Well, now that the National Book Awards winners have been announced, and congratulations to all the winners, it’s time to share which lucky OUPblog readers will be getting free books in the mail!

In first place with five points was Shawn Miklaucic who gets the big prize, the Historical Thesaurus of the OED.

In second place with two points was Jilly Dybka who will receive a Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.

In third place with one point was Christopher Elias who will get a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition).

A great big thank you to everyone who participated and to all the fabulous authors who wrote books we enjoyed this year.  2009 was chock-full of great literature and we can’t wait to read what you publish next year!

The National Book Award nominees were announced earlier this week. Kudos to all nominees, especially to our friends & compatriots at the nominated University Presses. I am glad to see the great good wisdom of the nominating committee at the NBAs. Congratulations aside, it is tradition here in the OUP publicity dept to host a little friendly contest to see who can pick the most NBA winners. This year I am inviting our blog readers to join the fray and send me your picks.  Details below.

Please note there is a point system in this contest. Correct picks in Fiction and Non-fiction will each receive 1 point each, 2 points for a correct pick in YA literature, and 3 points for a correct pick in the Poetry category. Please, only one submission per person. Send your entry to publicity.us@oup.com.

In the event of a tie, all entrants with the highest score will be placed in a raffle for prizes. Prizes include a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition), the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the Historical Thesaurus of the OED. One prize per player. I reserve the right to disqualify anyone I feel is trying to game this friendly competition. Awards are announced on November 18th. Winners here will be announced on November 20, 2009. Good luck.

FICTION (1 point)
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

NONFICTION (1 point)
David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)
T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf)

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE (2 points)
Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Henry Holt)
Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
David Small, Stitches (W. W. Norton & Co.)
Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

POETRY (3 points)
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press)

I’ve recently been dipping into The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, edited by Roger Lonsdale, and I’ve been struck by the number of wonderful poems – sometimes funny, sometimes sad – therein. Since I’ve been enjoying it so much, I thought I would today bring you a few short poems from the eighteenth-century.

In Praise of Laudanum – William Harrison (1714)

I feel, O Laudanum, thy power divine

And fall with pleasure at thy slumb’ring shrine:

Lulled by thy charms I ’scape each anxious thought,

And everything but Mira is forgot.

A Dutch Proverb – Matthew Prior (1709)

Fire, water, woman, are man’s ruin

Says wise Professor Vander Brüin.

By flames a house I hired was lost

Last year, and I must pay the cost.

This spring the rains o’erflowed my ground,

And my best Flanders mare was drowned.

A slave I am to Clara’s eyes:

The gypsy knows her pow’r, and flies.

Fire, water, woman, are my ruin:

And great thy wisdom, Vander Brüin.

The Poetess’s Bouts-Rimé – Anonymous (1747)

Dear Phoebus, hear my only vow;

If e’er you loved me, here me now.

That charming youth – but idle fame

Is ever so inclined to blame–

These men will turn it to a jest;

I’ll tell the rhymes and drop the rest:

– — – desire,

– — – fire,

– — – lie,

– — – thigh,

– — – wide,

– — – ride,

– — – night,

– — – delight.

Epitaph on Two Piping-Bullfinches of Lady Ossory’s, Buried under a Rose-Bush in her Garden – Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford (1783, pub. 1798)

All flesh is grass, and so are feathers too:

Finches must die, as well as I and you.

Beneath a damask rose, in good old age,

Here lies the tenant of a noble cage.

For forty moons he charmed his lady’s ear,

And piped obedient oft as she drew near,

Though now stretched out upon a clay-cold bier.

But when the last shrill flagelot shall sound,

And raise all dickybirds from holy ground,

His little corpse again its wings shall plume,

And sing eternally the self-same tune,

From everlasting night to everlasting noon.

On the Other Bullfinch, Buried in the Same Place

Beneath the same bush rests his brother–

What serves for one, will serve for t’other.

On the Setting up Mr. Butler’s Monument in Westminster Abbey – Samuel Wesley (1726)

While Butler, needy wretch! was yet alive,

No gen’rous patron would a dinner give:

See him, when starved to death and turned to dust,

Presented him with a monumental bust!

The poet’s fate is here in emblem shown:

He asked for bread, and he received a stone.

Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, as well as a science fiction novelist. He is the editor of Tennyson: the Major Works, which was recently published in the Oxford World’s Classics series. In the original post below, he reviews the Booker shortlisted novel The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds, which features Tennyson as a main character.

