Feed your soul: the 31-day literary diet for January
Our revels now are ended and January looms, with its exhortations to get fit, lose weight, dry out. So here’s a radical alternative diet: instead of depriving yourself, how about making it a month of treats – but feeding your brain instead of your face? Our one-a-day calendar will take you into magical realms of poetry and prose, argument and imagination. It will transport you to some places you always wanted to explore, but couldn’t find the time, and to others you never knew existed, where you will find strange and wonderful things.
In fact, this calendar very nearly didn’t happen because I kept disappearing down rabbit-holes so deep and fascinating that, had I been the white rabbit himself, someone would have had to drag me out by the ears. Some entries – such as John Huston’s film of Malcolm Lowry’s mescal-fuelled modernist masterpiece Under the Volcano (20 January) – come with the authority of a full year’s leisurely burrowing (it is among the BFI’s list of 100 great films to watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime, which was a comfort and joy through lockdown, and is handily still being updated).
But others were completely new to me. The fun of an adventure like this is the way that one genre melts into another, sending ripples across time and space. Many entries in the calendar are picked on this basis: as small, easy portals into something wide and various which will reward further investment of time and money. Some are introductions to poets, artists and musicians who do, after all, have livings to make. I’m not just being flippant: if you want to fully understand poet Alice Oswald’s relationship with water (28 January), you need to read her book-length, source-to-sea portrait of a river, Dart.
But other entries, such as Glasgow University and BBC Radio Scotland’s Robert Burns readings (24 January, naturally), are triumphs of cultural completism which radiate the enthusiasm of everyone involved. But I digress…
*** A literary calendar for January 2021 1 January Maya Angelou: Still I Rise
(Poetry, 2 mins)Angelou published this totemic poem in 1978 and continued to perform it into her 80s. Like a fine wine, it matured over the years, as this glorious late outing demonstrates.
Decades of chain smoking are invested in her smoky chuckle, as she asks: “Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise?”
2 January Clueless
(Film, 1hr 37 mins)In these dark days of the year, when the conviviality has worn thin but you’re still stuck at home, what’s really needed is a spiritraiser, preferably one that doesn’t involve alcohol. Forget all those costume Austens: this 1995 teen comedy is where the novel meets film and has babies – something smart and very much its own thing, which everyone in the family can enjoy.
3 January Kate Bush: The Sensual World
(Music, 4 mins)Has there ever been a sexier song than this one, based on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, from Ulysses? There are two versions, because James Joyce’s curmudgeonly estate at first forbade Bush from using his words. When they relented years later, she rerecorded it as Flower of the Mountain with the original text. I know which is my favourite, mrmmm, yes.
4 January Dona Croll reading This Sceptr’d Isle
(Drama, 2 mins)Never has John of Gaunt’s speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II seemed more powerful than when Croll reminted it in an all-black, female production at the Globe in 2019. It appears here as part of the Monologue Library, a lockdown archive of more than 100 solo turns by top actors. Listen and weep for all those truck drivers massing outside Dover.
5 January TS Eliot: The Journey of the Magi
(Poetry, 2 mins)You don’t have to share Old Possum’s religious beliefs to appreciate his take on the Epiphany, the festival of the three kings. Others have read it more elegantly, but there’s a frigidity to his delivery that shivers those famous opening lines: “A cold coming we had of it, /Just the worst time of the year”.
6 January Saul Williams: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert
(Poetry/music (20 mins)Long before anyone could have imagined being locked down, NPR’s concerts were bringing poets and musicians direct from their tiny desks to yours – and never more powerfully than in this 2016 performance by hip-hop hero Williams. Political in the truest sense, it includes a tender tribute to whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
7 January The Water Babies
(Film, under 2 hours)Talking Pictures TV has been a comfort blanket through the on-off lockdowns, with its stream of forgotten gems. Today at 2pm Tommy Pender plays Tom the chimney sweep, with Billie Whitelaw as Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby, in this all-star 1978 live action-animated adaptation of Charles Kingsley’s Victorian classic. As to who voices Jock the Lobster or Cyril the Walrus, you just have to guess.
