Copies of the Poems & Fragments of Alcaeus, translated into English by the poet and novelist R J Dent, and published by Circaidy Gregory Press, are now available to buy at Atlantis Books in Santorini.

Atlantis Books is a truly amazing bookshop. It’s on the Main Marble Road in Oia, Santorini. Inside, it’s a bibliophile’s treasure-trove.

Alcaeus’s Poems & Fragments has made its way across the world and onto a shelf of Greek poetry and literature in Atlantis Books. It’s almost as though Alcaeus has gone home.

Here’s Alcaeus alongside Philip Sherrard, Dionysios Solōmos, Arthur Machen, Homer, and other distinguished Greek and Anglo-Greek authors and scholars.

Atlantis Books in Oia, Santorini, is one of the bibliophile wonders of the world. There is no other bookshop quite like it.

It’s fitting that Alcaeus: Poems & Fragments is now available to lovers of Greek poetry and Greek literature – on a Greek island as beautiful as Santorini, and in a bookshop as unique as Atlantis Books.

Atlantis Books, Main Marble Road, Oia, Santorini, Cyclades, Greece.

http://www.atlantisbooks.org/

Alcaeus: Poems & Fragments, translated into English by R J Dent.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alcaeus-Fragments-R-J-Dent/dp/1906451532/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3

Circaidy Gregory Press, Hastings, Sussex, UK.

http://www.circaidygregory.co.uk/

R J Dent

www.rjdent.com

– tessellated flit – scatter – tatters – sonic yip – pitch – swerve turn dip – panic flap – zodiac – eye – high – fly – loop – swoop – flap – skitter – spin – black – zip thither – slip – weather – breeze – night – cloud – feed – flight – fast – faint light – retreat – crawl – claws – squawk – clamber – chamber – spider wing – shrill – echo ear – fear – echoing – ermine – vermin – fur huddle – warmth – puddle – rustle – bustle – tightness – inverted world – squeaks – wings curl – furl – sleeps –

© R J Dent (2005)

Bat was first published in Earth Love.

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Felix Salten was born Siegmund Salzmann in Budapest, Hungary. When he was four weeks old, his family relocated to Vienna, Austria.

When his father became bankrupt, the sixteen-year-old Salten had to quit school and begin working for an insurance agency. He also began submitting poems and book reviews to journals. He became part of the “Young Vienna” movement (Jung Wien) and soon received work as a full-time art and theatre critic. In 1900 he published his first collection of short stories.

He was soon publishing, on an average, one book a year, of plays, short stories, novels, travel books, and essay collections. He also wrote for nearly all the major newspapers ofVienna. He wrote also film scripts and librettos for operettas. In 1927 he became president of the Austrian P.E.N. club as successor of Arthur Schnitzler.

Felix Salten’s most famous work is Bambi (1923).

Bambi, a Life in the Woods, is a 1923 Austrian novel written by Felix Salten and published by Paul Zsolnay Verlag. The novel traces the life of Bambi, a male roe deer, from his birth through childhood, the loss of his mother, the finding of a mate, the lessons he learns from his father and experience about the dangers posed by human hunters in the forest. An English translation by Whittaker Chambers was published in North America by Simon & Schuster in 1928, and the novel has since been translated and published in over 20 languages around the world. Salten released a sequel, Bambi’s Children, in 1939. Janet Schulman released a children’s picture book adaptation in 2000 that featured realistic oil-paintings and many of Salten’s original words.

The novel was well received by critics and is considered a classic, as well as one of the first environmental novels ever published. In 1933, he sold the film rights to director Sidney Franklin for $1,000, and Franklin later transferred the rights to the Walt Disney Studios. It was adapted into a theatrical animated film, Bambi, by Disney in 1942.

Life in Austria became perilous for a prominent Jew during the 1930s. Adolf Hitler had Salten’s books banned in 1936. Two years later, after Austria had become part of Germany, Salten moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where he lived until his death. He was married to the actress Ottilie Metzl and had two children.

Felix Salten’s novel, Bambi is a fascinating and informative textbook of jungle warfare and survival techniques. It is also a powerful political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe, as can be deduced from the fact that it was subsequently banned in Nazi Germany in 1936, due to it being considered an anti-Nazi work of fiction.

