Podcast appearances and mentions of Ali Smith

Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote: “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions like why Thomas De Quincey is more widely read, why D.H. Lawrence's best books aren't his novels, Frances's conversion to spookiness, what she thinks about a whole range of modern biographers, literature and parasocial relationships, Elizabeth Bowen, George Meredith, and plenty about Muriel Spark.Here are two brief extracts. There is a full transcript below.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?And.Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking to Frances Wilson. Frances is a biographer. Her latest book, Electric Spark, is a biography of the novelist Muriel Spark, but she has also written about Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, DH Lawrence and others. Frances, welcome.Frances Wilson: Thank you so much for having me on.Henry: Why don't more people read Thomas De Quincey's work?Frances: [laughs] Oh, God. We're going right into the deep end.[laughter]Frances: I think because there's too much of it. When I chose to write about Thomas De Quincey, I just followed one thread in his writing because Thomas De Quincey was an addict. One of the things he was addicted to was writing. He wrote far, far, far too much. He was a professional hack. He was a transcendental hack, if you like, because all of his writing he did while on opium, which made the sentences too long and too high and very, very hard to read.When I wrote about him, I just followed his interest in murder. He was fascinated by murder as a fine art. The title of one of his best essays is On Murder as One of the Fine Arts. I was also interested in his relationship with Wordsworth. I twinned those together, which meant cutting out about 97% of the rest of his work. I think people do read his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I think that's a cult text. It was the memoir, if you want to call it a memoir, that kick-started the whole pharmaceutical memoir business on drugs.It was also the first addict's memoir and the first recovery memoir, and I'd say also the first misery memoir. He's very much at the root of English literary culture. We're all De Quincey-an without knowing it, is my argument.Henry: Oh, no, I fully agree. That's what surprises me, that they don't read him more often.Frances: I know it's a shame, isn't it? Of all the Romantic Circle, he's the one who's the most exciting to read. Also, Lamb is wonderfully exciting to read as well, but Lamb's a tiny little bit more grounded than De Quincey, who was literally not grounded. He's floating in an opium haze above you.[laughter]Henry: What I liked about your book was the way you emphasized the book addiction, not just the opium addiction. It is shocking the way he piled up chests full of books and notebooks, and couldn't get into the room because there were too many books in there. He was [crosstalk].Frances: Yes. He had this in common with Muriel Spark. He was a hoarder, but in a much more chaotic way than Spark, because, as you say, he piled up rooms with papers and books until he couldn't get into the room, and so just rented another room. He was someone who had no money at all. The no money he had went on paying rent for rooms, storing what we would be giving to Oxfam, or putting in the recycling bin. Then he'd forget that he was paying rent on all these rooms filled with his mountains of paper. The man was chaos.Henry: What is D.H. Lawrence's best book?Frances: Oh, my argument about Lawrence is that we've gone very badly wrong in our reading of him, in seeing him primarily as a novelist and only secondarily as an essayist and critic and short story writer, and poet. This is because of F.R. Leavis writing that celebration of him called D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, because novels are not the best of Lawrence. I think the best of his novels is absolutely, without doubt, Sons and Lovers. I think we should put the novels in the margins and put in the centre, the poems, travel writing.Absolutely at the centre of the centre should be his studies in classic American literature. His criticism was- We still haven't come to terms with it. It was so good. We haven't heard all of Lawrence's various voices yet. When Lawrence was writing, contemporaries didn't think of Lawrence as a novelist at all. It was anyone's guess what he was going to come out with next. Sometimes it was a novel [laughs] and it was usually a rant about-- sometimes it was a prophecy. Posterity has not treated Lawrence well in any way, but I think where we've been most savage to him is in marginalizing his best writing.Henry: The short fiction is truly extraordinary.Frances: Isn't it?Henry: I always thought Lawrence was someone I didn't want to read, and then I read the short fiction, and I was just obsessed.Frances: It's because in the short fiction, he doesn't have time to go wrong. I think brevity was his perfect length. Give him too much space, and you know he's going to get on his soapbox and start ranting, start mansplaining. He was a terrible mansplainer. Mansplaining his versions of what had gone wrong in the world. It is like a drunk at the end of a too-long dinner party, and you really want to just bundle him out. Give him only a tiny bit of space, and he comes out with the perfection that is his writing.