My Cultural Life - Bruce Bawer

This week our guest is the American writer, poet and journalist Bruce Bawer.

Over the years Bruce has written a number of books including Coast to Coast: Poems which was named the best first book of poetry for 1993 by the Dictionary of Literary Biography, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society which examined the public debate surrounding gay rights published in 1993 and Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity published in 1997.

In recent years he has focused primarily on the subject of Islam in Europe, writing While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006) in which he argued that Europe faces a cataclysmic threat from its growing Muslim population and his most recent book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009) which examined the phenomena of liberal appeasement towards radical Islam.

Bruce has also written articles for many magazines and newspapers including The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, Pajamas Media and The Hudson Review.

What's the latest download on your Ipod?

I don't have one. If I did? It would likely be Rosemary Clooney, Nina Simone or Sinatra.

What was the last thing you saw at the theatre?

A Norwegian-language production of La Cage aux Folles.

Tate Britain or Tate Modern?

Tate Britain.

What are you reading at the moment?

Manic: A Memoir by Terri Cheney

Which cultural figure from the past or present would you most like to meet or have met?

Thomas Jefferson or Elizabeth I.

Which cultural figure from the past or present do you think is the most over-rated?

Allen Ginsberg

And the most under-rated?

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My Cultural Life - Nick Cohen

Nick Cohen is a journalist, author and commentator.

He writes a regular column for The Observer and also contributes to such newspapers and magazines as The Spectator, The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Jewish Chronicle.

Nick has penned four books, the first being Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Presposterous published in 1999, the second Pretty Straight Guys a critique of the New Labour government published in 2003 and the highly acclaimed Orwell Prize nominated What's Left? published in 2007 in which he revealed the hypocrysy of the modern left. Nick's fourth book Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England which documents Britain's changing political attitudes in the wake of the financial crises was published in 2009.

What was the last thing you saw at the theatre?

Numbers by the Belarus Free Theatre. The actors mime absurd sketches, while the statistics about the misery of life in the dictatorship are projected on to the stage. Since the failure of the revolution, everyone involved with the play is keeping their heads down, in exile or in prison. You can watch it here

Tate Britain or Tate Modern?

Tate Britain, I guess, because I follow James Cameron's advice to be conservative in everything except your politics. I don't scream when someone suggests going to Tate Modern, however, I just worry about the quality control.

What are you reading at the moment?

On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman Dixon.

Which cultural figure from the past or present would you most like to meet or have met?

Shakespeare, but I wonder if that would be a good idea. We know next to nothing about him and all the biographies are 99 per cent padding. If I could raise him from the dead and discover what he thought about Hamlet would that liberate or constrict actors and directors? With artists, it is often better to imagine than to know.

Which cultural figure from the past or present do you think is the most over-rated?

Present: Damian Hirst

Past: Virginia Woolf

And the most under-rated?

I would  have said Hilary Mantel. It infuriated me that people used to say the only great British novelists of our time were Amis, Rushdie and McEwan when Mantel was producing A Place of Greater Safety and Beyond Black. Now she has won the Booker Prize, I nominate the ignored Polish Andrzej Wajda, for his wonderful films about life in Eastern Europe. His last film on the Katyn massacres barely made it into the art houses.

The X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing?

Never seen either.

You're asked by a paper to review either The Magic Flute or We Will Rock You. Which do you choose?

I am not competent to review Mozart and have no desire to review Queen.

Have you ever walked out of a play, film, concert or other production?

No, but once I went to see a Georgian production of Don Juan (that is Georgia in the Caucasus, not Georgia, USA). The Almeida told us there would be subtitles, as Georgian speakers are hard to find in North London. Just before the show began, the stage manager announced that the actors had insisted that he turn off subtitles because their presence would dilute the purity of their art. All of us sat there, docile and obedient, for two hours watching a play we did not understand. No one protested. No one walked out. No one shouted, "I want my money back". No one wanted to be the first to appear a philistine. I could compare this display of conformity among the theatre-going public to the fear of speaking out which allows tyrants to commit great crimes, but this not the time or place.

