by tommo » Sun Feb 02, 2003 12:40 pm
It's in your eyes, I can tell what you're thinking; my heart is sinking too...It's no surprise, I've been watching you lately; I want to make it with you...
by xita » Sun Feb 02, 2003 12:46 pm
If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.Tallulah Bankhead
by tommo » Sun Feb 02, 2003 1:23 pm
It's in your eyes, I can tell what you're thinking; my heart is sinking too...It's no surprise, I've been watching you lately; I want to make it with you...
by xita » Sun Feb 02, 2003 1:29 pm
If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.Tallulah Bankhead
by bluemote » Thu Feb 06, 2003 10:23 am
by Pale dreamer » Thu Feb 06, 2003 12:52 pm
i really wanted to see it all but i dont have a sky or aything so i cant 
but i have the book and it is very good, i keep reading it by strongwoman66 » Thu Feb 06, 2003 11:42 pm
I wonder anyone can tell me if I can buy the novel in Toronto? And I want to buy the DVD too, however I'm not sure the DVD gets caption for deaf people like me. I hope someone can help me. 
reyby concrete » Fri Feb 07, 2003 12:41 am
. That's really a shame because it's such a great series. But maybe, just maybe it's different overseas; it's worth a check! 'If you want to reach the well, you're gonna have to swim against the current'
by runnerbird » Fri Feb 07, 2003 5:33 pm
=================
Ask Yourself.. If: the Questioning Project
the daily revolution: the runnerbird blog
by the kat whisperer » Thu Feb 13, 2003 9:55 pm
Take a look around you at the world we've come to know
Does it seem to be much more than a crazy circus show
Maybe from the madness something beautiful will grow...
by Cicca » Thu Feb 13, 2003 10:13 pm
invite someone dangerous to tea * look forward to dreams * imagine yourself magic
by walker » Fri Feb 14, 2003 2:18 pm
"See, that's where you're a dummy. I think about what you grew up with, and then I look at what you are. It makes me proud. It makes me love you more." - Willow
by saule77 » Mon Feb 17, 2003 2:39 am
Irish pub? not the best venue for a reading...) absolutely silent for 20 minutes whilst she was reading from her latest novel, Fingersmiths. Of course, I had to buy a copy and get it signed! She then answered a few questions... Here's what I can remember: "You are Willow Rosenberg, vixen-y lighter of the flame and keeper of my heart."
(Camp Flutie by Rane)
by bluemote » Mon Feb 17, 2003 7:08 am
by Zippy » Mon Feb 17, 2003 7:50 am
)
Have it!
by Cicca » Tue Feb 18, 2003 1:19 am
invite someone dangerous to tea * look forward to dreams * imagine yourself magic
by Rane018 » Tue Feb 18, 2003 1:46 am
"Take care of my heart, won't you please? Take care of it because it's all that I have. And if you let me, I'll take care of your heart too." Pure sweetness in the look between Willow and Tara.
by Alirissa » Tue Feb 18, 2003 1:15 pm
by bluemote » Wed Feb 19, 2003 10:48 am
hope everyone that went had fun!by Iamyouknowyours » Thu Feb 20, 2003 3:51 am
by Shadow ALH » Thu Feb 20, 2003 7:53 pm
by Chino6069 » Fri Feb 21, 2003 5:24 am
by the kat whisperer » Fri Feb 21, 2003 3:44 pm
But nevermind, instead of a first-hand report, I have brought with me this interview with Sarah Waters that I read in Thursday's edition of my local newspaper, the Edinburgh Evening News (20th February 2003). As it's dutifully typed up by me, any spelling mistakes are entirely my own:There are a couple of pics accompanying the article: one of Sarah Waters in David Bann's vegetarian restaurant in St Mary's Street, Edinburgh; and one of Keeley Hawes and Rachael Stirling in the TV adaptation of Tipping the Velvet.Quote:
NOVEL APPROACH TO A TELEVISION SUCCESS STORY
She's a literary star but her work is best known to the public through a graphic BBC adaptation. But Sarah Waters tells Liam Rudden the secret to her writing lies in Hammer horror films
When the BBC revealed that they were to adapt Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters' graphic tale of Victorian England's lesbian underworld - for prime-time television, it caused, in the author's words, a predictable "hoo-hah".