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?Frances: I think that the way I approach biography is that there is a code to crack, but I'm not necessarily concerned with whether I crack it or not. I think it's just recognizing that there's a hell of a lot going on in the writing and that, in certain cases and not in every case at all, the best way of exploring the psyche of the writer and the complexity of the life is through the writing, which is a argument for psycho biography, which isn't something I necessarily would argue for, because it can be very, very crude.I think with the writers I choose, there is no option. Muriel Spark argued for this as well. She said in her own work as a biographer, which was really very, very strong. She was a biographer before she became a novelist. She thought hard about biography and absolutely in advance of anyone else who thought about biography, she said, "Of course, the only way we can approach the minds of writers is through their work, and the writer's life is encoded in the concerns of their work."When I was writing about Muriel Spark, I followed, as much as I could, to the letter, her own theories of biography, believing that that was part of the code that she left. She said very, very strong and very definitive things about what biography was about and how to write a biography. I tried to follow those rules.Henry: Can we play a little game where I say the names of some biographers and you tell me what you think of them?Frances: Oh my goodness. Okay.Henry: We're not trying to get you into trouble. We just want some quick opinions. A.N. Wilson.Frances: I think he's wonderful as a biographer. I think he's unzipped and he's enthusiastic and he's unpredictable and he's often off the rails. I think his Goethe biography-- Have you read the Goethe biography?Henry: Yes, I thought that was great.Frances: It's just great, isn't it? It's so exciting. I like the way that when he writes about someone, it's almost as if he's memorized the whole of their work.Henry: Yes.Frances: You don't imagine him sitting at a desk piled with books and having to score through his marginalia. It sits in his head, and he just pours it down on a page. I'm always excited by an A.N. Wilson biography. He is one of the few biographers who I would read regardless of who the subject was.Henry: Yes.Frances: I just want to read him.Henry: He does have good range.Frances: He absolutely does have good range.Henry: Selina Hastings.Frances: I was thinking about Selina Hastings this morning, funnily enough, because I had been talking to people over the weekend about her Sybil Bedford biography and why that hadn't lifted. She wrote a very excitingly good life of Nancy Mitford and then a very unexcitingly not good life of Sybil Bedford. I was interested in why the Sybil Bedford simply hadn't worked. I met people this weekend who were saying the same thing, that she was a very good biographer who had just failed [laughs] to give us anything about Sybil Bedford.I think what went wrong in that biography was that she just could not give us her opinions. It's as if she just withdrew from her subject as if she was writing a Wikipedia entry. There were no opinions at all. What the friends I was talking to said was that she just fell out with her subject during the book. That's what happened. She stopped being interested in her. She fell out with her and therefore couldn't be bothered. That's what went wrong.Henry: Interesting. I think her Evelyn Waugh biography is superb.Frances: Yes, I absolutely agree. She was on fire until this last one.Henry: That's one of the best books on Waugh, I think.Frances: Yes.Henry: Absolutely magical.Frances: I also remember, it's a very rare thing, of reading a review of it by Hilary Mantel saying that she had not read a biography that had been as good, ever, as Selina Hastings' on Evelyn Waugh. My goodness, that's high praise, isn't it?Henry: Yes, it is. It is. I'm always trying to push that book on people. Richard Holmes.Frances: He's my favourite. He's the reason that I'm a biographer at all. I think his Coleridge, especially the first volume of the two-volume Coleridge, is one of the great books. It left me breathless when I read it. It was devastating. I also think that his Johnson and Savage book is one of the great books. I