What's the latest download on your Ipod?

I don't have an Ipod.

Before being sent to your desert island, you're allowed to choose your three favourite films to take with you. What would they be?

They would have to be films I could watch repeatedly, so Casablanca, The Godfather and 1900

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My Cultural Life - Michael Arditti

Michael Arditti, is a novelist, short story writer and critic.

His first novel 'The Celibate' was published in 1993, his second novel 'Pagan and her Parents' was published in 1996, it attracted much interest from the literary world, being shortlisted for the Lambda award in the United States. Literary recognition continued, when in 2000, his third novel 'Easter' won the first Waterstone's Mardi Gras Award. Following on in 2005, his fourth novel 'Unity' was shortlisted for the Wingate Jewish Quarterly, and his sixth novel 'A Sea of Change' was published in 2006.

He also contributes to various national magazines and newspapers, as well as the Dictionary of National Review.

What's the latest download on your Ipod?

I've just bought an Ipod Nano, which is the most thrilling piece of technology I own. As one who finds it hard to understand the works of a telephone, I am awestruck that this elegant square the size of an After Eight mint, should hold 5000 songs. I've yet to download anything on to it, so perhaps I should mention the last CD I bought, Gerald Finley's Operatic Aria's, which include John Adams' glorious setting of the John Donne sonnet, Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God.

What was the last thing you saw at the theatre?

Fela, a Broadway musical about the Nigerian musician and activist, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, which was brash, manipulative, amusing and ludicrously sanitized. There was no hint in its bland book of Fela's 27 wives, let alone his death from AIDS. I'm at a loss to know what it was doing at the National Theatre, which would never have staged such an inept bio-play about a white musician such as Buddy Holly, even though, for all its faults, the long running Buddy is a far finer piece of work.

Far happier was my most recent visit to the opera to see A Dog's Heart (pictured) at the ENO, a new piece by Alexander Raskatov and Cesare Mazzonis based Bulgakov's novel. Bulgakov's satire can seem remote and overextended today, but both music and lyrics were fresh, powerful and at times, even funny, and Simon McBurney's witty, fluid production was a triumph.

Tate Britain or Tate Modern?

Neither rate high on my list of favourite London galleries but I so dislike the curating of the Tate Modern's permanent collection, let alone the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall, which is such an inferior rip-off of the main hall of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, that I have to opt for Tate Britain. Besides which, it has the Turners.

What are you reading at the moment?

Adam Mars - Jones's Cedilla, which is to be published in January 2011. I much admired Mars - Jones's Pilcrow, an intimate portrait of the bed-bound John Cromer, a precocious, stricken with Still's Disease, which fully justified its 500 pages. At 750 pages, Cedilla is even longer, but if the 650 pages are as good as the first 80, it will be a rare treat.

Which cultural figure from the past or present would you most like to meet or have met? 

There are so many but, provided I could take my 21st century consciousness back into the 19th century, it would have to be Gogol (image) so that I could try and persuade him to accept his sexuality and prevent his both destroying the second part of Dead Souls and starving himself to death.

Which cultural figure from the past or present do you think is the most over-rated?

Herb Ritts, Anna Leibovitz, Mario Testino, Rankin, and all the other celebrity photographers who have somehow managed to fool the public into believing that their work is the equal of the people that they record.

And the most under-rated?

I'd like to name two novelists, one of whom I met as a boy and the other in my twenties, who are not so much under-rated as neglected. The first is Richard Hughes, celebrated as the author of the children's classic - The Fox in the Attic - and - The Wooden Shepherdess - are far too little known. The second is William Cooper, a career civil servant, whose trilogy - Scenes from Provincial Life - Scenes from Metropolitan Life - and - Scenes from Married Life - though now rarely read, was enormously influential on novelists of the 50's and 60's.

