloved characters in children’s literature,” said the auction house.
The seven-part “Harry Potter” series became a global phenomenon, translated into 67 languages. It sold more than 450 million copies and was credited with reviving children’s interest in reading.
Also adapted into box office blockbuster films, “Harry Potter” made Rowling the first female novelist billionaire.
In 2012, Forbes dropped her from its billionaire list, attributing it to Rowling’s charitable donations and high tax rates in Britain.
So you want to write a novel? Of course you do. Everyone wants to write a novel at some stage in their lives. While you’re at it, why not make it a popular bestseller? Who wants to write an unpopular worstseller? Therefore, make it a thriller. It worked for Ian Fleming and Frederick Forsyth …
Every now and then I come across excellent advice for the apprentice writer. There was a fine recent article, for example, in The Big Thrill (the house magazine of International Thriller Writers) on “how to lift the saggy middle” of a story. Like baking a cake. And then there is Eden Sharp’s The Thriller Formula, her step-by-step would-be writer’s self-help manual, drawing on both classic books and movies. I felt after reading it that I really ought to be able to put theory into practice (as she does in The Breaks).
But then I thought: why not go straight to the source? Just ask a “New York Times No. 1 bestseller” writer how it’s done. So, as I have recounted here before, I knocked on Lee Child’s door in Manhattan. For the benefit of the lucky Child-virgins who have yet to read the first sentence of his first novel (“I was arrested in Eno’s Diner”), Child, born in Coventry, is the author of the globally huge Jack Reacher series, featuring an XXL ex-army MP drifter vigilante.
It is a golden rule among members of the Magic Circle that, when asked: “How did you do that?”, magicians must do no more than smile mysteriously. Child helpfully twitched aside the curtain and revealed all. Mainly because he wanted to know himself how he did it. He wasn’t quite sure. He only took up writing because he got sacked from Granada TV. Now he has completed 20 novels with another one on the way. And has a Renoir and an Andy Warhol on the wall. Windows looking out over Central Park. Grammar school boy done well.
Cigarettes and coffee
He swears by large amounts of coffee (up to 30 cups, black, per day) and cigarettes (one pack of Camels, maybe two). Supplemented by an occasional pipe (filled with marijuana). “Your main problem is going to be involuntary inhalation,” he said, as I settled down to watch him write, looking over his shoulder, perched on a psychoanalyst’s couch a couple of yards behind him.
Lee Child and Andy Martin in NYC.Jessica Lehrman, Author provided
Which was about one yard away from total insanity for both of us.
Especially given that I stuck around for about the next nine months as he wrote Make Me: from the first word (“Moving”) through to the last (“needle”), with occasional breathers. A bizarre experiment, I guess, a “howdunnit”, although Child did say he would like to do it all again, possibly on the 50th book.
Maybe I shouldn’t be giving this away for free, but, beyond all the caffeine and nicotine, I think there actually is a magic formula. For a long while I thought it could be summed up in two words: sublime confidence. “This is not the first draft”, Child said, right at the outset, striking a Reacher-like note. “It’s the only draft!”
Don’t plan, don’t map it all out in advance, be spontaneous, instinctive. Enjoy the vast emptiness of the blank page. It will fill. Child compares starting a new book to falling off a cliff. You just have to have faith that there will be a soft landing. Child calls this methodology his patented “clueless” approach.
Look Ma, I’m a writer
To be fair, not all successful writers work like this. Ian Rankin, for one (in his case I relied on conventional channels of communication rather than breaking into his house and staring at him intently for long periods) goes through three or four drafts before he is happy – and makes several pages of notes too.
Ian Rankin, creator of Inspector Rebus.Mosman Library, CC BY
And yet, with his Rebus series set in Edinburgh, Rankin has produced as many bestsellers as Child. Rebus also demonstrates that your hero does not necessarily have to be 6’5” with biceps the size of Popeye’s. And can be past retiring age too, as per the most recent Even Dogs in the Wild.