It was tagged a "sizzling lesbo drama", and some others highlighted their "disgust" at the decision by the Beeb, but still the first episode pulled in five million viewers - a massive figure for BBC2 - much to the delight of 36-year-old Sarah.
"I was really pleased with the series because it stayed faithful to the book," she says, adding: "But when all the headlines started before it had even been screened my poor mum, who is in her late 60s and works once a week in a Darby and Joan club, kept asking me: 'What is it going to be like when the first episode goes out and I walk into the Darby and Joan?' It was a real anxiety for her. She kept waking up in the middle of the night worrying about it, but within a week of watching it she was phoning me up to discuss certain sex scenes and I couldn't believe she was using the graphic language from the series."
In fact, as we settle down for a spot of lunch at David Bann's vegetarian restaurant, it comes as a surprise to hear the elfin-featured writer use such graphic language herself - a reaction she's used to.
She laughs: "For quite a while after Tipping first came out, people expected me to be sexier because of the reputation of the book. They'd always comment on how 'fresh-faced' I looked - that doesn't happen so much now because I'm older."
Tipping The Velvet, Sarah's first novel, wasn't an instant success, however. Ten publishers read it and turned it down before Virago agreed to take it on board in 1998. That first print run sold just 5000 copies - when the television adaptation was screened last year a further 60,000 copies flew off the shelves.
Thoughtfully, Sarah says: "It was so obviously a lesbian book that I thought its natural home would have been with a small press, a women's press maybe, but I decided I had to try mainstream publishers as well and was delighted when I heard that Virago had accepted it."
That first novel set a loose template for Sarah's next two books, Affinity, and now the Booker-nominated Fingersmith. Both continue her trademark themes of Victorian London, and hidden female relationships.
"In a way I'm surprised people have taken them so seriously. Being nominated for the Booker Prize was staggering because writing has always been something that is just my own weird project and I've been amazed that other people are prepared to get excited about it."
There are also plans to adapt her other two books for television she reveals, which she's pleased about given the "positive and enjoyable" experience it was to her first book serialised. Surprisingly, Sarah came to writing late in life. Born in Pembrokeshire, South Wales, she was an academic child who was "nauseatingly good at school".
However, she didn't seriously start writing until she was 34. "I was one of those kids who hated the holidays and couldn't wait to get back to lessons," she says. "But I was also quite a solitary child. We moved from Wales to Middlesborough when I was eight and then back to Wales five years later, so I did feel like a bit of an outsider for much of that middle bit of my childhood. However when I think back, it was a happy, but funny, childhood."
The word "funny" refers to her love of creating imaginary worlds and imaginary friends. "When we went to Middlesborough I had this whole elaborate fantasy about how the Nazis had re-invaded and I was leading the Resistance. I remember going around shouting 'Achtung! Achtung! Schnell! Schnell! I think I much have been watching Secret Army at the time."
Indeed it was television, and not literature, that was her biggest influence as a child. In those days, Sarah's favourites included Doctor Who and gory Hammer House of Horror films. "From a very early age I used to watch all the Hammer films. I was so keen on them that I'm sure that their lurid colours had a huge impact on me.
"What I really love about them is that they are unlocated, not just geographically, but also historically. They're set in a generic past and although I try to be more precise than that in my books, I know that their highly-coloured, moist textures have informed what I look for when I write."
A surprising confession perhaps considering her latest book, Fingersmith, was nominated not just for the Booker prize but the Orange Prize as well - literary awards a world away from Hammer scripts.
"It's quite alarming actually to be up for those very big awards. People call my books literary, and I suppose I am more on the literary side than on the trashy side. They all have a literary ambition but at the same time, like Hammer horror films, they are not afraid to embrace a bit of cheesiness and stereotyping. Above all, I try to make them reader-friendly by giving them a good, strong narrative drive."
Fingersmith, she claims, does just that. Once more it transports the reader back to Victorian London and, again, boasts two heroines. It tells the tale of a gang of pickpockets, or fingersmiths as they were then known. It all sounds very Oliver Twist.