If you’d like to read more by Adam Roberts, he also writes for literary blog, The Valve.

I picked up Adam Foulds’ excellent new novel The Quickening Maze (it has, as I’m sure you know, been shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize) with more than an ordinary reader’s interest. You see, this scrupulously researched historical novel takes Alfred Tennyson as one of the main characters; and I, as the editor of Tennyson: the Major Works, was curious as to how Foulds treats him.

I was not disappointed. The Quickening Maze is, throughout, a beautifully written fiction: set in 1840 and centred on the lunatic asylum run by Dr Matthew Allen on the outskirts of Epping Forest, the novel evokes its world with a poet’s eye and skill at phrasing—indeed the book is as much about poetry, or poetic perception, as it is about a series of events. The point-of-view shifts deftly between all the main characters, including a number of the inmates at the asylum; although the peasant poet, John Clare, is the main focus. A patient in Allen’s asylum, his sanity is precarious at the beginning of the tale and becomes less stable as it goes on. Fould’s vivid, precise way with poetic image, and his exquisite control of language, brilliantly evoke the world through Clare’s hyper-sensitive eyes.

But Tennyson has a large part to play too. He comes into the story as he oversees the admittance of his brother Septimus (suffering from the melancholic ‘black blood’ of the Tennysons) to the asylum, living there for nearly three years. Dr Allen befriends Tennyson, and persuades him to invest in his idea for an automated wood-lathe—in fact Tennyson put almost all the money he had, £3000, into this scheme, only to lose it all. The doctor’s pale, bookish daughter Hannah falls hopelessly in love with Tennyson, although the emotion is not reciprocated.

Foulds has certainly done his research. He credits Robert Bernard Martin’s dependable biography Tennyson: the Unquiet Heart in his acknowledgments, but I take this to be modest understatement on his part; because one thing that emerges from this book is how well Foulds knows his pre-1840s Tennyson. I’ll give a few examples. Early in the book Tennyson talks philosophy with Allen, who believes in a ‘Grand Agent’ behind the phenomena of reality: ‘a common cause, a unitary force.’ Tennyson concurs.

“I see. A Spinozism, of sorts.” And Tennyson did see: a white fabric, candescent, pure, flowing through itself, surging, charged, unlimited. And in the world the flourishing of forms, their convulsions: upward thrive of trees, sea waves, the mathematical toy of sea shells, the flight of dragonflies. [25]

This is nicely done; and if the reader of Tennyson recognises the sea-shell from Maud, the dragonfly from ‘The Two Voices’ it only contributes to the effect. Fould’s Tennyson goes on more specifically:

“As a boy I could put myself into a trance by repeating my name over and over until my sense of identity was quite dissolved. What I was then was a being somehow merging, or sustained, with a greater thing, truly vast. It was abstract, warm, featureless and frightful.” [The Quickening Maze, p.26]

This speech has been lifted from a letter Tennyson wrote (late in his life—in 1874) to an American mystic and writer Benjamin Paul Flood. Flood, it seems, believed it was possible to enter a spiritual trance state via the newly discovered medical technologies of anasthesia. Tennyson wrote:

I have never had any revelations through anaesthetics: but “ a kind of waking trance” (this for lack of a better word) I have frequently had quite up from boyhood. When I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being—and this not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words—where Death was an almost laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life. [Tennyson: the Major Works, p.520]

What interests me here is how Foulds have adapted this famous self-description for the purposes of his novel: Tennyson’s actual 1874 account is surprisingly reassuring about this strange fugue state, and wholly positive: ‘not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest … Death was an almost laughable impossibility … no extinction but the only true life’. In the novel, though, it becomes something rather more unnerving: ‘abstract, featureless and frightful’—because The Quickening Maze’s main focus is on madness, on that breakdown of coherent consciousness and its fearful consequences.

‘May I ask you, what is your opinion of Lord Byron’s poetry?’ Hannah, the doctor’s daughter enquires later on in the narrative Tennyson replies:

I remember when he died. I was a lad. I walked out into the woods full of distress at the news. It was the thought of all he hadn’t written, all bright inside him, being lost for ever, lowered into the darkness for eternity. I was most gloomy and despondent. I scratched his name onto a rock, a sandstone rock. It must still be there, I should think. [The Quickening Maze, pp.102-3]

The original for this is a conversation Tennyson had late in life with his son, Hallam.