Bambi was banned, and Salten was hunted by the Nazis. The last section of Bambi contains Salten’s famous (and very well-written) critique of Hitler:

‘He isn’t all-powerful as they say. Everything that lives and grows doesn’t come from Him. He isn’t above us. He’s just the same as we are. He has the same fears, the same needs, and suffers in the same way. He can be killed like us…’

Salten wrote another book based on the character Bambi, entitled Bambi’s Children: The Story of a Forest Family (1939).

The sequel follows the lives of Bambi’s twin fawns as they grow from fawns through adulthood.

Salten wrote the sequel while living in exile in Switzerland after being forced to flee Nazi occupied Austria as he was of Jewish heritage. Originally written in German, the novel was published in English in the United States in 1939 by Bobbs-Merrill. It was not published in Germany until the following year. Its language is gentler than that of Bambi, A Life in the Woods.

Salten’s novels Perri (1938) and The Hound of Florence (1923) inspired the Disney films Perri (1957) and The Shaggy Dog (1959).

Selected works

Bambi, a Life in the Woods (1923)

The Hound of Florence (1923)

Animal Novels: 15 Rabbits (1929)

Florian the Emperor’s Horse (1933)

Perri (1938)

Bambi’s Children (1939)

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Fred Zackel

Fred Zackel is a very interesting, entertaining and thrilling writer.

One of his best novels is Cocaine and Blue Eyes. It is one of several novels from the 1970s that used the form and conventions of the private eye genre as developed by Hammett and Chandler to comment critically on the changes and disenchantment in American society wrought by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. In common with Roger L. Simon’s The Big Fix, James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, Newton Thornburg’s Cutter and Bone, and to a lesser extent the Spenser series by Robert B. Parker, these are contemporary hardboiled stories set in a world picking up the pieces after the tumultuous 1960s by refreshing and refining plots, characters and situations more familiar from the 30s and 40s. Cocaine and Blue Eyes fits right in with this pattern and was to a certain extent shepherded by Ross Macdonald, the last of the great classic triumvirate of the classic PI novelists.

“Fred Zackel’s first novel reminds me of the young Dashiell Hammett’s work, not because it is an imitation, but because it is not. It is a powerful and original book made from the lives and language of the people who live in San Francisco today.” – Ross Macdonald

In 1975 Fred Zackel attended the Santa Barbara Writers Conference with the intention of quitting in his attempt, after several unsuccessful years, to become a published author. However he submitted a piece of writing that got the attention of novelist Ross Macdonald who would eventually serve as a mentor for what would become Cocaine and Blue Eyes (1978) after succumbing to the great author’s suggestion:

“Have you ever thought about doing something serious, like detective fiction?”

Set in San Francisco during Christmas and New Year, Cocaine and Blue Eyes features Michael Brennan, a private investigator fired from his large agency who now has to decide whether to go it alone or find a new line of work. Divorced with two young children, he helps Joey Crawford travel back to San Francisco on Christmas Day when the young man’s van breaks down. Joey is desperate to track down Dani Anatole, his girlfriend of several years who has dumped him and disappeared. Brennan refuses to take the case, but when the man sends him $1,000 in the post he changes his mind – not for the money but because in the interim Joes was killed in a car crash and he now wants to let Dani know what happened to her ex-boyfriend. It’s a classic piece of knight-errantry, a quest seeming to be without much obvious purpose but one through which our hero means to maintain his sense of honour, respect and to a certain extent sense of purpose in a world where values and even buildings are built perilously on shifting sands.“Playing detective is like being a gravedigger.”

It turns out that Dani is the scion of a powerful local family who has been trying to break free of the shackles that tie her financially to a complex trust fund, like her dypsomaniac sister Catherine and her shell-shocked Vietnam vet cousin, Jack. She has tried in various ways to escape the clutches of her dysfunctional family and now no one will tell Brennan where she is, convinced that he is hiding his real motives for trying to track her down.

At a rudimentary level the novel can be seen as a sort of homage to Hammett, with its Northern California setting and its subplot of rival gangs being set up by the protagonist to play off each other, and Chandler, with particular reference to the latter Farewell, My Lovely. Like in that classic novel, the protagonist is hired, against his will, to find a long-lost girlfriend who had been a singer in a band but who is now in hiding. There is even a subplot regarding the theft of some Mandarin Jade, but this is just a gentle tipping of the hat to the past – the tone is much more modern, as are the language and situations, such as the clue that tells Brennan that maybe Dani hasn’t gone very far:

“… she had left behind too much. A modern woman might walk on her man, but she wouldn’t leave behind her vibrator.”