"It is a bit, actually," she concedes. "It starts in a thieves' kitchen and is about an orphan girl who has been brought up by thieves and is persuaded to get involved in a plot to defraud an heiress of her money.
"Simultaneously, a gentleman conman has found another orphan girl living in the country with her rich uncle. He wants to marry her so that he can have her locked in an asylum and ten steal her inheritance, which you could actually do in those days."
Sarah's fascination with London's history started while she was a student at London University, as did her desire to write creatively. "I know some writers can say that they always wanted to write, and when I think about it I suppose I did love writing as a child but in an academic sort of way. When I went on to London University it was there I wrote my PhD on lesbian and gay historical novels and biographies. While doing that, I came up with the plot for Tipping the Velvet."
A plot that some might argue was a very public way of outing yourself. Candidly, she recalls: "When I was a teenager I did have boyfriends. It wasn't until I went to university that I first fell in love with another woman. But even then I didn't tell my parents right away. It became a peculiar sort of open secret. The problem was they would still say things which implied that one day I might bring a boyfriend home so eventually I had to tell them."
Their initial reaction was to declare that they knew already. Although Sarah remembers the next few years as difficult. "My dad was better about it than my mum. My mum wouldn't talk about it for a long time and that really upset me because there was a part of my life I couldn't share with her, even though she had met, and was always very nice to, my girlfriends. Happily, over the years that has broken down."
She continues: "It's funny. When I first told mum I was writing a novel she asked what the heroine was called. I said 'Nancy' and she asked what the hero was called. I told her there wasn't one, just another heroine called Kitty. She went: 'Oh, okay'.
"Then when it came out I must have said that it was a bit raunchy at some point because my big sister, Debbie, read it first - she found it mind-boggling - and warned my mother off it. Mum still hasn't read it, although she loved the telly version.
"The weird thing is their pride in whatever I do has always outweighed anything else. Even way back at the beginning when I got reviews that had graphic language in them my dad would cut them out of the paper and take them in to work to show his friends. It makes me wonder how far I could push things. If I was a porn star would it be the same?"
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters is published by Virago. Price £7.99
Quote:
'I don't know why I write about these dark, secretive things. I'd say I was sunny natured'
Lucy Cavendish
Sarah Waters writes very dark, very strange books. They are all set in the 19th century, all involve lesbianism in one form or another, and have all been so well received that, yesterday, she was named by Granta as one of its influential Best of Young British Novelists 2003. This list of the top 20 writers aged under 40 is announced every decade. The first one, published in 1983 and including such literary luminaries as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, was treated with curiosity. The second - AL JFK, Will Self, Kazuo Ishiguro and their ilk - was thought elitist as it didn’t include Jonathan Coe, Irvine Welsh and Nick Hornby. But I don’t suppose anyone was surprised by the inclusion of Waters this time.
She qualifies on all counts. She’s 36 years old and has skilfully managed to be extremely popular - her third novel, Fingersmith, was named by many critics as their Book of the Year - while also retaining literary glory. She has won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer Award. But she reached true infamy when her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, was made into a three-part drama by BBC2 last year. It follows the travails of a young woman, Nan Astley, a Whitstable oyster shucker, who falls in love with vaudevillian male impersonator Kitty and then goes on to become a music-hall star, rent "boy" and East End tom. It was billed as a "lesbian romp" and adapted by Andrew Davies. In the end it garnered middling reviews and complaints from viewers about how little sex there actually was in the programme.
"It did feature a leather strap-on dildo!" says Waters, brushing one of her four very friendly cats off her leg. "I mean, how often do you see that on television?"
Of course, because she is a literary person with a PhD on the history of lesbian and gay literature, and because people such as A N Wilson have called her "brilliant", she is, naturally, interested in more than just Dickensian girl-on-girl sex.
In fact it was because of her PhD that Waters, when she was at London University, became interested in lesbian stories within Victorian pornography. "There was a real history of women impersonating men then," she says. "It was part of mainstream entertainment but it didn’t cross over in the way drag culture did and has. I always think that most so-called lesbian pornography is for men really. You see those videos of lesbian sex and the girls are all tall with long hair and pneumatic boobs. Tipping the Velvet was not actually about that. It was about all sorts of things, and one of these things was female sex that involved love and tenderness and real truths. Lesbians actually think Tipping is a social drama about the history of lesbianism. Although I wrote it for myself and my friends, I always hoped it was funnier than that. Funnier and darker."
