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By: linda sarah,
on 9/26/2015
By: Paula Becker,
on 5/30/2014
I’m working on and finishing up a few projects, and all have a dog or dogs. Also, in different styles. Below are clips from the final or working toward final illustrations.
By: linda sarah,
on 6/22/2011
By: Kirsty,
on 12/2/2010
London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew is an extraordinary work of investigative journalism, a work of literature, and a groundbreaking work of sociology. It centres on hundreds of interviews conducted by Mayhew with London’s street traders, beggars, and thieves, which provide unprecedented insight into the day-to-day struggle for survival on London’s streets in the 19th century.
In the video below, our edition’s editor, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, explains why he believes it is still well worth reading today. The interview was conducted by George Miller for Podularity. Robert has previously written this post for OUPblog.
Click here to view the embedded video.
By: Gigi Moore,
on 10/5/2010
Finally finished my Winter Observation illustration.
Some pieces from the book Quiet Tessa, Scholastic 2007... I love black and white and don't really do enough of it.
By: Rebecca,
on 3/31/2009
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The
Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at regulation. Read his previous OUPblogs here.
Government regulation of the market in American has always been either too invasive or too superficial, never just right. This tells us more about ourselves than the day-by-day report card of Obama’s fledgling administration.
The Obama adminstration’s firing of GM CEO Rick Wagoner seem to some to have been a power grab and an overkill; yet others feel that the administration’s plan to help to buy up some of the toxic assets owned by banks will be too easy on the banks.
We swing between the extremes of excessive regulation and unfettered laissez faire - indeed we have majority factions within both major parties staunchly defending both extremes - because our country has never properly worked out the tension between the two.
Consider the last time an economic crisis of even greater proportions rocked the country. The New Deal and in particular the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) represented an even greater power grab by the Roosevelt administration than the one Obama is being accused of today, including the right by the president to approve of a set of “codes of fair competition” for every industry regulating minimum wages and maximum weekly hours. The Supreme Court unanimously declared the NRA unconstitutional in 1936.
As a country born without the feudal baggage of the old world and one which has constructed the self-fulfilling myth of the American Dream, we have never had to fully confront the crisis of capitalism that industrialization provoked elsewhere. Even having experienced the Great Depression, we still have not found, and no politician has successfully articulated, a sustained national consensus about the relationship between the state and the economy. Our love-hate relationship with the federal government explains American exceptionalism, but it also the source of our current woes.
Because ours is a capitalist economy which concedes the value of government intervention and regulation, we must lived with mixed (and hence often botched) solutions to our current economic crisis. We can neither nationalize the banks - and hence control how they are run including how executive compensation is structured, nor can we leave the banks alone - no politician would dare risk a depression on the heels of his/her inaction. In trying to find a compromise between market liberalism and political control of the market, we often end up achieving neither. So the Obama administration will alternately be accused of sleeping with Wall Street or witch-hunting it; decades after we have weathered the current crisis, we will still be debating whether or not what Obama did helped or worsened the problem. This is America, where we have a right, nay, a duty, to earnestly debate - as our Founders did - the necessity of even having a federal government at all.
By: Kelly Fineman,
on 2/3/2008
When I was at ALA, I scored a paperback copy of How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster. I've only read a bit of the book thus far, but I can tell you that thus far, the subtitle is not a lie. The chapters are short. They are written conversationally. And they are full of pithy advice and sentences, some of which are oversimplifications, but most of which are useful in any case.
On poetry
Foster's fourth chapter is entitled "If It's Square, It's a Sonnet". He goes on to explain that he doesn't bother teaching much of anything but sonnets (fie on Mr. Foster, fie!), because unless you're a poet or really into poetry, it's kind of pointless. (A thousand times fie! Which would, I suppose, be fie thousand. But I digress.) He notes that a sonnet contains 14 lines, and is usually in iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line), which means that it's roughly as high as it is wide on the page. And then he says this:
I think people who read poems for enjoyment should always read the poem first, without a formal or stylistic care in the world. They should not begin by counting lines, or looking at line endings to find the rhyme scheme, if any, just as I think people should read novels without peeking at the ending: just enjoy the experience. After you've had your first pleasure, though, one of the additional pleasures is seeing how the poet worked that magic on you. There are many ways a poem can charm the reader: choice of images, music of the language, idea content, cleverness or wordplay. And at least some part of the answer, if that magic came in a sonnet, is form.