The book is full of knowing comments like that – if the 1970s milieu and slang don’t so much date as anchor the book to the 1970s, it is also clearly a work written by a young author, impressively finding his own voice though occasionally giving in too readily perhaps to the understandable temptation to provide some evidence of experience via some very sweeping generalisations (‘I’d seen sharp eyes like his before …’. ‘Like many old people …’, ‘Most women who wear black …’). These many sentences try to suggest a world-weariness that sometimes don’t quite match the zest and even innocence in the writing and which is a big part of the book’s charm. Along with loving descriptions of the weather and of life lived directly on the bay or near the water, there is also some great tough guy dialogue which shows that ear for the genre’s seemingly essential one-liners:

“She had a voice like a cat being sandpapered.”

As in the best of the Ross Macdonald books, the storyline which involves Chinese gangs and drug smuggling, eventually boils down to a convoluted pattern of family behaviour and hidden motives based on several skeletons in the closet. The result is a fine novel which can easily hold its head high amongst the great books published during the hardboiled renaissance of the 1970s and which keeps a particularly nasty little twist for the knockout 12-word chapter with which it concludes. Brennan would return, albeit battered and bruised, to fight another day in Cinderella After Midnight (1980).

For more information about the author, you can read the brief biographical outline at:

www.smashwords.com/profile/view/fzackel

Zackel discusses his early meeting with Macdonald, and the circumstances surrounding the writing of his first novel, in a brief memoir published over at January Magazine, which you can read here: http://januarymagazine.com/features/zackel.html.

For a much more recent interview with Zackel, visit the item at Gutterbooks here in which he also discusses how he has embraced online publishing. The first chapter of Cocaine and Blue Eyes can be read online here at thrillingdetective.com while one of author’s short stories, ‘The Bicycles were Gravestones’, can be accessed here: www.storyglossia.com/28/fz_bicycles.html

R J Dent’s latest published short story is the surreal The Pink Floyd Story Considered as a NASA Space Flight Report.

R J Dent says: ‘I was inspired to write The Pink Floyd Story Considered as a NASA Space Flight Report after reading J G Ballard’s The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race and Princess Margaret’s Facelift, both from Ballard’s classic, The Atrocity Exhibition.’

The Pink Floyd Story Considered as a NASA Space Flight Report was published by Authspot.

Other stories by R J Dent are available to read at:

http://www.rjdent.com/shortstories.htm

www.rjdent.com

Roxy Music is the debut album by art rock band Roxy Music, released in June 1972.

Track listing:

All songs written by Bryan Ferry.

Re-Make/Re-Model – 5:14

Ladytron – 4:26

If There Is Something – 6:34

2HB – 4:30

The Bob (Medley) – 5:48

Chance Meeting – 3:08

Would You Believe? – 3:53

Sea Breezes – 7:03

Bitters End – 2:03

Personnel

Bryan Ferry – vocals, piano, Hohner Pianet, Mellotron

Brian Eno – VCS3 synthesizer, tape effects, backing vocals

Andy Mackay – oboe, saxophone, backing vocals

Phil Manzanera – electric guitar

Graham Simpson – bass guitar

Paul Thompson – drums

The opening track is Re-Make/Re-Model, whichstarts with a musique concrète introduction, a short collage of cocktail party noise, before launching into a stereotypical 1950s song structure. Whilst the basic backing track of guitar, acoustic piano, bass guitar, tenor saxophone and drums is relatively straightforward and traditional in form, other elements of the arrangement are quite bizarre and futuristic: Eno plays continual squalls of atonal oscillator noise from his Electronic Music Studios VCS3 synthesizer, whilst Ferry’s lead vocal style is strikingly distraught and anguished in tone, as befits the lyric: I tried but I could not find a way/ Looking back all I did was look away. The lead guitar and saxophone solos in the middle of the song also tend towards cacophony. At the end of the song, each instrument is allowed a short solo break in turn; the guitar mimics Duane Eddie’s C’mon Everybody; the bass guitar solo mimics the riff from the Beatles song Day Tripper. The lyrics describe a man who is afraid to approach a woman he’s attracted to. Ferry explained in an interview that Eno and MacKay’s backing vocal chorus of CPL 593H was the number plate of the car in which the woman is riding. Ferry took inspiration from a personal experience – the number plate CPL 593H belonged to a car he previously owned. After he’d sold it, Ferry saw it parked in a street, and observed an attractive young woman get into the car and drive away. To immortalize the moment, he wrote the song.