Child has a few key pointers for the would-be author: “Write the fast stuff slow and the slow stuff fast.” And: “Ask a question you can’t answer.” Rankin also advises: “No digressions, no lengthy and flowery descriptions.” He has a style, and recurrent “tropes”, but no “system”. And Child is similarly sceptical about Elmore Leonard’s “10 rules of writing”. “‘Never use an adverb’? Never is an adverb!” And what about Leonard’s scorn for starting with the weather? “What if it really is a dark and stormy night? What am I supposed to do, lie?”
Elmore Leonard at the Peabody Awards.Peabody Awards, CC BY
Child never disses other writers. OK, almost never (there is one he wants to challenge to unarmed combat). But he is dismissive of a certain writerly attitude, a self-conscious mentality which he summarises as follows: “Hey, Ma, look – I’m writing!” And here we come close to the secret, the magic potion that if you could bottle it would be worth a fortune in book sales. Do the opposite. If you want to be a writer, the secret is: don’t be a writer. Try and forget you are writing (difficult, I know).
This is why both Child and Rankin speak with such reverence for the narrative “voice”. And why both privilege dialogue. The successful writer is a throwback to a vast, lost, oral tradition, pre-Homer. Another thing, fast-forwarding, they share in common: the default alter ego is rock star. It’s all about the vibe. Everything has to sound good when you read it aloud.
Art is theft
But if you seriously want to be a writer, think like a reader. Child explained this to me the other day in relation to his novel, Gone Tomorrow, set in New York, which is now often used to teach creative writing. “I introduce this beautiful mysterious woman. I started out thinking: I want my hero to go to bed with her. And then I thought: hold on, isn’t the reader going to be asking: ‘What if she is … bad?’” A small but crucial tweak: one letter – from bed to bad.
“So!“ you might well conclude, “isn’t this bloke like one of those con men who offer to show you how to make a fortune (for a modest outlay) and you think: ‘Well, why don’t you do it then?'” Fair comment. Which is why I am starting a novel right now about an upstart fan who tricks his way into a successful writer’s apartment and steals all his best ideas. I don’t know why, it just came to me in a flash of inspiration. Maybe that, in a word, is the core of all great art: theft. Andy Martin in conversation with Lee Child is part of the Cambridge Literary Festival on April 14. Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, University of Cambridge
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
William Leahy, Brunel University London
If you’re not aware that on April 23 this year – in just a few weeks time – the world will be celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, then I can only think you have no access to any media whatsoever, social or otherwise. All sorts of celebrations – exhibitions, performances, talks, TV marathons, books, cakes, songs and so on – are already underway. And they, and more like them, will continue until the year’s end at least. Online, Twitter and Facebook are alive with almost endless posts with quotes, pictures, comments and clips.
The centre of these celebrations in Britain – and the major source of the endless stream of tweets and posts – is Stratford-upon-Avon, where the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has much invested in this moment of celebration. This is natural enough of course, given that, as it says on the tin, Shakespeare was born and lived in this small country town and returned to it once his career in London was over, dying there in 1616.
The Birthplace Trust owns a number of houses that are associated with Shakespeare and his family and which are now museums open to the paying public. These include the house that is Shakespeare’s Birthplace, as well as Anne Hathaway’s Cottage (Shakespeare’s future bride), Mary Arden’s Farm (Shakespeare’s mother), Hall’s Croft (which according to the website was “the elegant home of Susanna Shakespeare and her husband, Dr John Hall”), and others. Tens of thousands of tourists from around the world flock to these houses and they are the very nucleus of this year’s festivities.
Shakespeare’s ‘Birthplace’.gary718/Shutterstock
But I cannot remove the image of the Sleeping Beauty castle in Disneyland when I think of the various houses. Why? First, there is Shakespeare’s Birthplace on the street where we think Shakespeare was born – but there’s no evidence of which house. And there is no evidence whatsoever that Anne Hathaway, Mary Arden and Dr John Hall lived in the houses they’re attributed to. Hathaway lived in the village where the house is (we think). Arden’s Farm is in the village (we think) where Arden grew up. Hall’s Croft has nothing at all to do with Hall.