Huzzah! for Mr. Foster after all. And his further explication of what a sonnet is and what it can accomplish is equally good. He closes his chapter by noting that "Sonnets are . . . short poems that take far more time [to write], because everything has to be perfect, than long ones. We owe it to poets, I think, to notice that they've gone to this trouble, as well as to ourselves, to understand the nature of the thing we're reading. When you start to read a poem, then, look at the shape."
On writing compelling biography or nonfiction
I recently read a 2003 New York Times interview with Laura Hillenbrand, the author of the acclaimed bestseller, Seabiscuit. Here are some bits from the interview. The first bit is her explanation as to how she made the book feel alive and contemporary.
I think the secret to bringing immediacy to any nonfiction story is to ferret out every detail that is there to be found, so that the reader feels like an eyewitness. To do this, I consulted a very broad range of sources, from record books to living witnesses, and everything in between. I studied every film and photograph that I could find, and acquired complete newspapers and magazines from the period and read them cover to cover so I could put myself in the mindset of the men and women of the era. I researched what things cost, what books and movies were popular, what the weather was on a particular day, anything that might help me stand in the shoes of an average American of the Depression era. I was very fortunate in that Seabiscuit was covered very heavily in the press and followed by millions of people, so there was a lot to be found.
My goal as an historian is to make nonfiction read as smoothly as fiction while adhering very strictly to fact. I read a lot of nonfiction, and have certainly been influenced by such superb historians as Bruce Catton and David McCullough, but the writers who have had the greatest impact on me have been novelists. Michael Shaara's masterpiece "The Killer Angels," an historic novel about Gettysburg, has had a tremendous influence on my writing. Tolstoy has also been a wonderful teacher, namely "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina." Other writers I read over and over again, and try to emulate, include Austen, Wharton, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
Don't forget that Masterpiece Theatre is airing Miss Austen Regrets at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations tonight. And try not to laugh (as I did) at the name of the lovely younger girl pictured here in the role of Fanny Austen Knight. (And no, Fanny isn't the name I found funny - it's her real name, Imogen Poots, that cracked me up. I am so very immature.)
By: Kelly Fineman,
on 1/20/2008
On what writing is
"I always thought writing was arraying words in beautiful patterns, but now I think it's more like walking blindfolded, listening with your whole heart, and then looking backward to see if you made any tracks worth keeping." Sara Lewis Holmes in her recent Poetry Friday post at Read Write Believe.
On why fiction/fantasy matter
Ten days ago, I put up a post entitled "Why We Need Fiction", about which I remain pleased. One of my rationales for why fiction is important reads as follows: "We need fiction because it allows us to create an artificial barrier, behind which we can examine Big Important Issues in a hypothetical setting, instead of beating people's brains out, possibly literally, by addressing those issues in the real world."
I've started reading my copy of The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy by Leonard S. Marcus, and it appears that Lloyd Alexander agreed with me in part:
"Q: Why do you write fantasy?
A: Because, paradoxically, fantasy is a good way to show the world as it is. Fantasy can show us the truth about human relationships and moral dilemmas because it works on our emotions on a deeper, symbolic level than realistic fiction. It has the same emotional power as a dream."
On poetry
Here, the first seven lines of a fourteen-line poem by James Kirkup called "The Poet":
Each instant of his life, a task, he never rests,
And works most when he appears to be doing nothing.
The least of it is putting down in words
What usually remains unwritten and unspoken,
And would so often be much better left
Unsaid, for it is really the unspeakable
That he must try to give an ordinary tongue to.
And from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which airs tonight at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations, the novel of which I reviewed last July. Here is a portion of the text taken from a description of the developing friendship between Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe. This section is often referred to as Austen's "defence of the novel", and is found in Volume I, chapter 5 of the novel:
. . . and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; ——for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding ——joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens, -- there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader ——I seldom look into novels ——Do not imagine that I often read novels ——It is really very well for a novel." ——Such is the common cant. —— "And what are you reading, Miss ——————?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ——"It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;" or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.
Seems the more things change, the more they remain the same. No?
By: Kelly Fineman,
on 11/18/2007
It's Sunday, and you know what that means: time for a bit of quoteskimming.