Waters herself is quite serious and blonde. The picture on her book jackets shows a smiling, fluffy-haired woman who would not look out of place in the Home Counties. She’s changed a lot since then.
Her hair is now cropped much shorter. She doesn’t look quite so smiley. She is very well read and bright with a nice combination of wit and seriousness. But some things about her jar. She lives in a small rented flat in a council tower block in Brixton. It seems rather incongruous for a woman who was, last year, shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction with Fingersmith.
Most people with her type of status and money inhabit boltholes in Islington. But the flat itself has a stunning view over London and is kitted out in jolly kitsch - a Buffy advent calendar, a windowsill full of colourfully fake flowers, fairy lights hanging on the balcony and some jewelled-bead curtains, all of which seems quite frivolous for someone who has spent the past two and a half years ensconced in a dark Dickensian world of intrigue, nastiness and corruption in her third book.
There are also cat-litter trays everywhere, which Waters keeps apologising for. "Usually I only have two cats here," she says. "Two are visiting." One of the "visitors" belongs to her ex-girlfriend, Laura Gowing. They were together for seven years, and Gowing used to sit in one room tapping away on her computer (she is a history don) while Waters tapped away in another room on her computer writing her PhD, which led to more tap, tap, tapping away on Tipping the Velvet. In the foreword to that book Waters thanks Gowing "who has taught me many marvellous things about history, and about love".
Obviously, things did not work out, hence the move to Brixton from the shared home in Hackney. "I still stand by what I wrote," she says. "But there were also other female friends who looked at the book and helped me out. Some friends had a better literary knowledge in some ways." Two of the cats are sisters - Waters got custody of one, Gowing the other. "Laura travels a lot now though," says Waters, "so I might keep them both." She says she wants to buy a house with a garden for the cats, but still in Brixton. "I love living here," she says. "I love London for the multiculturalism and the anonymity."
But maybe everything’s started tilting the wrong way slightly. She certainly doesn’t have much anonymity now, even though the woman in the flat two doors up looked absolutely nonplussed when I mouthed through the window, "Where does Sarah Waters live?" "Ah, yes, well, it’s a Catch-22 isn’t it?" she says.
"When I first started writing the books I didn’t think I’d get anything published. I wrote Tipping for myself and my friends. I thought I’d be perfectly happy for the manuscript to sit in a box under my bed. But then it was published by Virago and I wondered if anyone would buy it.
"Now, of course, I worry if anyone’s going to buy the next one. And with the success comes a whole host of other things - interviews and photo shoots and people asking me to write intros for this book and that book and offers of short story collections and - I’ve been trying to write my fourth book and I’m not sure if I’m getting anywhere."
She feels that her inclusion on the Granta list is only bound to make her insecurity worse. "I don’t know if it benefits anyone. It means people have much higher expectations of me. I worry that I can’t write any more or that people won’t like what I do. I’ve never had that before because no-one knew anything about me. Now everybody seems to know my business and they almost feel they have a right to it." But her new-found celebrity has helped her profile in her home town of Neyland in Pembrokeshire, Wales. "It’s a small village," she says, "very small. I think when I came out, maybe ten years ago, people gossiped but now I go back and they say, ‘Sarah, look how well you’ve done for yourself!’ I wonder what they would think if I was a world-famous lap-dancer or porn star or something. Am I acceptable because I am a writer?
"My parents have never been worried about my sexuality, though I was concerned that the scenes on the television adaptation of Tipping the Velvet might upset them, or make everything more real to them, but they were very cool about it all."
She describes a rather idyllic childhood - lots of countryside and running around and fun. "I really have had a rather lucky life," she says. "Nothing that traumatic has happened to me." And yet her books are full of people who are manipulative and manipulated. Nothing in the fictitious world of Sarah Waters is ever what it seems, and her skill is to lure the reader into her consciousness and then jolt them to the core with some startling twist or turn. "Affinity [her second novel] is much darker than the others," she says. It’s about a repressed woman who, to obscure her attraction to a friend’s wife, visits female prisoners in Millbank women’s jail and becomes obsessed with one of them, spiritualist Selina Dawes. It’s very melodramatic.
