IAN RANKIN'S EDINBURGH

 

Source: www.speakup.com.br

Language level: Advanced

Speaker: Mark Worden

Standard: British accent

Ian Rankin published his first novel in 1986, but success arrived when He published his second novel the following year. It was called Knots and Crosses and it introduced a new character in fiction: Inspector Rebus, a hardened detective who attempts to solve crimes in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh. Rankin went on to publish a further 16 Rebus novels, but decided to stop in 2007, when the detective reached the age of 60 and retired.

The Rebus books have been adapted for television and they have been translated into at least 25 languages. They are said to account for 10 per cent of crime fiction sales in Britain.

Not surprisingly, Rankin and Rebus have created something of a tourism industry in Edinburgh. There are Rebus walking tours and you can even download a free iPhone app called “Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh.”

THE DARK SIDE

Yet Rankin, who moved to Edinburgh when he went to university, isn’t the city’s only famous writer, Robert Louis Stervenson, the creator of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, was from here, as was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Homes. More recent examples include Muriel spark and Irvine Welsh, author of the cult novel Trainspotting. Their books have a dark side and we asked Ian Rankin whether the same could be said of Edinburgh:

Ian Rankin

(Scottish accent)

There are two towns, there’s the Old Town, which runs from the Castle to the Palace of Holyrood, where the Queen stays when she’s in Edinburgh, and that was the original city, but then, in the 18^th century, when it became vermin ridden and insanitary, those who could afford to move started building a “New Town” and there was a physical barrier between the two, there was a lake, a loch, which is now Princess Street Gardens. So there was a physical barrier between two towns, the New Town and the Old Town, and the New Town was a place where rationalism grew up, it’s a place where your scientists and your economists would sit and debate how the world was going to be. And that’s where Robert Louis Stevenson lived when he was a child, his father, his whole family were engineers, they were rationalists, but he was attracted to the chaos that existed in the Old Town.

LOW LIFE

So, as a young man, he would tiptoe out of the house at dead of night and walk up the hill, and go to the taverns where poets and vagabonds and drug addicts and alcoholics and prostitutes would hang out, and so he was seeing those two sides, the rational and the chaotic, the Jekyll and the Hyde. So the city actually, structurally has that, it has that divide.

And when you arrive in Edinburgh, you arrive in hat seems a very civilised city, you arrive at Waverley Station, by rail, which is named after a novel. As you step out, the first thing you see is the huge statue to Sir Walter Scott, the novelist, the biggest statue to a writer in the world, we believe, certainly in Europe. So very imposing and very cultured, but if you go outside the periphery, when you get to the territory that Irvine Welsh writes about in Trainsportting you see there’s another side to Edinburgh, that’s just below the surface.

INSPIRATION

We then asked him why Edinburgh was such a productive place for writers.

Ian Rankin

I don’t know. I mean, it wasn’t always like that. I mean, there’s big gaps in its history. I mean, you had Sir Doyle, arguably, although he left and never wrote about the place. You had Stevenson, who you know, didn’t set his most famous book there, Jekyll and Hyde is set, in London, it’s not set in Edinburg, but not many. Then you get to the modern age, there seems to be a gap until you get to Muriel spark, with Miss Brodie, although the vast majority of her books were set abroad, many in Italy because she lived in Italy for many years. And then you come to Irvine Welsh and you get this explosion of people writing about Edinburgh, in the vernacular, and also writing about contemporary Edinburgh, and not the city of the past.

NEIGBOURS

But now Edinburgh contains multitudes of writers, it has changed since…when I arrived as a student in 1978 I couldn’t find anybody who was writing novels about contemporary Edinburgh, there just didn’t seem to be any. There were a few historical novelists, Dorothy Dunnett being the leading example, but nobody writing about contemporary Edinburgh and now, since Trainspotting, there are dozens of authors.

I mean, in my street, I’m not the only novelist in my street: you know, there’s Alexander McCall Smith lives two houses up the road from me, J.K Rowling lives just round the corner, Kate Atkinson is a little bit further on, there’s Lin Anderson, the crime writer, nearby, there’s lots and lots of crime writers in Edinburgh, as well as literary novelists.