We talked of Byron and Wordsworth. “Of course,” said Tennyson, “Byron’s merits are all on the surface. This is not the case with Wordsworth. You must love Wordsworth ere he will seem worthy of your love. As a boy I was an enormous admirer of Byron, so much so that I got a surfeit of him, and now I cannot read him as I should like to do. I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: “Byron is dead!” [Tennyson: the Major Works, p.541]

Once again Foulds has done something interesting with his source material. The substance of the recollection is the same, but where Tennyson’s original account is a cathartic outpouring—he ‘rushed out of doors’ at the news, ‘shouted aloud’ and wrote on rock to express himself—Foulds internalises the grief. His Tennyson is filled, even glutted, with a grief that is inside: he goes ‘into the woods’; he is ‘full of distress’ at ‘the thought of all he hadn’t written, all bright inside him.’ This interiorisation of experience is one of the main thrusts of the novel. Foulds’ characters all inhabit their subjectivities much more than they live in the world, some to the point of monomaniac madness. The exception also proves the rule: Clare, whose perceptions of the natural world around him furnish the novel with some of its most beautiful moments, cannot escape his own imprisoning imagination. He sinks into a grief-filled interiority—even believing himself to be Lord Byron himself—for he has been unable to cope with the death of his childhood sweetheart Mary, and the fantasy of her being alive again overwhelms him.

The parallels with Tennyson are unobtrusively drawn: in 1840 he was also sunk in grief, at the premature death (in 1833) of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Foulds’ Tennyson reverts to memories of Hallam time and again, and across the course of the novel he is writing the elegiac lyrics that were later collected into Tennyson’s most famous poem, ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’ Foulds quotes the ninth:

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore
Sailest the placid ocean-plains
With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er.

So draw him home to those that mourn
In vain; a favourable speed
Ruffle thy mirror’d mast, and lead
Thro’ prosperous floods his holy urn.

All night no ruder air perplex
Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright
As our pure love, thro’ early light
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

Sphere all your lights around, above;
Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
My Friend, the brother of my love;

My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow’d race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me. [The Quickening Maze, pp. 107-8; Tennyson: the Major Works, p.209]

That Tennyson is sane, and Clare mad, has as much to do with the different emphases of their imaginative engagements with mourning. Tennyson styles himself, patiently, as Arthur’s ‘widow’, in the last stanza there; a feminisation that Foulds develops in his fictional recreation of the poet’s personality. Clare, on the other hand, chafes against his restrains. He believes himself a famous pugilist, and fights with the asylum’s warders and with local gypsies. He roams restlessly through Epping forest, and—in a superb passage at he novel’s end—walks all the way back to his home village, a journey of 80 miles or more, overcoming the obstacles placed in his way, landscape, hunger and weakness. By comparison Tennyson moves smoothly: Foulds captures well his stillness and inwardness, his silences, the way he draws things into himself—not least, tobacco smoke (Allen “watched Tennyson relight his pipe, hollowing his clean-shaven cheeks as he plucked the flame upside down into the bowl of scorched tobacco’ [23]”). In all, it’s very deftly and sensitively done. The novel is highly recommended.

Sue Brown is an independent scholar based in London and Malta, and is the author of Joseph Severn, A Life: The Rewards of Friendship. Joseph Severn (1793-1879) was the best known but most controversial of poet John Keats’s friends. In the nineteenth century Severn’s friendship with Keats was seen as a model of devoted masculine companionship and he was reburied by popular acclaim next to Keats in 1882. In the original post below, Sue Brown reflects on her recent party at Keats House, and wonders what is was about the poet that brought out the best in people.

It absolutely bucketed down in London last Tuesday evening and never stopped all evening. Tube stations were closed, railways disrupted, the traffic ground to a halt and I and a friend struggled to get the drink and glasses up to Keats House for the party I was giving to celebrate the publication of my new biography of Joseph Severn. Gloomily, I wondered whether anyone would come. Mick Scott, the manager at Keats House, did a wonderful job carrying heavy cartons of wine and champagne into the House and getting soaked to the skin. Downstairs in the kitchen, where Charles Brown must often have visited Abigail O’Donaghue eyeing her up as she laboured, my caterers were already busy turning out delicious canapés.

And as we opened a few bottles, we saw through the windows odd figures crouched under umbrellas, or, bareheaded, braving their way through the garden to knock on the front door. On this most inhospitable of evenings, Keats House was the most hospitable of places. A few turned back or got lost in the downpour: but eighty persisted. Among them were direct descendants of Charles Brown, from New Zealand and France; a descendant of Severn’s oldest child, the gentle Claudia Gale, from Minnesota, as well as descendants of Severn’s eldest son, Walter, and his youngest daughter, Eleanor, including Lady Juliet Townsend who was so generous to me when I worked in the family attic, truffling out some amazing treasures. And Fernando Paradinas, who is directly descended from Fanny Keats came with his wife, Patricia.