8 January Shirley Jackson: Afternoon in Linen
(Podcast, 40 mins)Kristen Roupenian, whose own name-making short story Cat Person went viral after being published in the New Yorkermagazine in 2017, reads an unsettling Shirley Jackson story that ran there in 1943 – and explains how a single word tips it into horror. A cult curio from the New Yorker’s super-cool fiction podcast series.
9 January Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood
(Radio drama, 1hr 30 mins)Richard Burton leads the unforgettable 1954 recording of life in the little village of Llareggub, which unfolds like a Chagall painting, with its fishingboatbobbing sea and its houses as blind as moles, where Polly Garter for ever mourns her
dead lover, while Mr Pugh dreams up poisons for his living wife.
10 January Tom Lehrer: Pollution
(Lyrics, 2 mins each)If Bob Dylan can win the Nobel prize, Lehrer can surely be counted a poet. The great mathematico-musical humorist recently made all his lyrics and sheet music available to download free of charge until 2024. Altogether now: “Pollution, pollution! You can use the latest toothpaste, And then rinse your mouth with industrial waste…”
11 January Lafcadio Hearn: Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
(Short stories, 10 mins each)A gem of internet arcana from a fin-de-siecle Irish writer who naturalised as Japanese and remains a hero there. Here are corpse-eating spirits and faceless ghosts. The tales inspired a cult 1965 film by Masaki Kobayashi, which has been described as the “Rolls Royce of horror anthology movies”. But read him in the original first.
12 January Seamus Heaney: Mossbawn Sunlight
(Poetry, 1 min)One of the Irish poet’s loveliest poems – published in his 1975 collection, North (Faber), and chosen to sit alongside his Nobel citation – was written for his aunt Mary, “broadlapped with whitened nails” in her floury apron. Hear the love in his voice at the Poetry Archive.
13 January George Saunders: Congratulations By the Way
( Talk/Book, 12 mins)In 2013, the novelist gave a speech to students at Syracuse University, which was a love song to kindness – “that luminous part of you that exists beyond personality”. Such was its success when it was printed in the New York Times (where you can still read it) that it was published as a standalone pamphlet by Bloomsbury.
14 January New York Times: Oops! Famously Scathing Reviews of Classic Books
(Archive Reviews, 10 mins)From the collected poems of Yeats (“As discouraging as a breakfast of cold porridge”), to Nabokov’s Lolita (“dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion”), an irresistible collection of literary misjudgments that should be prescribed reading for anyone wanting to make a quick buck as a critic.
15 January Saki: The Storyteller
(Short story, 8 mins)The cautionary tales of Hector Hugh Munroe – AKA Saki – might not be as well known as those of his contemporary Hilaire Belloc, not least because he wrote in prose. Also, because they’re gorgeously twisted, as demonstrated by this piquant story-within-a-story of a smug little girl whose good behaviour medals prove her undoing.
16 January James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time
(Essays, 2 hours+)Baldwin’s twin letters on his Harlem childhood and the evil of racism in US society were published in 1963 (Penguin), and became a rallying cry for the US civil rights movement. This reading by Jesse L Martin is a timely reminder that Baldwin is a hero for all seasons.
17 January Longplayer dialogues
(Conversations, 30 mins each)This inspiring interdisciplinary daisy-chain of half-hour dialogues commissioned by Artangel ran over 12 hours last September and is now available in individual sections online, with an accompanying reading list. Novelist Naomi Alderman chats with inventor Saul Griffith, composer Brian Eno exchanges urbanities with forensic architect Eyal Weizman. Take your pick.
18 January Jay Bernard: Surge
(Poetry, 9 mins)The poet and archivist combined two skill sets into a debut collection that commemorates the death of 13 young black Londoners in the New Cross fire on this day in 1981. Surge (Chatto) was shortlisted for the 2019 TS Eliot prize, for which Bernard gave a reading that is truly haunting. Once heard, never forgotten.
19 January Alice Oswald: Interview with Water
(Lecture, 1 hour)As a poet who is passionate about being out and about, it’s ironic that Oswald’s first lecture as Oxford professor of poetry should take place on YouTube. But here it is – a stimulating and moving meditation on the relationship between water and grief, from Homer describing the tears of Odysseus to Jericho Brown’s Riddle, mourning the death of Emmett Till.