Ladytron is the album’s second song. It has distinctive instrumentation, including an oboe solo, liberal use of the mellotron’s famous ‘three violins’ tape facility, and much processing of the other instruments by Brian Eno via his Electronic Music Studios VCS3 synthesizer and tape echo. The eerie sounds at the start of the song were created by Brian Eno, after Bryan Ferry asked him to produce something reminiscent of the Lunar Landing. Lyrically, it presents Ferry as a Casanova-style seducer of women, whilst being simultaneously enraptured by them. Another interpretation is that the Ladytron is a female robot (hence the name) that is being seduced by Ferry. According to The Times, Ladytron is one of Roxy Music’s ‘best loved songs.’

If There Is Something is the third song on the album. The song begins in a rather light-hearted, jaunty fashion, a slight pastiche of country music, with honky-tonk style piano and twangy guitar. Ferry’s singing is nonchalant and jocular. However the mood of the song builds with a repeated instrumental motif played between guitar and saxophone, Ferry’s vocals re-entering to provide a fraught vocal climax, the lyrics including a reference to a passion for secrets, roses, and (bizarrely), growing potatoes. The instrumental motifs then return, finally giving way to an emotional end section where Ferry’s impassioned and melancholy vocals are set on top of a lush blend of backing vocals and the mellotron ‘three violins’ tape set. The song is tripartite in structure and it has been suggested that the first part of the song is a youth wondering about love, the second part is an adult in the heat of passion and the third part is the singer in old age thinking about his past love. The song features prominently in the 2008 film, Flashbacks of a Fool, written and directed by Baillie Walsh, and starring Daniel Craig. In a memorable scene, a young Joe Scott and Ruth Davies dance in Ruth’s living room and mime to the song; Joe dressed as Bryan Ferry.

2HB is the first of the songs that are thematically linked to films/movies. The title of 2HB is a pun – the song is not in fact about pencil lead, but is actually Ferry’s tribute to Hollywood film star Humphrey Bogart. (2HB = To Humphrey Bogart.) 2HB quotes the line ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ – a famous line from the Bogart classic, Casablanca (1942). The song is gentle and mellow in tone, evoking a smoky cabaret atmosphere and classic black-and-white films. The song is dominated by Ferry’s Hohner electric piano, and features a sax solo in the middle where MacKay’s playing is treated with tape echo effects by Brian Eno.

Chance Meeting was inspired by David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), and includes lyrics inspired by the film/movie’s dialogue: I never thought I’d see you again/ Where have you been until now?/ Well how are you?/ How have you been?/ It’s a long time since we last met/ It seems like yesterday/ When I first saw you/ In your red dress smile/ How could I forget that day?/ I know that time spent well is so rare…

The Bob (Medley) is the next track. The song was inspired by the war film/movie, The Battle of Britain (1969), the song’s title (BoB) being an acronym for Battle of Britain. The sound of gunfire and explosions from the battlefields can be heard throughout the instrumental refrain.

Would You Believe? is an elegant, delicate and anguished lament to an inscrutable, elusive someone. Would you believe in what I do/ When the things that I make are all for you?… Ferry sings forlornly, before adding cynically: Well I’m sure I’ll love you all my life/ And in the morning too….

Sea Breezes is the penultimate song on the album and is a clear precursor to Song for Europe: We’ve been running round in our present state/ Hoping help would come from above/ But even angels there make the same mistakes/ In love… and is Ferry at his most quaveringly anguished…

Bitters End is the final song on the album. The song is based on a group vocal arrangement done in a satirical 1950s doo-wop style. In the middle eight, the band sings ‘bizarre’, which seems to sum up the initial impact of the first listen to the album.

Discussing the album’s music, Andy Mackay later said: ‘We certainly didn’t invent eclecticism but we did say and prove that rock ‘n’ roll could accommodate – well, anything really’.