MANY FACES

And he had more to say on the subject.

Ian Rankin

And what marks us out in the range of styles, there’s no Edinburgh school, there’s no one type of writing about Edinburgh. So Alexander McCall Smith’s Edinburgh is very different from Rebus’ Edinburgh, which is different from Kate Atkinson’s Edinburgh, which is different from Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh. And it’s as though this small city, this tiny city, half a million people if that, maybe 400.000 people, which can’t grow, it really can’t grow, it’s got the sea to the north, sea to the east, hills to the south, it’s very tightly packed in, it just seems to be fascinating and complex to us.

And I began writing about Edinburgh when I arrived there as a student, to try and make sense of the place, to try and take apart the mechanism, almost as though you’re taking apart an engine, or a watch, or something, and to see what makes it work, what makes it the particular city that it is and that process is ongoing. If I had come to any reasonable conclusions about Edinburgh, I could have stopped writing the books, but I continue to write about Edinburgh because it continues to fascinate me and I still don’t know what makes it tick. 

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Return to Sender

 

Source: 

http://www.englishexercises.org/makeagame/viewgame.asp?id=1772

Author of this exercise: Teacher Angeles from Spain

 

 

Complete the text

 

 

return to sender

return to sender

I gave a letter to the ,

he put it his sack.

bright and early next ,

he brought my letter back.

she wrote upon it:

return to sender, address .

no such number, no such .

we had a quarrel, a lover's spat

i write i'm sorry but my letter keeps coming .

so then i dropped it in the  

and sent it special d.

bright and early next  

it came right back to me.

she wrote upon it:

return to sender, address unknown.

no such person no such .

this time i'm gonna take it myself

and put it right in her .

and if it comes back the very next  

then i'll understand the writing on it

return to sender, address unknown.

no such number, no such zone

Margaret Bourke-White Helped Create Modern Photojournalism

Source: www.voanews.com

I'm Barbara Klein. And I'm Steve Ember with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. Today we tell complete our report about photographer Margaret Bourke-White. She helped create the modern art of photojournalism.

(MUSIC)

Margaret Bourke-White began her career as an industrial photographer in the early nineteen thirties.  Her pictures captured the beauty and power of machines.  They told a story – one image at a time.  The technique became know as the photographic essay.  In nineteen thirty-six, American publisher Henry Luce started a new magazine, called Life, based on the photographic essay. In this magazine, the pictures told the story.  Bourke-White had worked as a photographer for one of Luce's other magazines called Fortune.  Luce chose her to work on his new magazine.

Margaret Bourke-White took the picture that appeared on the first cover of Life magazine.  It was a picture of a new dam being built in the western state of Montana.  The light on the rounded supports showed the dam's great strength.  The small shapes of two men at the bottom showed the dam's huge size.  Bourke-White was no longer satisfied just to show the products of industry in her pictures, as she had in the past.  She wanted to tell the story of the people behind the industry:  In this case, the people who were building the dam.

The dam in Montana was a federal project. Ten thousand people worked on it.  Bourke-White took pictures of those people – at the dam, in the rooms where they lived, and in the places where they had fun. With her pictures in Life magazine, she told a story about America's "Wild West" in the twentieth century.

(MUSIC)

Margaret Bourke-White was a social activist.  She was a member of the American Artists Congress.  These artists supported state financial aid for the arts.  They fought discrimination against African-American artists. And they supported artists fighting against fascism in Europe.

In the nineteen thirties, Bourke-White met the American writer Erskine Caldwell. Caldwell was known for his stories about people in the American South. The photographer and the writer decided to produce a book to tell Americans about some of those poor country people of the South.  They traveled through eight states, from South Carolina to Louisiana. Their book, "You Have Seen Their Faces," was published in nineteen thirty-seven. It was a great success.