Given this, from where I stand, the houses in Stratford are in fact as imaginary as the castle in Disneyland, with the exception that at least the latter acknowledges its fictive nature. So, what is going on? Is there some massive scam going on here, located right in the heart of Shakespeare’s England? Of course not. But it does demonstrate the absurd amounts of mythmaking (and money) that form around these figures that we revere above all others. And sometimes (especially on anniversaries), it’s good to step back and acknowledge how creatively we celebrate these heroes.
Here’s another example. All this reminds me of that other Shakespearean tourist attraction in Verona, Italy: Juliet’s balcony. This is known not to be Juliet’s balcony – how could it be, the play is fiction – and yet tens of thousands of tourists visit it every year.
‘Juliet’s’ balcony.S-F/Shutterstock
The original attraction of Juliet’s balcony lies in the enormous emotional and intellectual drama as it appears in Shakespeare’s play. It is the power of the play itself that is the attraction; a power that draws people to a bogus tourist attraction in order that they can in some way associate themselves with the story on a physical level. Juliet’s balcony is, in this sense a type of holy relic, much like the Turin shroud. Over time even those who do not “believe” are attracted to this famous relic: just as people ignorant of Shakespeare’s story are drawn to the balcony.
And such is the case – on a grand scale – with the various houses that are associated with Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. Many visitors know that the various houses are “fictive” – just like Disneyland’s castle – and yet still pay their money and immerse themselves in “Shakespeare’s England”. For they are entering holy places – tourism is, as we know, a form of modern pilgrimage – and communing with their literary saint, who was responsible for the plays that have moved them so much in their lives. Or, for many, they are a day out at the houses of a famous writer, even if they have not read the works. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust merely provides them with the opportunity to do this (at a cost), in the same way that Disneyland provides visitors with the opportunity to see their cartoon heroes come to life.
When we celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death we are celebrating a mythical figure much like Jesus (or Mickey Mouse). But like Jesus we do not celebrate the real man, as we know almost nothing about him. We celebrate Shakespeare as he is associated with the plays in the same way that we celebrate Jesus as he appears in the Gospels. The fact that the various houses in Stratford-upon-Avon are nothing to do with Shakespeare is beside the point. Their function is to perpetuate the myth, build the brand, continue the fiction of this great man, this holy icon. That is their function – not to be real, but to be “there”.
In this Sept. 21, 2009 file photo, Head Verger Jon Ormrod tends to the grave of William Shakespeare in the Chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford Upon Avon, England.
(Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP)
Archaeologists who scanned the grave of William Shakespeare say they have made a head-scratching discovery: His skull appears to be missing.
Researchers used ground-penetrating radar to explore the playwright's tomb in Stratford-upon-Avon's Holy Trinity Church. Staffordshire University archaeologist Kevin Colls, who led the study, said they found "an odd disturbance at the head end," with evidence of repairs some time after the original burial.
He said the finding supports a claim — first made in 1879 but long dismissed as myth — that the Bard's skull was stolen by grave-robbers in the 18th century.
"It's very, very convincing to me that his skull isn't at Holy Trinity at all," Colls said.
Church records say Shakespeare was buried in his home-town church, 100 miles northwest of London, on April 25, 1616, two days after his death at the age of 52. His wife,Anne Hathaway, daughter and son-in-law were later buried alongside him.
Colls and geophysicist Erica Utsi found the family members lie in shallow graves in the church chancel, rather than in a single vault. There are no traces of nails or other metal, suggesting they may have been buried in cloth shrouds rather than coffins.
Colls said the findings, which feature in a documentary airing Saturday on Britain's Channel 4 television, would "undoubtedly spark discussion, scholarly debate and controversial theories" — and some Shakespeare scholars remained skeptical.
Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, said the grave-robbing claim was first made in an 1879 short story.
"It's striking the piece of fiction imagines Shakespeare being buried quite shallow, and it turns out he was buried quite shallow," he said Thursday. "But it is still a piece of fiction."
A skull takes a starring role in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," in which the Danish prince addresses the bony cranium of a man he once knew: "Alas, poor Yorick!"
But Dobson said it would have been unusual for anyone to want a writer's skull at the time of the alleged theft.
"There wasn't a huge fashion for robbing literary graves in the 18th century," he said.