It struck me that this was probably the most extended gathering of descendants of Keats and his circle since the originals got together at Wentworth Place nearly two hundred years ago. Nobody has yet told me that I’m wrong about that.

The House is now looking splendid having recently been refurbished. If that makes it look a bit too spick and span Mick and Ken Page are quick to remind visitors that it was still very new in Charles Brown’s day and I guess that Charles Brown, Keats’s landlord and an active domestic manager, made sure that carpets and curtains stayed clean – and umbrellas were left at the door. It’s not difficult to imagine Keats and Severn together there, making a “concert” with Charles Wells for six hours in the New Years in 1818 (but what on earth could it have sounded like?) Or Severn flirting with Fanny Brawne the first time he met her at a party as Keats morosely compared his own dwarfish stature with Severn’s matinee idol good looks. He was always miserably conscious of being only five feet tall. Keats House has cleverly set a bust of him at his exact height. With everyone milling around it on Tuesday evening, it was easy to imagine why parties could be an ordeal for Keats. But Keats forgave Severn and described the spare bed at Wentworth Place as “your little crib” inviting him to come and sleep for nine hours and spend the day gossiping as he painted in the backgrounds to his miniatures. It is not difficult to imagine them chatting away in “Keats Parlour” neither of them guessing the tragic turn of events which would take them both to Italy in September 1820.

When Keats last left Wentworth Place on Wednesday morning, 13 September, it must have seemed more likely than not that he would have to sail to Italy and then make the journey from Naples to Rome entirely alone, desperately ill though he was. The same morning William Haslam went to see Joseph Severn to persuade him to drop everything (including an illegitimate son) and go with Keats on the Maria Crowther which was then due to sail on the 15th. Severn – to both his credit and, as it turned out, his profit – said Yes.

What is it about Keats that brings out the best in people? A curator at the Houghton Library where the main Severn collection is once told me how much more agreeable, warm and congenial, conferences on Keats were, compared with those on Byron or Shelley where participants were more disputatious. And would anyone but Keats have brought 80 people up to an obscure corner of Hampstead on a truly miserable night to celebrate his friendship with Joseph Severn?

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Below is a hint to a musical riddle. His introduction is below and be sure to check back tomorrow for the answer and to try his other riddles here. Feel free to guess the answer in the comments.

Sixties British pop created a wealth of musical material that we now describe as classics, not that classicists are likely to embrace them. Not just the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Who, but a wealth of musicians of that era competed to produced recordings that would catch the listening public’s attention, draw them to their concerts, and sell disks. This month’s riddle celebrates another anniversary from that milieu.

Riddle me now, riddle me then,
Can you tell me what again?

Brothers rage against the right,
But this song came before the night.

Not quite crooked, and not perverse;
Replace with “girl,” improve the verse.

Proto-punk, a random slice,
A wild guitar, a roll of the dice.

Those of you acquainted with British weather will know that we do not have the hottest of climates. However, The Met Office reliably informed us earlier this year that this summer we were actually in for a bit of a scorcher (by UK standards, you understand). A collective cheer went up, and across the land barbeques and garden furniture were put on stand-by, ready for that first gleam of sun. The signs were good. We had – oooh – a week of 30+ degrees! And then it started raining again.

This week The Met Office officially revised its estimates of the kind of summer we could expect here in Blighty… and it’s considerably less exciting than previously hoped. Sure enough, as I sit and type this on a July afternoon in Oxford, the rain is beating off the windows with no sign of abating. With that in mind, I bring you some of my favourite rain-related quotes from The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (new, seventh edition publishing in the UK in September). Now, where’s me brolly… ?

