Midnight Voices
THE PETE ATKIN WEB FORUM   RSS
Welcome, Guest. Please Login or Register.
This page loaded: 28.03.24 at 14:55 UK time
PA
HOME
Pete Atkin home page
MV Home | Short | Help | Search | Login | Register | Shop | PA Home
Midnight Voices « Point of View by Clive James »
   Midnight Voices
   Pete Atkin
   Words
(Moderator: Mike Walters)
   Point of View by Clive James
« Previous thread | Next thread »
Pages: 1   Start of Thread | Latest Post Reply | Notify of replies | Send Thread | Print
   Author  Thread: Point of View by Clive James  (Read 13049 times)
Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
*****


I love Midnight Voices!



Posts: 1144
Point of View by Clive James
« : 22.09.10 at 10:22 »
Quote

Hot to the pages of The Bookseller.com comes this announcement:
 
Quote:
Picador buys new Clive James title
22.09.10 | Victoria Gallagher
 
Picador has acquired the rights to a new title by broadcaster Clive James. Senior editor Sam Humphreys bought UK and Commonweath rights to Point of View from Robert Kirby at United Agents.
 
The title will be made up of pieces originally aired on the BBC Radio 4 programme and will also include new introductions to each piece from James. It will be published in autumn 2011.
 
Humphreys said: "It's a fascinating glimpse into the key concerns, issues, obsessions and trivia that have kept us occupied in the first decade of the new millennium."

 

 
Kevin Cryan
 
    https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=Words&action=display&num=1285147354&start=0#0   copy 
Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
*****


I love Midnight Voices!



Posts: 1144
Re: Point of View by Clive James
« Reply #1: 05.11.11 at 20:45 »
Quote


 
Now available from amazon.co.uk and booksellers  elsewhere.  
 
Kevin Cryan
    https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=Words&action=display&num=1285147354&start=1#1   copy 
dr_john
MV Feature
***



You've gotta help me, doc...



Posts: 65
Re: Point of View by Clive James
« Reply #2: 08.11.11 at 09:57 »
Quote

Something to add to my list for Santa.   (I assume Clive has been too busy recently, what with one thing and another,  to vet the artwork.)
    https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=Words&action=display&num=1285147354&start=2#2   copy 
Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
*****


I love Midnight Voices!



Posts: 1144
Re: Point of View by Clive James
« Reply #3: 08.11.11 at 14:45 »
Quote

on 08.11.11 at 09:57, dr_john wrote:
....I assume Clive has been too busy recently....)

 
I'd hope that this appreciation  of actor James Gardner being published in the December issue of The Atlantic is of the outcomes of his more recent labours.  
 
The piece, which is ostensibly a review of The Garner Files: A Memoir by Garner himself and and Jon Winokur (Simon & Schuster), allows him to repeat, at greater length and with the benifit of longer hindsight, things he has been saying about Garner's qualities as a screen actor from the beginning of his own career as a published critic.  
 
Quote:

Every sane person’s favorite modern male movie star, Garner might have done even better if he’d been less articulate. In his generation, three male TV stars made it big in the movies: Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and Garner. All of them became stars in TV Westerns: McQueen in Wanted: Dead or Alive, Eastwood in Rawhide, and Garner in Maverick. The only one of them who looked and sounded as if he enjoyed communicating by means of the spoken word was Garner. McQueen never felt ready for a film role until he had figured out what the character should do with his hands: that scene-stealing bit in his breakout movie, The Magnificent Seven, in which he shakes the shotgun cartridges beside his ear, was McQueen’s equivalent of a Shakespearean soliloquy, or of a practice session for a postatomic future in which language had ceased to exist.  

 
The fact that he gives the reader a neat summary of how he views Garner as an actor early on does not mean that the remainder of the essay can be skipped over. It should be read as a whole because it is so full insights about Garner himself, the world he moved in and abourhis contemporaries.
 
He observes along the way that in Hollywood "preferred way of writing is to bolt together clichés that have already been tested to near-destruction" and that  "one of the secrets of maintaining a long and fruitful career is not to mourn too much for the might-have-beens."  
 
He makes not bones about his belief that Garber is "far too generous when praising his buddy Marlon Brando" but concedes:
 
Quote:

...there’s nothing wrong about praising Brando as long as you admit that the capacity for industrial sabotage that he brought to so many of his film sets was another form of robbery: somewhere, somebody was paying for every extra hour that Brando’s behavior cost. Still on the subject of Brando, a judgment like “best movie actor we’ve ever had” would mean more if Garner had taken room to say that Alan Arkin was a much better movie actor but didn’t look it.


 
Well, it's  a concession of sorts.
 
You do not have to agree whth this or anything else he says in this essay; his real value - and the real value of piece -  lies in the fact that much of what he does say is thought-provoking and pleasurably challenging to the reader.  
 
Kevin Cryan
 
    https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=Words&action=display&num=1285147354&start=3#3   copy 
Pete Atkin
MV Deity
*****







Posts: 508
Re: Point of View by Clive James
« Reply #4: 15.11.11 at 23:54 »
Quote

Well, my copy of A Point Of View arrived today from Amazon, and what a delight it is.  I think I've heard all of those pieces at least once each, and read most of them too, but even if I weren't delighted to read them again, each of them is hugely enhanced by a postscript - that device which Clive has used before in his essay collections and which is, if anything, even more effective here, given the topical prompting for most of these talks.    
 
The fact that they were written for speech/ear rather than the eye/brain means they have a directness and immediacy which, if I may make so bold, links them more closely to the songs in some ways, and makes the jokes even more solid.  Hugely enjoyable, I'd say, for anyone reading this, and for a much wider audience too.
 
(Oh, and the artwork in Kevin's 5.11 posting turns out to be a mockup, thank goodness.)
    https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=Words&action=display&num=1285147354&start=4#4   copy 
Kevin Cryan
MV Fellow
*****


I love Midnight Voices!



Posts: 1144
Re: Point of View by Clive James
« Reply #5: 16.02.15 at 14:34 »
Quote

Podcasts are now a vailable for downloading.
 

Quote:
A Point of View: Clive James
 
Clive James presents reflections on topical issues ranging from politics to pop culture in this award-winning series of BBC Radio 4's A Point of View. These programmes were first broadcast between 2007 and 2009.
 

 
Podcasts & Downloads
 
Kevin Cryan
    https://peteatkin.com/forum?board=Words&action=display&num=1285147354&start=5#5   copy 
Pages: 1    Start of Thread | Latest Post Reply | Notify of replies | Send Thread | Print
Return to Top « Previous thread | Next thread »
MV Home | Short | Help | Search | Login | Register | Shop | PA Home
Midnight Voices is not responsible for comments made by its members. All opinions expressed are entirely those of their authors.
Midnight Voices » Powered by YaBB 1 Gold - SP 1.3.1!
YaBB © 2000-2003. All Rights Reserved.