20 January Under the Volcano
(Film, 2 hours +)Albert Finney delivers a timely resolve booster for anyone whose dry January is in danger of falling apart, as the alcoholic former British consul trying to “drink himself sober”, in a small Mexican town celebrating the Day of the Dead. Jacqueline Bisset stars alongside him in Huston’s 1984 adaptation of Malcolm Lowry’s “modernist Mexican Ulysses”, which was previously assumed to be one of the great unfilmables.
21 January
Louise Glück: Faithful and Virtuous Night
(Poetry, 5 mins)The American winner of the 2020 Nobel prize in literature hasn’t published a new poetry collection since 2014 when she won the National Book award for this book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). While publishers scramble to fill the gap (at least four new publications are slated for this year), listen to her “unmistakable poetic voice” at the NBA ceremony.
22 January
Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement
(Essay, 2 hours +)What are the stories that need to be told in the age of catastrophe? In this gripping polemic ( University of Chicago), the Indian novelist argues that we can only address the challenge of climate change by uncoupling ourselves from a storytelling tradition rooted in the industrial revolution: ie, we need to reinvent the novel.
23 January Roger Robinson: A Portable Paradise
(Poetry, 9 mins)Until winning the TS Eliot prize in 2019, Robinson was one of the poetry world’s best-kept secrets. His prize reading includes a poem that should be adopted as an anthem to health workers in the age of a pandemic: Grace takes its name and subject from the redoubtable Jamaican nurse who saw his prematurely born son through his perilous first days.
24 January Robert Burns: Tam o’Shanter, read by Brian Cox
(Poetry, 2 mins each)Address to a Haggis is the traditional fare for Burns Night – and you can seek it out in this 716-reading archive created by Glasgow University and BBC Radio Scotland – but I’ve always had a soft spot for the “blethering, blustering, drunken blellum” Tam. All come with celebrity performers and a handy set of notes.
25 January Kae Tempest: What I Love
(Podcast, 56 mins)Theatre director Ian Rickson devised a revealing format for this podcast series: invite artists to discuss a song, a film and a piece of writing they really love. A basketball documentary about Michael Jordan and the poetry of William Blake are among the choices of a poet who is caught, like their subjects, in mid-air (they were transitioning from Kate to Kae as it was made).
26 January Olga Tokarczuk: The Tender Narrator
(Lecture, 1 hour)The 2018 Nobel prize winner marked her win with a characteristically smart and thoughtprovoking lecture about the need for a new literature to reflect – and deflect – the cacophony of our “polyphonic age”, one that looks for a fourth-person narrator reminiscent of biblical parable or the classical deus ex machina. Read and discuss, in English, Polish or Swedish.
27 January
Valerie Stivers: Cooking With DH Lawrence
(Blog/essays, 5 mins each)The Paris
Review’s Eat Your Words blog series, extracting recipes from literature, is a delight. You could try Italo Cavino’s sour cherry meringue pie or James Baldwin’s oysters with mignonette, but who could resist the chance to taste Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Stivers’s essays are delicious, too.
28 January Kurt Vonnegut: Make Your Soul Grow
(Letter, 1 min)Possibly the sweetest letter ever written by a famous author to his fans was penned by the great American humorist months before his death, in response to a request for a school visit by five pupils at a New York school. Read it on Letters of Note.
29 January Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on feminism
(Talk, 30 mins)Adichie’s 2012 TED talk launched an international debate on feminism and took the Nigerian writer to a new level of global celebrity. It’s funny and clever. And if you like it, you can go on to to her letter to her friend, Dear Ijeawele, which lists 15 ways to ensure your daughter grows up a feminist.
30 January Christina Rossetti: Goblin Market
(Illustrated essay, 5 mins)There are such riches in the British Library’s Discovering Literature section that it’s easy to get lost for days, but for all that John Ruskin declared it “the calamity of modern poetry”, Dinah Roe’s introduction to this creepy masterpiece (Penguin) is particularly seductive, with letters, facsimiles and Arthur Rackham illustrations to die for.
31 January Open University: Start writing fiction
(Classes, 12 hours)There are loads of online writing courses but this OU OpenLearn offering is both good and free. It’s 12 hours overall, broken down into sections: character, setting, genre. So if you’ve worked your way through all the brilliant writing above and fancy having a go yourself, here’s a starting point.