The band’s penchant for glamour was showcased both in the lyrics and in the 1950s-style album cover, with photography, hair dressing and art work credits detailed on the sleeve. The photographer, Karl Stoecker, shot the cover featuring model Kari-Ann Muller, who later married Chris Jagger, brother of Mick Jagger. The album’s original cover, as issued in 1972, featured a gatefold sleeve picturing the band in stage attire designed by Antony Price.

The entire album was recorded in a single week. This was necessary because the group had no record deal and their managers at EG were financing the sessions themselves. The album was produced by King Crimson’s lyricist, Peter Sinfield. In May 1972, a few weeks after the recording sessions, a contract was signed with Island Records and in June, Roxy Music was released.

Roxy Music was generally well-received by contemporary critics and reached #10 in the UK charts. It is now considered by many to be Roxy Music’s best album.

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Here is R J Dent’s latest short story Towards the Finish Line.

R J Dent says: Towards the Finish Line is a short literary experiment – although hopefully it is entertaining too.’

If you enjoyed Towards the Finish Line, you can find other stories by R J Dent at http://www.rjdent.com/shortstories.htm

Towards the Finish Line

(c) R J Dent (2011)

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Flaubert was born in Rouen, France on 12 December 1821, the fifth of six children in a family of doctors.

In the 1830s Flaubert attended the Collége Royal de Rouen, writing for its newspaper, reading Shakespeare, travelling extensively and beginning his own writings.

His first finished work was November, a novella, which was completed in 1842.

In September 1849, Flaubert completed the first version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony. He read the novel aloud to Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp over the course of four days, not allowing them to interrupt or give any opinions. At the end of the reading, his friends told him to throw the manuscript in the fire, suggesting instead that he focus on day-to-day life rather than fantastic subjects.

In 1850, after returning from Egypt, Flaubert began work on Madame Bovary. The novel, which took five years to write, was serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856. The government brought an action against the publisher and author on the charge of immorality, which was heard during the following year, but both were acquitted. When Madame Bovary appeared in book form, it met with a warm reception.

Flaubert embarked on a trip to Egypt and the Far East with fellow writer Maxime Du Camp in 1851, sending home a varied assortment of exotic souvenirs. Nearly thirty years old he then took the next five years to write Madame Bovary, working mostly at night, having it published in six instalments by Du Camp’s literary journal Revue de Paris. The ensuing moral outrage in 1857 caused him to be (unsuccessfully) prosecuted on moral grounds.

In 1858, Flaubert travelled to Carthage to gather material for his next novel, Salammbô. The novel was completed in 1862 after four years of work.

Drawing on his youth, Flaubert next wrote L’Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education), an effort that took seven years. His last complete novel, it was published in 1869.

Flaubert then published a reworked version of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, portions of which had been published as early as 1857.

Flaubert wrote the Three Tales in 1877. This book comprised three stories: Un Cœur simple (A Simple Heart), La Légende de Saint-Julien l’Hospitalier (The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller), and Hérodias (Herodias).

After the publication of the stories, he spent the remainder of his life toiling on the unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet, which was a grand satire on the futility of human knowledge and the ubiquity of mediocrity. It was posthumously printed in 1881 and received lukewarm reviews.

Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues (The Dictionary of Received Ideas) is a short satirical work collected and published in 1911-3 from notes compiled by Flaubert during the 1870s, lampooning the clichés endemic to French society.

At the time of Flaubert’s death, it was unclear whether he intended eventually to publish it separately, or as an appendix to his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet. In some of his notes, it seems that Flaubert intended the dictionary to be taken as the final creation of the two protagonists.

Flaubert’s letters have been collected in several volumes.

Gustave Flaubert is buried at Rouen Cemetery in Normandy, France.

Works:

November

Madame Bovary

Salammbô.

Sentimental Education

The Temptation of St. Antony

Three Tales

Bouvard and Pécuchet

A Dictionary of Received Ideas

Letters

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Relativity and the Lobster - http://www.rjdent.com

Here’s a short story I’ve written entitled Relativity and the Lobster.

I was inspired to write  Relativity and the Lobster after reading a story by Samuel Beckett.

If you enjoy reading  Relativity and the Lobster, then there are more of my short stories available to read at http://www.rjdent.com/shortstories.htm

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