On Poetry:
"Poetry began when somebody walked off a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, 'Ah-h-h!' That was the first poem. The urge towards 'Ah-h-h!' is very human, it's in everybody." ~Lucille Clifton
"Don't shackle poetry with your definitions. Poetry is not a frail and cerebral old woman, you know. Poetry is stronger than you think. Poetry is imagination and will break those chains faster than you can say 'Harlem Renaissance.'" ~Mark Flanagan
On Writing Poetry:
"One of the most definable characteristics of the poetic form is economy of language. Poets are miserly and unrelentingly critical in the way they dole out words to a page. Carefully selecting words for conciseness and clarity is standard, even for writers of prose, but poets go well beyond this, considering a word's emotive qualities, its musical value, its spacing, and yes, even its spacial relationship to the page." ~Mark Flanagan
"The imagery gets richer as I write. 'I walk the dog and it’s there' is fine for a rough draft, but I made it more specific in the final draft: 'I walk the dog and plot how it gets stamped on my ankle bone.' . . . I find this to be true of nearly all my rough drafts---the triggering words are mundane, the ending words, much richer. I get more 'live hits' the deeper in I go." ~Sara Lewis Holmes, in her notes about the construction of her poem, "Inked: On Memorizing Gerard Manley Hopkins". You can read Sara's poem, hear Sara read her own poem, and check out the rough draft and notes (from whence came this quote) at Sara's podcast site, A Cast of One.
"Writing a poem is like conducting an argument between your unconscious mind and your conscious self. You have to get unconsciousness and consciousness lined up in some way. I suspect that's why working to a form, achieving a stanza, and keeping to it—deciding that the first and third and fifth lines will have to rhyme, and that you're going to insist on so many stresses per line—oddly helps the poem to be born. That is, to free itself from you and your attentions to it and become a piece of art in itself. Heaven only knows where it comes from! I suppose working out a form diminishes the thousands of possibilities you face when you begin. And once you've cut down the possibilities, you can't swim off into the deep and drown." ~Anne Stevenson
On revision and critique:
This week, the lovely and talented Jennifer Hubbard
"Take a break. Let the story sit a week or two before you go back to revise. After all, 'revise' means 'see again.' You can't take a second look at something unless you first look away." ~David Lubar, quoted by Kate Messner in her speech to the NYS English Council. You can read more revision tips from others (including, well, me) in Kate's blog post.
On characters
What makes a memorable character, particularly in a children's book?
"'It has to do with an intensity of presence,' [Philip] Pullman says. 'Just as some people are so much there that you can sense when they come into the house, so some characters in fiction have the same authority or charisma. Some personal quality makes them more alive than their fellow characters. It has nothing to do with how good or friendly a characters is. They can be horrible, and you can still not lift your eyes from the page when they appear.'" From an article by Amanda Craig that appeared in The Times, called Creating Characters.
On character motivation, again from Jenn Hubbard (and if you aren't reading her yet, really, why aren't you?):
Some things that help me get in touch with the motivations of my characters--the secret and the not-so-secret motivations:
Asking myself, 'What does this character really, really want, more than anything?' (sounds obvious, but I can't believe how far into a first draft I can get before I remember to ask this!)
Writing some scenes from different characters' points of view
Writing scenes that don't appear in the final manuscript, but that help me see how characters interact in other situations
Rewriting scenes with different endings (I thought the scene went this-a-way, but what if it went that-a-way instead? What if the character said this, not that? Then where does the scene go? What am I learning about everyone?)
THE FIRST AUCTION STARTS TOMORROW! You can see precisely which flakes will be on the block this week at The Robert's Snow page. While there, you can find information on how to register to be a bidder, and can check out the bidding rules.
To check out the snowflakes featured in today's blogosphere, click on the Robert's Snow button. Jules at 7-Imp has posted two new 2007 snowflakes: an astonishing winged snowflake featuring "Cupid and Psyche" from Rebecca Guay, and Kathy Jakobsen's DC-inspired "Jefferson Memorial/Washington Monument". In addition, Jules and Eisha have also been keeping an ongoing list of blog posts thus far featuring snowflakes and the artists who created them.
Really wonderful Peggy! Especialll lvoe the feet!
I just found your blog, and I love your art...