Caldwell's words were beautiful.  But Bourke-White's pictures could have told the story by themselves. They showed the faces of people in a land that still wore the mask of defeat in America's Civil War.

(MUSIC)

In nineteen thirty-eight, some countries in Europe were close to war. Bourke-White and Caldwell went there to report on these events.  They produced another book together, this time about Czechoslovakia.  It was called "North of the Danube."  The next year Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell were married. They continued to work together.

By the spring of nineteen forty-one, Europe had been at war for a year and a half. Bourke-White and Caldwell went to the Soviet Union. They were the only foreign reporters there. For six weeks, Bourke-White took pictures of the Soviet people preparing for war. Then, one night in July, Soviet officials announced that German bomber planes were flying toward Moscow.  No civilians were permitted to stay above ground because of the coming attacks.

As others were hurrying to safety, Bourke-White placed several cameras in the window of her hotel room.  She set the cameras so they would remain open to the light of the night sky.  Then she joined the others in rooms under the hotel. While she waited for the bombing attack to end, her cameras recorded the explosions, which lit up the rooftops of the city.

Before leaving the country, Bourke-White received permission to meet with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. She returned home with his picture and a series of other photographic essays for Life magazine.  She also had enough material for a book on the war in the Soviet Union. Margaret Bourke-White's marriage to Erskine Caldwell ended in divorce in nineteen forty-two.

During World War Two, she became an official photographer with the United States Army.  Her photographs were to be used jointly by the military and by Life magazine. She was the first woman to be permitted to work in combat areas during World War Two.

Bourke-White flew with American bomber planes in England as they prepared to attack enemy targets on the European continent. She wanted to fly with the Army to North Africa, where the allies were fighting German troops in the desert.

But the commanding general told her it would be too dangerous. So she sailed for North Africa instead.  Before she reached the African coast, enemy bombs hit the ship and sank it.  An allied warship rescued Bourke-White and the other survivors and took them to Algeria.

The incident did not stop Bourke-White from reporting on the war.  She flew in an allied bombing attack on a German airfield at El Aouina in Tunisia.  She flew over the terrible fighting in the Cassino Valley in Italy. And she moved along the Rhine River with the United States Third Army, under the command of General George Patton.  At the end of the war, she was with American troops when they entered and freed several Nazi death camps.  She took photographs of the prisoners in the Buchenwald death camp in Germany in nineteen forty-five.

Later, she wrote about the war.  She said she sometimes pulled an imaginary cloth across her eyes as she worked.  In the death camps, she said, the cloth was so thick that she did not really know what she was photographing until she saw the finished pictures.  In addition to her stories for Life magazine, Bourke-White published books on the allied campaign in Italy and on the fall of Nazi Germany.

(MUSIC)

After the war, Life magazine sent Margaret Bourke-White to India. She stayed for three years as India prepared for its independence from Britain.  She photographed the battles between Muslims and Hindus. And she met with the leader of India's non-violent campaign for independence, Mohandas Gandhi.  She made a famous photograph of him called "Gandhi at His Spinning Wheel."  She was the last person to photograph Gandhi before he was murdered in nineteen forty-eight.

After that, Bourke-White traveled to South Africa.  Her job was to tell the story of the black people who worked in the country's gold mines.  To get the pictures she wanted, she followed the workers deep into the mine tunnels.

In the early nineteen fifties, she went to Korea to photograph the effects of war on the Korean people. She took a famous photograph of a returning soldier reunited with his mother in South Korea in nineteen fifty-two.  The mother had believed that her son had been killed several months earlier in the Korean War.

Margaret Bourke-White tried to make her pictures perfect. Often, she was not satisfied with what she had done.  She would look at her pictures and see something she had failed to do, or something she had not done right. Reaching perfection was not easy.  Many things got in the way of her work.  She said: "There is only one moment when a picture is there.  And a moment later, it is gone forever.  My memory is full of those pictures that were lost."

(MUSIC)

More of Margaret Bourke-White's beautiful pictures were to be lost, sooner than anyone expected.  In the middle nineteen fifties, she began to suffer from the effects of Parkinson's disease.

