Happy New Year from Litopia After Dark! We kick off 2009 with a bang as we look towards what may be a difficult 12 months, but also what we hope will be a very productive one for all our listeners.

On the show this week…

Filming is due to start this year on a trilogy of Tintin films, directed by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. The big question is can Tintin rival on the one hand, Spielberg’s Indian Jones franchise, and on the other, Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” masterpiece?  In order to get close to the success of either of these modern icons, it is essential that Tintin succeeds not just in the European market, but also in the American domestic market.  So what do our pundits think?  Does the new Obama zeitgeist make Tintin timely?   Can a story about “an overgrown boy scout, whose adventures involve pluck, fair play, restrained violence and no sex” ever succeed in America?

A new book about Hitler appears most months, but Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life by Timothy W. Ryback has been published at precisely the same time as Karl Rove has been extolling the literary tastes of his former boss, President George W. Bush. Both reading lists make surprising, if not incredulous, reading. Rove claims that Bush reads a book every week. “Each year”, he says, “the president also read the Bible from cover to cover.” And far from being an illiterate thug, Hitler collected a library of over 16,000 books. What does all this tell us about our leaders?

The Daily Telegraph is reporting that more than a third of Britons – 39 per cent – are more likely to lie about what books they have devoured than they are about their age or their job. The research, carried out by the National Year of Reading, found that one in five adults said they would read while waiting for their date to arrive in order to make a good first impression. The panel discuss what books they’ve lied about reading and the crushing humiliation at being caught.

Writing in The Times, feminist and author Germaine Greer addresses possibly the season’s most urgent issue of sexual politics – high heels!  “The success of the TV series Sex and the City” writes Greer, “derives partly from the accuracy of its basic tenets that chocolate and shopping are more satisfactory than sex and that all women hanker after extravagant shoes.”  So what do high heels say about the women who wear them and the men who love them?

We close the show by making a New Years Resolution – not for ourselves though, but for someone else.  Tune in to find out who each panel member chose… and what they’re resolving they should do in 2009.

On our fresh and sparkly panel this week are stalwart regulars, Donna Ballman and Dave Bartram.  Joining them are Amanda Lees, author of Kumari, Goddess of Gotham and Richard Howse.  The Ustream chatroom was buzzing with New Year cheer and insightful comments, however next week… we may have moved somewhere new.

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Links mentioned in the show…

In the Economist…

In America filming is supposed to begin in earnest on a trilogy of Tintin films to be directed by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, using digital “performance capture” technology to create a hybrid between animation and live action. Mr Spielberg secured an option to film Tintin shortly before Hergé’s death in 1983. The delays seem to have been caused partly by American puzzlement at Tintin. In September 2008 Universal Pictures pulled out of a plan to co-finance the project. The Hollywood Reporter, a trade publication, describes the films as being about “a young Belgian reporter and world traveller who is aided in his adventures by his faithful dog Snowy”, and explains that this storyline is “hugely popular in Europe”. You can almost hear the baffled shrugs.

Assuming that Tintin does end up the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster, many around the world will soon think he is American. Hergé’s heirs know Tintin’s fame will take on quite different, global dimensions, in a way that will be hard to control. That will mark a big change. After Hergé’s death, his wife Fanny inherited the rights to his work. She remains in overall artistic control of the Hergé Studios in Brussels (day to day the studios are run by Fanny’s second husband, Nick Rodwell, a British businessman). The studios are known for the ferocity with which they guard the works, scouring the world for abuses of copyright from Hergé’s old offices on a smart shopping avenue.
Mrs Rodwell confesses to seeing risks in Hollywood doing Tintin. To her, the charm of Hergé’s work is absolutely “European”—more “nuanced” than an American comic strip. The American style of telling a story threatens that European “sensibility”, she suggests: American narratives are “very dynamic, but more violent, and are much more aggressively paced.”
Hergé wanted the risk taken. He died days before a planned face-to-face meeting with Mr Spielberg, but had been briefed on the director’s thinking by a trusted assistant, Alain Baran, sent to Los Angeles to open negotiations. Mr Baran later wrote that Mr Spielberg saw Tintin as an “Indiana Jones for kids”, imagining Jack Nicholson as Captain Haddock. Such talk did not alarm Hergé. He said a film-maker like Mr Spielberg should be given free rein, and told his wife: “This Tintin will doubtless be different, but it will be a good Tintin.”