Whoso boasteth himself of a false gift is like clouds and wind without rain.
The Bible, Proverbs ch. 25, v. 11

It lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the rain.
Samuel Pepys, Diary, 19 July 1662

Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought.
Dwight Morrow, American lawyer, banker, and diplomat (attributed)

The drop of rain maketh a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.
Hugh Latimer, English Protestant martyr, 19 April 1549

She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, st. 10, 1821

If in February there be no rain, ’tis neither good for hay nor grain.
early 18th century proverb

We swing ungirded hips,
And lightened are our eyes,
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
Charles Hamilton Sorley, English poet, Song of the Ungirt Runners, 1916

It was a real slow walk in a real sad rain.
Johnny Cash, Drive On, 1993

And ghastly through the drizzling rain
On the bald streets breaks the blank day.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., canto 7 (1850)

A duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London.
Thomas De Quincey, English essayist and critic, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1822 (ed. 1856)

She was the kind of wife who looks out of her front door in the morning and, if it’s raining, apologizes.
Fay Weldon, British novelist and screenwriter, Heart of the Country, 1987

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
W.H. Auden, quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, W.H. Auden, ch. 6, 1981

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry.  Yesterday he puzzled us all with a masterful riddle, below he explains the answer.

Riddle me that, riddle me this; can you tell me what it is?
Was not born in Leicester Square; nevertheless, the square was there.
Did not start out as a star; still a nocturnal sun is tougher by far.
Not that parent’s parent, but very mean; Fred came off as very clean.
Did not need to take a tram; a Welsh transplant saw through the glam.

On Monday 6 July 1964, forty-five years ago Monday 6 July 2009, the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night, premiered for an audience of royalty, dignitaries, record executives, and friends. Of course, the surrounding streets were jammed with fans hoping for a glimpse of the Fab Four as would be Liverpool a few days later for its premier. The film arguably marked the peak of international Beatlemania with record audiences around the globe returning to see the film and memorizing the lines. In theaters almost everywhere, the film’s opening scene of the Beatles racing down Boston Place chased by fans near Marylebone Station elicited screams that suggested the band was about to exit the screen and dive out among the viewers. This riddle plays with some elements of the film

“Was not born in Leicester Square; nevertheless, the square was there.”
A Hard Day’s Night premiered at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus, not Leicester Square where today you can find several film theaters. On the surface, Richard Lester (whose name is not spelled “Leicester” but is pronounced that way) seemed an unlikely candidate to direct the film. Prematurely bald, 32-years-old, and American, he appeared a bit too square to interpret the adolescent world of England’s shaggy-haired heroes. Nevertheless, his work with Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Peter Sellers in translating their radio Goon Show for television and, in particular, his work on the eleven-minute short, The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film marked him as a favorite of the Beatles.

“Did not start out as a star; still a nocturnal sun is tougher by far.”
The film’s title notoriously comes from a quirky aside by the Beatles’ drummer. Ringo Starr did not begin life with that name, but rather as Richard Starkey. Like many other teens in postwar Britain, he had a fascination with American westerns and, when he became a professional musician, adopted a stage name that reflected that interest.

The Beatles had become used to a schedule that had them performing at night followed by personal time. Richard Lester introduced them to the life of film crews, which had them up early in the morning. One day during the shoot, Starr emerged from one of the theaters or studios thinking that the sun might still be in the sky. He began to utter the line, “It’s been a hard day’s work,” when he realized the sky was dark. Instead of “work,” he substituted “night,” which apparently delighted John Lennon. Lester preferred this phrase to Beatlemania as the film’s title and Lennon wrote a song to close the deal.

“Not that parent’s parent, but very mean; Fred came off as very clean.”

One of the films conceits introduces a character played by Wilfred Brambell who repeatedly causes trouble for the band and everyone else in the story by inciting arguments and eliciting money. The film introduces us to Brambell through the eyes of the other characters who, when they ask about his identity, are told he’s Paul McCartney’s grandfather. When they respond that they’ve met McCartney’s grandfather and that this isn’t him, the response is that McCartney has two grandfathers and that this is the other one. The running gag—along with the line that describes him as very “clean”—serves the purpose of legitimizing Brambell’s presence among four of the best-known individuals in the world at that time.

“Did not need to take a tram; a Welsh transplant saw through the glam.”

Although the idea behind the film was to capture the lives of the Beatles in a kind of cinéma vérité black-and-white style, Lester wanted a script. He turned to a promising young screenplay writer, Alun Owen, because the Welsman had been so successful at capturing a working-class image of Liverpool in his No Trams to Lime Street. Owen, who had spent his adolescent years in Liverpool, had an ear for dialect and an eye for detail. After briefly traveling with the Beatles, he came to see how their fame had trapped them in hotel rooms, dressing rooms, and train compartments and he brought this image to the film. He also listened to their stories of the kinds of things that happened to them, such as the scene where a suited middle-aged businessman reminds them that he had fought a war for them. In general, although the film had the Beatles playing a band called the Beatles, McCartney thinks that Owen accurately distilled their world.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Below is a hint to a musical riddle.  His introduction is below and be sure to check back tomorrow for the answer.  Feel free to guess the answer in the comments.