Her hands shook so badly that she could not hold a camera.  She wrote a book about her life, called "Portrait of Myself."  And, even though she was unable to take photographs, she continued to work for Life magazine until nineteen sixty-nine.  She died in nineteen seventy-one at the age of sixty-seven.

Margaret Bourke-White was a woman doing what had been a man's job. Her work took her around the world, from factories to battlefields.  Her life was full of adventure. She was one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century.

(MUSIC)

This program was written by Shelley Gollust.  It was produced by Lawan Davis. I'm Barbara Klein. And I'm Steve Ember.  Join us again next week for PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English.

Before answer the questions have a look at the entry posted in March of this year

Before answer the question have a look at the entry posted in March of this year 

Celebrities Pen names

Alberto Pinchele

Daniel Defoe

WHAT’S IN A NAME

Pen Names

Source: Speak Up

Language level: Lower intermediate

Speaker: Justin Ratcliffe

Standard: British accent

Many of the most famous writers in history have used pen names. Why?

SIMPLICITY AND STYLE

Eric Blair thought George Orwell was “a good round English name.” Daniel Foe, author of Robson Crusoe, decided Defoe sounded more aristocratic.  Vampire novelist, Anne Rice, changed her name early in life: her mother bizarrely named her after her father, Howard O’Brien. The famous Japanese haiku poet tried 15 pen names before settling on Basho, which means banana plant. Some choose simplicity. Georges Remi reversed his initials (French pronunciation) to become Hergé, author of Tintin. Joseph Conrad sounds reassuringly English, compared to Jozef Konrad Korzeniowki. Wilhelm Albert Vlademir Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky is less memorable than Guillaume Apollinaire, Ettore Schmitz became Italo Svevo because he “felt sorry for the one little vowel surrounded by all those fierce consonants;” it also sounds less foreign.

Not only are these pen names clear and memorable, they also look great on book covers. (Like pen names, authors often use their initials – from T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence to J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling – to create a memorable brand). Some pen names are a kind of homage. Neftali Bosoalto put together Paul Verlaine and Czech writer Jan Neruda to become Nobel poet Pablo Neruda. Samuel Langhorne Clemens chose Mark Twain because it reminded him of his beloved Mississippi River.

GENRE AND GENDER

Writers may use pseudonyms for different for different genres. Math professor Charles Lutwidge Dodgson invented the playful name Lewis Carroll for Children’s books such as Alice in Wonderland. (Lewis is the French versionof Lutwidge; Caroll come from the Latin for Charles, Carolus.)

Pen names also disguise who you are for example, a woman. Mary Ann Evans did not want readers to assume her novels were romances, so she wrote as George Eliot. Amantine Aurore Dupin became George Sand, while the Brontë sisters (Anne, Charlotte and Emily) initially published as Actor Bell, Currer Bell and Ellis Bell.

CONCEALMENT AND DISGUISE

There are other reasons to hide one’s identity. Isak Dinesen was the pen name used for Out of Africa, the disguised autobiography of Baroness Karen Blixen. Because Irish civil servants were not allowed to publish books, Brian O’Nolan wrote novels as Flann O’Brien and articles as Myles na gCopalleen. Respected critic Anne Desclos wrote erotic best-seller, the Story of 0, as Pauline Réage. Stephen King published four novels under the name Richard Bachman to find out whether people bought his books for his name, rather than his writing.  Crime queen Agatha Christie used the pen name Mary Westmacott to write romances, exploring her own psychology n a way the Poirot and Miss Marpie novels could not.

Molliére hid his name (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) because the theater was shameful. Most touching, when he was just 16, future American politician Benjamin Franklin invented middle-aged widow Silence Dogood to get his satirical letters published in the newspaper printed by his brother.

Would you write books under your own name? Use your initials? Or would you prefer a pen name, to hide your identify or to be more memorable?

