Public park benches in Amsterdam now come with red clips on the side for holding books, magazines, or newspapers - with public libraries and newspapers supplying good reads for willing readers:
Everything you need to know… is well, nah, just watch!
Swoon. A DragonballZ cameo.
Roddy Doyle is revisiting the Barrytown trilogy with a sequel to The Commitments… Jimmy Rabbitte is middle class, middle-aged and diagnosed with bowel cancer.
What do the critics think? The New Statesmen rounds up the best reviews from the weekend.
Theo Tait (Guardian) remarks that although the book is “easy to pigeon hole” as a “mid-life crisis novel”, it “has heart and humour, and is thick with Dublin detail”. Impressive too is the fact that Doyle manages to simultaneously serve “up a good-sized helping of nostalgia”, yet attack such sentiments at the same time. Tait believes that the book “provides everything that, back in the mid-1990s, a Roddy Doyle novel seemed to represent: a big, raucous but loving Northside Dublin family; perfectly pitched dialogue; well-observed male camaraderie; a lot of music; and, perhaps most of all, entertaining profanity”. He concludes that “The Guts deserves to be a popular success. Who knows, it might even penetrate a demographic group notoriously resistant to reading novels: middle‑aged men”.
Philip Marchand (The National Post) also emphasises the warmth that Doyle’s latest work contains. “The novel is rich in sentiment and episodes conveying sentiment” Marchand explains, while the book has a “comic mode” which is retained even in its darker moments. This “comic mode is heightened by the form of the narrative, which is basically a series of dialogues - often texted”. However, although this “keeps things sprightly” it “also limits the emotional tone, so that the novel begins to seem like a requiem performed entirely by brass instruments.” In all, Marchand offers a balanced appraisal of a “buoyant tale”.
“It is bright, jokey, wry and robust” explains Patricia Craig (Independent). She a makes a point of commenting on the book’s authenticity, as Doyle “captures the authentic tones of a late 20th-century, urban working-class, pub- and housing-estate culture, all Howyeh and Wha’ d’you mean? and shite and fuck”. This creates an “emphatic atmosphere” which “in a sense… takes the place of a plot”. Like the other “’Barrytown’ novels in particular” The Guts is by no means a book where you will find intricate plot making.
Again, reference is made to the book’s treatment of sentimentality. At times, Doyle’s “and his characters’ exasperation with sentimental shite (‘it was fuckin’ everywhere’) gives way to actual sentimental shite: ‘the sadness, the grief, had never left. Like losing the kids, them growing up and away from him, one by one’. But such lapses are rare, amid the whole demotic, chaotic onrush of Dublin life and inimitable carry-on”, Craig explains.
Craig remarks that The Guts features much of what is typical of Roddy Doyle: social criticism, “immense skill” and an intensely Irish feel.
Dina Goldstein Fallen Princesses aimed to upend the fairy tale ending for girls, in the process, Goldstein creates some incredible photographs:
Just catching up on this now: The Independent on Sunday is letting all if its art critics staff go as of September… part of a series of cuts at the paper.
The paper is to continue arts coverage none of it will be review led and the paper’s music writer, film reviewer, theatre critic, visual arts critic and music critic are all due to finish with the paper in the coming weeks.
It’s a blow to arts coverage in an already shrinking arena - shows and exhibitions reliance on reviews is huge.
Interviews and coverage over at The Guardian.
Adi Shankar (of Dredd fame) and director Joe Lynch produced a new short film featuring the Marvel character Venom called Truth in Journalism.
The movie features Ryan Kwanten (of True Blood fame) as Eddie Brock/Venom - and makes up a mockumentary-style unofficial Spiderman fan-film.