Day One: The Riddle

British pop music resounded around the globe in the sixties, expanding American consciousness of the musical world outside of its borders and providing adolescents with a vehicle by which they could define an identity unique from their parents. For this month’s riddle, I’ll give you the additional clue that, as with my earlier blog entries, this riddle celebrates an anniversary.
Here are your riddle clues…

Riddle me that, riddle me this; can you tell me what it is?
Was not born in Leicester Square; nevertheless, the square was there.
Did not start out as a star; still a nocturnal sun is tougher by far.
Not that parent’s parent, but very mean; Fred came off as very clean.
Did not need to take a tram; a Welsh transplant saw through the glam.

Stephen Mansfield is an author and photojournalist who has been living on the edges of Tokyo since the late 1980s.  His book, Tokyo: A Cultural History, looks at how Tokyo grew from a fishing village along a marshy estuary to one of the world’s largest and most culturally vibrant metropolises.  We learn that for all its modernity and craving for the new, it is a city impregnated with the past.  In the excerpt below Mansfield looks at piece of Tokyo’s history that has lived on in literature.

An extraordinary event occurred in 1701 that electrified the entire city.  Because of its reverberations as both news and as a fitting subject for literature, the story is worth retelling.  Assigned to perform ceremonial duties at the shogun’s court in Edo, Lord Asano, a daimyo from the western domain of Ako, was provoked into attacking and injuring Lord Kira.  Though the reason for the provocation has never been satisfactorily explained, an oversight of etiquette, personal slight or grudge toward Kira – a condescending and spiteful superior by all accounts – have all been mooted.  Having violated the strict rule of court banning the drawing of weapons, Asano was commanded to commit immediate seppuku (ritual disembowelment).  With Asano’s death, his vassals automatically became ronin, masterless samurai stripped of crest, armour and a banner to serve under.  His estates were seized by the authorities, the family castle razed to the ground and his widow driven into taken refuge in a nunnery.

Smarting from humiliation, 47 of the ronin secretly swore to avenge his death.  Knowing that they would be under surveillance from the authorities, who posted spies to watch the men’s comings and goings, they took a full two years planning their revenge.  To allay suspicion, they took up jobs as carpenters, labourers and peddlers, work that would have been inconceivable for a samurai.  While quietly hatching a plan of action, Oishi Kuranosuke, Lord Asano’s former Elder Councillor, adopted a dissolute lifestyle, drinking and womanizing, a pretense that relaxed Kira’s guard.

During the winter of 1703, the ronin broke into Kira’s high-walled mansion at midnight.  After fierce fighting, in which all the guards and retainers were slaughtered, they searched the grounds for Kira, eventually finding him hiding in a charcoal shed in white satin sleeping robes.  After removing Kira’s head with the very sword that Lord Asano had used against him at court, they carried the trophy through the snow-blanketed streets of Edo, washed it in a well, which is still there today, and placed it on the grave of their master at Sengaku-ji temple.

While the public in general lauded this violent act of revenge as a heroic deed consistent with the samurai code of absolute loyalty, the shogunate was obliged by its own set of rules to punish the offenders for having assassinated a member of the court.  Rather than being decapitated, the fate of the common criminal, the 47 were, after long and spirited debates and deliberations among intellectuals and officials, granted the privilege of an honourable death by seppuku.

The story of the attack by the ronin appeared as a puppet play within weeks of the actual event, and example of the speed with which reality was transmuted into art and entertainment.  the story has inspired countless novels, Kabuki plays and films.  The best-known theatrical version is the puppet play Chushinguru (A Treasury of Loyal Retainers), first performed in 1748.  For reasons of censorship, the story was re-situated in the fourteenth century.  The poet John Masefield wrote a much inferior English version of the play called The Faithful.

Climbing the steps up to the time-weathered graves today, an acrid smell hangs in the air, the tombs banked up beneath clouds of smoke from incense sticks placed there by those who continue to honour the men.  Rudyand Kipling did just this in the spring of 1889, finding that “an animal of the name of V. Gay had seen fit to stratch his entirely uninteresting name” on one of the gold-leafed, lacquered panels of the tomb.  “It is not the handwriting upon the wall” he added: “Presently there wll be neither gold nor lacquer-nothing but the finger marks of foreigners.”