PEN NAME	REAL NAME
Alberto Moravia	Alberto Pinocherle
Anne Rice	Howard Allen O’Brien
Anthony Burgess	John Burgess Wilson
Boz	Charles Dickens
Daniel Defoe	Daniel Foe
Eltery Queen	Freeric Dannay and Manfred B. Lee
Flann O’Brien	Brian O’Nolan
George Elliot	Mary Ann Evans
George Orwell	Eric Arthur Blair
George Sand	Amandine Dupin
Guillaume Apokinaire	Vilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky
Hergé	Georges Remi
Karen Blixen	Isak Dinosen
Italo Stevo	Ettore Schmitz
John Le Careré	David John Moore Cornwell
Joseph Conrad	Józel Teodor
Lemony Snicket	Daniel Handler
Lewi Carroll	Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Mark Twain	Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Molière	Jean-Baptiste Poquelin
Pablo Neruda	Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
Richard Bachman	Stephen King
Pauline Réage	Anne Desclos
Saki	Hector Hugo Munro
Stendhal	Marie-Henri Beyle
Voltaire	François-Marie Arguet

PEN NAMES (B1) – Speak Up – Issue 280

GETTING STARTED.

TASK 1. Speaking. With your partner(s) discuss these questions.

a)    Do you like your name? Why (not)?

b)    What’s your favourite name for a woman? Why?

c)    What’s your favourite name for a man? Why?

d)    Would you ever consider changing your name? Why (not)?

e)    What are possible reasons why some people change their name?

LISTENING

TASK 2.  Prediction. You are going to listen to a recording about famous writers who changed their names. Before you listen, discuss this question with your partner, and make some notes. If you don’t know/aren’t sure, guess!

What are possible reasons why famous writers changed their names? Make a list. When you have finished, compare your list with other students in the class.

TASK 3. Listening for Specific Information. Listen to all of the recording, without reading. How many of your ideas were mentioned?

Check your answers before completing the remaining TASKS.

READING

TASK 4. Prediction #2. Before you read all of the article, work with your partner and match the famous writer  with the reason for changing their name. If you don’t know, guess!

1.    Agatha Christie	a)    Name looks good on a book cover
2.    Daniel Defoe	b)    Pen name is more memorable than original name
3.    George Eliot	c)    Pen name sounds more aristocratic than original name
4.    Guillaume Apollinaire	d)    Simplicity
5.    Hergé	e)    To find out if people bought his books because of his name only
6.    Isak Dinesen	f)    To hide her gender
7.    J.R.R. Tolkien	g)    To hide identity
8.    Pablo Neruda	h)    To pay homage to other writers
9.    Stephen King	i)     To write a different kind of book

TASK 5: Reading for Specific Information: Read all of the text as quickly as you can and check your answers to TASK 4.

P.E.T. EXAM PRACTICE

(Paper 1: Reading and Writing Paper, WRITING PART 1)

TASK 6. Here are some sentences related to the topic of the article you have read.

For each question, complete the second sentence so that it means the same as the first.

Use no more than three words

1)	I like Hergé’s real name better than his pen name
	I prefer Hergé’s real name _________ his pen name
2)	You won’t know Stephen King’s pen name if you don’t read this article.
	You won’t know Stephen King’s pen name _________ read this article.
3)	George Orwell wrote such good books, that I’ve read them all.
	George Orwell wrote _____________well, that I’ve read all his books
4)	I went so see the Harry Potter films because I loved the books by J..K. Rowling
	I loved the books by J.K. Rowling ______________ I went to see the Harry Potter films.
5)	It was the first time I had  read a poem by T.S. Eliot.
	I _________ a poem by T.S. Eliot before.

SPEAKING

TASK 7 . Discuss these questions with your partners

1. Which of the reasons given for changing names do you find strange? Why?
2. Do you think Stephen King’s books sell because of his name or his writing? Why?
3. How important do you think the writer’s name is when you want to choose a book? Why?
4. Do you prefer reading books or going to see the same story at the cinema? Why?
5. Have you ever bought a book by an author you know and found you didn’t like the book? Why?