Holy Trinity's vicar, Patrick Taylor, said he was not convinced there is "sufficient evidence to conclude that his skull has been taken" — and there are no plans to disturb the grave to find out for sure.
"We shall have to live with the mystery of not knowing fully what lies beneath the stone," he said.
That may be a wise decision in light of the warning inscribed on Shakespeare's gravestone:
English dominates as the language of world scholarship. Shutterstock
English was born in the 7th century in England – a small island nation a quarter of the size of France. Since the 17th century, it has become the mother tongue of all locally-born Brits, Americans and Canadians (except for Native Americans on reservations), most Australian and New Zealanders, and several Caribbeans, in the form of English creoles. It has also become the official language of numerous countries of the British Commonwealth: in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.
English remains the dominant working language of the United Nations, although Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish are also used as official languages of the organisation. It has become the dominant working language of the European Union too.
English has become the dominant working language of the European Union
The rise of English is unparalleled in world history – dwarfing even the impressive territorial and demographic expansion of Latin, the administrative language of the Western Roman Empire, of the Catholic Church, and of the European scholarly elite for centuries.
The companion of empire
The worldwide spread of English began with the lucrative colonial ventures of that small island. As an imperial language, English has done better than, for instance, Spanish and Russian.
Spanish spread from Castile to the rest of Spain and then to most of Latin America from the 15th century. However, its spread to the rest of the world was curtailed when it lost Morocco and The Philippines as major exploitation colonies. Russian’s importance as a lingua franca of the former Soviet Union has also decreased since the collapse of this communist bloc.
England’s biggest linguistic victory, however, has been over France – its biggest rival in the colonial venture since the 18th century. This nation, which has celebrated the superiority of its culture and language, must surely envy the success of English.
France started losing the maritime provinces of Canada and some of its Caribbean island colonies to England in the 18th century. In 1803, the emerging United States bought a massive chunk of the New France Colony from Napoleon Bonaparte in the Louisiana Purchase.
The acquisition of this vast territory by the United States – from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, from the Gulf of Mexico to the southern border of Quebec, and beyond, cleared the way for the spread of English from the east to the west coast. The growth of American and Canadian populations since then has resulted in a significant increase in the number of mother-tongue English speakers.
The process continues to date as a consequence of mass migration. The current influx of Hispanics to the US is a transition comparable to the immigration of continental Europeans to North America since the 19th century. With their children acquiring English with native competence, the adult Hispanic immigrants are likely to take their heritage languages and their nonnative accents with them to their graves, as did adult continental European immigrants before them.
English in trade, science and scholarship
Now, in the postcolonial era, English has been expanding largely because of the emergence of the US and the British Commonwealth as the dominant players in world trade. In this game, it is the buyer’s language, not the seller’s, that comes out on top - especially when the buyer is truly king.
The economic and military power of the US and its role in saving Europe from two world wars have promoted English to the status of the foremost diplomatic language, thus demoting French. Its leadership, along with the United Kingdom’s, in science and technology has also made English the dominant world lingua franca of scholarship. Even the French and the Germans, economically powerful and influential as they are in science and technology, have had to bow to English. More and more of their scholars publish in English.
To be sure, there are languages such as Hindi and Mandarin, and in fact even Spanish, which have more mother-tongue speakers than English. But from the point of view of what language one needs to be competitive in the scholarly and business world today, English dominates.
In fact, the rise of China as a leading world economic power is helping the spread of English more than it does Mandarin. There are hundreds of millions of speakers of Cantonese, Haka, Hokkien, and other Sinitic languages who learn Mandarin (otherwise known as Putonghua) as the common, official language of China. By my calculations, these Mandarin learners are outnumbered by the multitude of Chinese and other peoples learning English.
A world of many, unequal Englishes
Since the 1950s, even more countries have adopted English as their international language of trade and scholarship. The Indian-born linguist Braj Kachru at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign refers to them as the “Expanding Circle”.
This is in opposition to the “Inner Circle” and the “Outer Circle”. The Inner Circle includes all countries where English is the mother tongue of the majority population. By contrast, the “Outer Circle” consists of Britain’s former colonies, in which English is an official language but is not spoken as a mother tongue by the overwhelming majority of its users.