The X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing?

I have never seen either.

You're asked by a paper to review either The Magic Flute or We Will Rock You. Which do you choose?

I have been asked to review in my time and, since I walked out of 'We Will Rock you' (without reviewing it I should add), the answer is clear. Queen's songs weren't written to be dovetailed into a West End musical and the resulting show is a brash cartoon. The Magic Flute is one of the world's great masterpieces which, even the most bizarre production (and I speak as one who has seen it performed in a French circus ring with a trapeze artist mimicking the vocal gymnastics of the Queen of the Night's aria and real-life animals greeting Tamino in the forest) is full of musical glories.

Have you ever walked out of a play, film, concert or other production?

After years of thinking it my duty to sit through every performance to the bitter end, I've realised that, as a paying customer, it's my right to leave quietly when the work in question is boring, perverse or inept (or, in the case of Katie Mitchell's production of The Seagull, all three). It has been wonderfully liberating.

Before being sent to your desert island, you're allowed to choose your three favourite film's to take with you. What would they be?

Ingmar Bergman (image) is my favourite director and Through a Glass Darkly is the film of his that has moved and challenged me the most. Given that it focuses on a mentally ill woman on a remote island, it might the happiest choice on this occasion so, instead, I shall opt for the more life-affirming Fanny & Alexander. My second choice would be the Wizard of Oz, which I haven't seen for thirty years and I trust won't be a disappointment; it would not only remind me of innocent joys of childhood but provide me with me own karaoke machine. My third choice would be Visconti's The Leopard, arguably the finest epic ever made, so richly populated that I should never feel lonely and with the inestimable bonus of the Verdi score.

Michael's most recent novel, is 'The Enemy of the Good' a tale of faith and feeling in the 21st century; published by Arcadia Books (2009).

His forthcoming novel 'Jubilate' a love story set in Lourdes, will be on bookshelves in 2011. 

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My Cultural Life - Michael Burleigh

This week's guest is the historian and author Michael Burleigh, whose latest book is the superb Blood & Rage : A Cultural History of Terrorism (Harper Press). His two-part history of politics and religion, Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes, were two of the most acclaimed books of 2005 and 2006 respectively. His work has been translated into fifteen languages and his The Third Reich: A New History, won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001.

What’s the latest download on your Ipod?

Don't own one. But I have eclectic tastes in CDs- Uhm Khaltum, Argentinian tango music, stuff from Mali and Mauritania.......

What was the last thing you saw at the theatre?

Tom Stoppard's 'Rock n'Roll'

Tate Britain or Tate Modern?

Tate Britain since I can walk to it. I liked the little Orientalism show.

What are you reading at the moment?

Neville Chamberlain's diaries and letters and Churchill's speeches.

Which cultural figure from the past or present would you most like to meet or have met?

Rubens- far and away my favourite painter.

Which cultural figure from the past or present do you think is the most over-rated?

So many faces crowd my mind that I can't name any of them. Tracey Emin, Damian Hirst, the whole gang.

And the most under-rated?

A very obscure Weimar writer called Christoph Bry who died very young but managed to write 'Verkappte Religionen' (Hidden Religions) a prescient book. I don't know whether Chardin is underrated?

The X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing?

Neither.

You’re asked by a paper to review either The Magic Flute or We Will Rock You. Which do you choose?

I wouldn't know where to start with either, having once tried to review a novel- incredibly difficult.

Have you ever walked out of a play, film, concert or other production?

Yes, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen since I found the physics tutorial showy and the theatre seemed to empty anyway. I confess that the audience at a recent St Matthew's Passion so depressed me that I didn't return after the interval.

Before being sent to your desert island, you're allowed to choose your three favourite films to take with you. What would they be?

Mirror (Tarkovsky); Battiglia di Algeri (Pontecorvo), Beau Travail, Tous les Matins du Monde and Scorsese's Casino.

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