Waters herself has no idea where this darkness comes from. "I don’t know why," she says, "but I seem to write about people who feel trapped. None of them can move - they are trapped by their sexuality, their gender, their position in society. I don’t know why I write about these dark, secretive things. I’d say I was sunny-natured."
Later on, when talking about the issue of whether gay men should be allowed to adopt children, she says: "Of course they should. Many heterosexual women get pregnant accidentally. At least with a gay person you know that they really want the child as it’s taken so much to get one." She tells me how, as a child, she felt rather worthless. "I do remember sitting around in the front room with my mother’s friends watching them all chatting. I wouldn’t really listen to them that much. I felt totally out of place, as if I was in a game I couldn’t understand. I was so quiet. I am sure they all looked at me and thought, ‘What a stupid girl, how dull she is’. Maybe she did have a sense of being trapped then? "I don’t know," she says. "I knew I wasn’t going to stay in Wales, though."
Her love of 19th-century literature has generally shaped all her work. "I love Dickens and Thackeray, " she says. "I love the way they span history and society in a way contemporary novels don’t. I have spent so long paddling in the past." However, the novel she is writing at the moment is set in the 1940s. "I’m reading a lot of Greene, Waugh and Powell," she says. "I love A Dance to the Music of Time." And she’s fascinated by Brief Encounter. "There is a starkness of emotions in that film that is so exquisite. No-one says anything, yet all the range of emotion is there."
It’s quite a departure, though, to leave behind the well-trod turf of characters such as Sue Trinder and Mrs Sucksby (in Fingersmith), Nan Astley (Tipping the Velvet) and Selina Dawes. Her language, she says now, has necessarily to err on the stark side rather than the descriptive. "It’s so new for me," she says. "A complete departure and I have no idea if anyone will like it." She hasn’t sold the book yet. She wants to make sure she can at least finish her first draft before offering it around. She has a surprising lack of confidence about it. "I have become so ensconced in the Victorian era that I can hardly visualise this one at all."
Waters has a strange habit of seeing her books in her mind before she writes them. When she appeared as an extra in Tipping the Velvet, and was wigged and gowned up in a music-hall scene, she virtually fainted. "It was so strange to be living within something I had visualised and seeing it come to life." She thinks this visual sense comes from a childhood spent watching television. "I loved watching TV," she says. "That’s really all I did. It gave me this ability to see everything in my brain rather than just think of words. When I hear people now moaning about children watching too much TV I think ‘stop! It’s good for them.’ I might front a campaign. The ‘Let Children Watch TV Campaign’."
It takes a bit of coaxing, and a lot of well-deserved praise, for Waters to admit that her success does, at times, make her happy. "Yes, I do like it when people tell me they have enjoyed the book. They are like my children, those books. It is difficult to think of someone in bed reading my words." But doesn’t she want to, occasionally, look at her reviews and the praise and the shortlists and just let herself, for a secret small moment, feel joy in her heart and think, "I did it! That book, that best-selling, acclaimed, Booker Prize shortlist book was created by me!"
She looks surprised at the question. "I think I may like to feel that," she says, four cats back round her legs. "I may even let myself feel that after the next novel."
Take a look around you at the world we've come to know
Does it seem to be much more than a crazy circus show
Maybe from the madness something beautiful will grow...
by poweroftwo » Sat Feb 22, 2003 1:38 pm
by oneyedchicklet » Sun Mar 02, 2003 6:31 pm
A long time ago I had a lady to love. She made me think of things I never thought of. Now she's gone and I'm on my own. A love song keeps coming to my mind. A love song that was there all the time. ~ LRB
by duellistjc » Wed Mar 12, 2003 4:02 pm
by daydreamer » Thu Mar 13, 2003 4:49 am
by hellmouthhottie20 » Wed Mar 19, 2003 10:14 am
International rockstar - Gravy maker extraordinaire - Ozzy
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