Anthony Grafton in The New Republic…

What could reading do–what did it do–for Hitler? The mere fact that he marked many of his books, Ryback points out, is striking. After all, Hitler was “a man who famously seemed never to listen to anyone, for whom conversation was a relentless tirade, a ceaseless monologue.” Yet as a reader he would stop “to engage with the text, to underline words and sentences, to mark entire paragraphs, to place an exclamation point beside one passage, a question mark beside another, and quite frequently an emphatic series of parallel lines in the margin alongside a particular passage.” Hard though they are to interpret–the fuller annotations found in some of the volumes do not seem to come from Hitler himself–these traces show a man listening and responding. Could they offer a path to that mysterious mind, more concealed than revealed by the thousands of volumes of memoirs and commentary that never seem to penetrate Hitler’s shell?

Hitler’s own words make clear–clearer, in fact, than the surviving volumes–just how much some writers meant to him. His lifelong favorites–leatherbound copies of which he kept in the study of his alpine villa–ranged from the Western adventure novels of Karl May to the plays of Shakespeare. May’s novels, from The Ride Across the Desert on, “overwhelmed” Hitler as a boy, claiming his attention so powerfully that his grades suffered “a noticeable decline.” During the war, Hitler told his generals to study May’s books, and even had a special edition issued for soldiers at the front. He considered Winnetou, the Indian chief of May’s tales, a master of “tactical finesse and circumspection,” and a model for his own love of cunning tactics and surprises. Reading at night, he told Albert Speer, “when faced by seemingly hopeless situations, he would still reach for these stories,” because “they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people.”

Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal…

We recommended volumes to each other (for example, he encouraged me to read a Mao biography; I suggested a book on Reconstruction’s unhappy end). We discussed the books and wrote thank-you notes to some authors.
At year’s end, I defeated the president, 110 books to 95. My trophy looks suspiciously like those given out at junior bowling finals. The president lamely insisted he’d lost because he’d been busy as Leader of the Free World.

Mr. Bush’s 2006 reading list shows his literary tastes. The nonfiction ran from biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ and Genghis Khan to Andrew Roberts’s “A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900,” James L. Swanson’s “Manhunt,” and Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Mayflower.” Besides eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton’s “Next,” Vince Flynn’s “Executive Power,” Stephen Hunter’s “Point of Impact,” and Albert Camus’s “The Stranger,” among others.

Germaine Greer in The Times Online…

The success of the TV series Sex and the City since 1998 derives partly from the accuracy of its basic tenets that chocolate and shopping are more satisfactory than sex and that all women hanker after extravagant shoes. Improved engineering had by then made Manolo Blahnik’s dizzier heels wearable. Just. Women who wear trainers to travel to work will change into serious heels when they get there, unless they are salespeople or factory workers or nurses. As well as carrying a complex set of sexual implications, heels are a way of signalling vicarious leisure.

Some say that foot fetishism gains ground when intercourse becomes too dangerous. Lap dancers, strippers and porn stars wear the highest platforms of all. An Italian urologist has declared that high heels “directly work the pleasure muscles that are linked to orgasm”. What is more, “They influence and work the pelvic muscles and reduce the need to exercise them.” However, she also admits that she adores high-heeled shoes and “wanted to find something positive about them”. You’d be rash to trust to your Christian Louboutins to cure your stress incontinence. Comments on an osteoarthritis sufferers’ website indicate that despite the known facts about the stress on the knee caused by wearing high heels, women have no intention of giving them up. Those now unfashionable psychoanalysts who explained women’s psychology as a perpetual struggle between narcissism and masochism might have had a point.

It makes no more sense to put women’s addiction to silly shoes down to men, than it does to blame men for cosmetic polysurgery and female genital cutting. If women spend fortunes on dreadfully uncomfortable shoes it is their choice – except maybe in Italy where the Italian police have kitted out their 14,750 female officers with high heels.

Caroline Gammell in The Telegraph…

For both men and women, exaggerating the extent of your literary appetite is second only to false boasts about previous conquests in bed.
More than a third of Britons – 39 per cent – are not entirely honest about what they have read and are more likely to lie about what books and magazines they have devoured than they are about their age or their job.

The research, carried out by the National Year of Reading, found that men and women did not confine themselves to books when trying to create an impression.
Men were twice as likely to read Heat magazine or rifle through a collection of poetry before meeting a potential partner.

Nearly one in five adults – 18 per cent – said they would read while waiting for their date to arrive in order to make a good first impression.

More than quarter – 26 per cent – said they would try and entice someone into bed by leaving a copy of the book they had been discussing earlier in the evening by the bed.

For men, the book most likely to win over women is Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, while men were impressed by women who had inspected news websites before a date.
photo credit: Thomas Haw

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