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Thinking and dreaming, from England

Pubblicato con Flock

British and English-language novels and books

The Western Australian small town of Angelus is classic Winton country. With neither the bright lights and distractions of the city, nor the rural reassurances of the country, people live out lives in the shadow of the meat-packing plant, the trailer park, a dying fishing industry. There is drinking, drug-taking, violence, and depression. There’s also intense loneliness, misunderstanding, and a whole raft of fractured families. But if taking a trip to Angelus (a fictional place, by the way) for a series of connected short stories where the same characters crop up viewed from different angles doesn’t sound like much fun, think again. As a writer Winton has an enormous sense of humanity, and an abiding sympathy for his characters. He also writes with as subtle a touch as you could wish for. Through his eyes we examine a collection of personal turning points, crucial reassessments of lives that have gone wrong, or which might have been different. In the opening story, ‘Big World', the narrator reflects on an adolescent escape from Angelus which didn’t work out, and a future which is both better and worse than might have been hoped for – and which is, either way, ‘unimaginable’. Peter Dyson in ‘Small Mercies’ also returns to the town, only to be confronted by an ex-girlfriend whose life forces him to imagine what might have been. Winton’s fascination is with the moment of realisation, most frequently a crux arrived at in middle age which forces individuals to look back at their adolescence and those moments or people which they left behind, or screwed up, or wish they'd handled differently. Crucially, in most cases, a potential to make up for things and start to repair the damage follows hard on these biting reassessments.

Tim Winton
The Turning

Picador 2003 hbk £16.99 ISBN 0-330-43830-1

Cathy Hopkins
Mates, Dates & Inflatable Bras

Lucy is at a turning point in her life, and suddenly she seems beset by problems. She doesn't know who she is and what she wants to be. Her best friend Izzy has become friends with the glamorous new girl Nesta and Lucy feels left out. And while Nesta and Izzy look sixteen, Lucy, at fourteen, can easily pass for a twelve-year-old. Something has to change .

Reading age from 13, interest level from 13

Piccadilly Press 2001 hbk £9.99 ISBN 1-85340-638-4
Piccadilly Press 2001 pbk £5.99 ISBN 1-85340-633-3

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Edinburgh International Festival 2008

Welcome to Festival 08

Welcome to Festival 08.  The Edinburgh International Festival was founded in 1947 in the aftermath of a devastating war, as an optimistic expression of what Europe could be. It owes its origins to an imperative to rebuild a sense of community in a continent which had torn itself apart; to restore hope to shattered lives through music, opera, drama, and dance. Europe today is a very different place. Borders have been redrawn in every direction and these borders are not just political or geographic, but also cultural, social and even religious. These are exciting times in which to live in Europe; times which demand a commitment to our sense of community. A festival is an expression of the creative ambition of the community it serves. It's also a place where the personal and collective challenges we face as a society can be explored. Please visit the website of the Edinburgh International Festival to discover every venue and enjoy your stay in wonderful Scotland.

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Arts, music and drama around Britain

BRIGHTON FESTIVAL, BRIGHTON, 7–27 May 2007
The largest mixed arts festival in England with a programme including Michael Clark Company, Suspect Culture & National Theatre of Scotland and Ockham’s Razor. The festival also includes the Streets of Brighton street arts festival and the National Street Arts Meeting.
Email: info@brightonfestival.org
Web: www.brightonfestival.org

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New ways to approach Boccaccio in English

Few great books like the Decameron have shaped our very notion of storytelling and its crucial role in the negotiation and production of shared social and cultural values. In its hundred stories, shared in ten days by ten young people escaping the Plague in mid-14th-century Florence, it combines sheer entertainment with a meaningful humanistic message. A tribute to human ingenuity, an epic masterpiece of a rising, dynamic mercantile society that pursues pleasure while being threatened by sudden extinction, the Decameron can be read as a transgressive and escapist manual of behavior as well as a breviary of moral predicaments intended for a secular, unprejudiced reader.
The Decameron Web began as the WWW "translation" of a Storyspace document which was created by a group of graduate and undergraduate students in Italian Studies at Brown University during the academic year 1994-1995, under the direction of Prof. Massimo Riva (Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Brown U).
Link for the Decameron Web here.

Modernity and anxiety in Britain 1900-1945

Please see my presentation about modernity and the age of anxiety in Britain, between 1900 and 1945. I consider this presentation a useful resource to study for the final Esame di Stato.