Although Kachru’s typology has its limitations, it captures some of the power dynamics in world English: native speakers from the Inner Circle claim more authority on English than speakers in the Outer and Expanding circles. They dictate the norms in publishing and international broadcast. They are also less subject to stigmatisation for their grammatical and spoken peculiarities.
Up in flames: the 450th birthday of William Shakespeare in 2014 was a smoke-filled celebration. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett
State-of-the-art forensic technology from South Africa has been used to try and unravel the mystery of what was smoked in tobacco pipes found in the Stratford-upon-Avon garden of British playwright William Shakespeare.
Residue from clay tobacco pipes more than 400 years old from the playwright’s garden were analysed in Pretoria using a sophisticated technique called gas chromatography mass spectrometry.
Chemicals from pipe bowls and stems which had been excavated from Shakespeare' garden and adjacent areas were identified and quantified during the forensic study. The artefacts for the study were on loan from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
The gas technique is very sensitive to residues that can be preserved in pipes even if they had been smoked 400 years ago.
What were they smoking
There were several kinds of tobacco in the 17th century, including the North American Nicotiana (from which we get nicotine), and cocaine (Erythroxylum), which is obtained from Peruvian coca leaves.
It has been claimed that Sir Francis Drake may have brought coca leaves to England after his visit to Peru, just as Sir Walter Raleigh had brought “tobacco leaves” (Nicotiana) from Virginia in North America.
In a recent issue of a magazine called Country Life, Mark Griffiths has stimulated great interest in John Gerard’s Herbal, published in 1597 as a botanical book which includes engraved images of several people in the frontispiece. One of them (cited as “The Fourth Man”) is identified by Griffiths as William Shakespeare, but this identification is questionable.
Possibly, the engraving represents Sir Francis Drake, who knew Gerard.
Gerard’s Herbal refers to various kinds of “tobacco” introduced to Europe by Drake and Raleigh in the days of Shakespeare in Elizabethan England.
There certainly is a link between Drake and plants from the New World, notably corn, the potato and “tobacco”. Furthermore, one can associate Raleigh with the introduction of “tobacco” to Europe from North America (notably in the context of the tobacco plant called Nicotiana, from Virginia and elsewhere).
What we found
There was unquestionable evidence for the smoking of coca leaves in early 17th century England, based on chemical evidence from two pipes in the Stratford-upon-Avon area.
Neither of the pipes with cocaine came from Shakepeare’s garden. But four of the pipes with cannabis did.
Results of this study (including 24 pipe fragments) indicated cannabis in eight samples, nicotine in at least one sample, and in two samples definite evidence for Peruvian cocaine from coca leaves.
Shakespeare may have been aware of the deleterious effects of cocaine as a strange compound. Possibly, he preferred cannabis as a weed with mind-stimulating properties.
These suggestions are based on the following literary indications. In Sonnet 76, Shakespeare writes about “invention in a noted weed”. This can be interpreted to mean that Shakespeare was willing to use “weed” (cannabis as a kind of tobacco) for creative writing (”invention”).
In the same sonnet it appears that he would prefer not to be associated with “compounds strange”, which can be interpreted, at least potentially, to mean “strange drugs” (possibly cocaine).
Sonnet 76 may relate to complex wordplay relating in part to drugs (compounds and “weed”), and in part to a style of writing, associated with clothing (”weeds”) and literary compounds (words combined to form one, as in the case of the word “Philsides” from Philip Sidney).
Was Shakespeare high?
Chemical analyses of residues in early 17th-century clay “tobacco pipes” have confirmed that a diversity of plants was smoked in Europe. Literary analyses and chemical science can be mutually beneficial, bringing the arts and the sciences together in an effort to better understand Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
This has also begged the question whether the plays of Shakespeare were performed in Elizabethan England in a smoke-filled haze?
One can well imagine the scenario in which Shakespeare performed his plays in the court of Queen Elizabeth, in the company of Drake, Raleigh and others who smoked clay pipes filled with “tobacco”. This piece is based on an article published in the South African Journal of Science in July 2015. Francis Thackeray, Phillip Tobias Chair in Palaeoanthropology, Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