love Footsteps as well, his account of the books he didn't write in Footsteps. I think he has a strange magic. When Muriel Spark talked about certain writers and critics having a sixth literary sense, which meant that they tuned into language and thought in a way that the rest of us don't, I think that Richard Holmes does have that. I think he absolutely has it in relation to Coleridge. I'm longing for his Tennyson to come out.Henry: Oh, I know. I know.Frances: Oh, I just can't wait. I'm holding off on reading Tennyson until I've got Holmes to help me read him. Yes, he is quite extraordinary.Henry: I would have given my finger to write the Johnson and Savage book.Frances: Yes, I know. I agree. How often do you return to it?Henry: Oh, all the time. All the time.Frances: Me too.Henry: Michael Holroyd.Frances: Oh, that's interesting, Michael Holroyd, because I think he's one of the great unreads. I think he's in this strange position of being known as a greatest living biographer, but nobody's read him on Augustus John. [laughs] I haven't read his biographies cover to cover because they're too long and it's not in my subject area, but I do look in them, and they're novelistic in their wit and complexity. His sentences are very, very, very entertaining, and there's a lot of freight in each paragraph. I hope that he keeps selling.I love his essays as well, and also, I think that he has been a wonderful ambassador for biography. He's very, very supportive of younger biographers, which not every biographer is, but I know he's been very supportive of younger biographers and is incredibly approachable.Henry: Let's do a few Muriel Spark questions. Why was the Book of Job so important to Muriel Spark?Frances: I think she liked it because it was rogue, because it was the only book of the Bible that wasn't based on any evidence, it wasn't based on any truth. It was a fictional book, and she liked fiction sitting in the middle of fact. That was one of her main things, as all Spark lovers know. She liked the fact that there was this work of pure imagination and extraordinarily powerful imagination sitting in the middle of the Old Testament, and also, she thought it was an absolutely magnificent poem.She saw herself primarily as a poet, and she responded to it as a poem, which, of course, it is. Also, she liked God in it. She described Him as the Incredible Hulk [laughs] and she liked His boastfulness. She enjoyed, as I do, difficult personalities, and she liked the fact that God had such an incredibly difficult personality. She liked the fact that God boasted and boasted and boasted, "I made this and I made that," to Job, but also I think she liked the fact that you hear God's voice.She was much more interested in voices than she was in faces. The fact that God's voice comes out of the burning bush, I think it was an image for her of early radio, this voice speaking, and she liked the fact that what the voice said was tricksy and touchy and impossibly arrogant. He gives Moses all these instructions to lead the Israelites, and Moses says, "But who shall I say sent me? Who are you?" He says, "I am who I am." [laughs] She thought that was completely wonderful. She quotes that all the time about herself. She says, "I know it's a bit large quoting God, but I am who I am." [laughs]Henry: That disembodied voice is very important to her fiction.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's the telephone in Memento Mori.Frances: Yes.Henry: Also, to some extent, tell me what you think of this, the narrator often acts like that.Frances: Like this disembodied voice?Henry: Yes, like you're supposed to feel like you're not quite sure who's telling you this or where you're being told it from. That's why it gets, like in The Ballad of Peckham Rye or something, very weird.Frances: Yes. I'm waiting for the PhD on Muriel Sparks' narrators. Maybe it's being done as we speak, but she's very, very interested in narrators and the difference between first-person and third-person. She was very keen on not having warm narrators, to put it mildly. She makes a strong argument throughout her work for the absence of the seductive narrative. Her narratives are, as we know, unbelievably seductive, but not because we are being flattered as readers and not because the narrator makes herself or himself pretty. The narrator says what they feel like saying, withholds most of what you would like them to say, plays with us, like in a Spark expression, describing her ideal narrator like a cat with a bird [laughs].Henry: I like that. Could she have been a novelist if she had not become a Catholic?Frances: No, she couldn't. The two things happened at the same time. I wonder, actually, whether she became a Catholic in order to become a novelist. It wasn't that becoming a novelist was an accidental effect of being a Catholic. The conversion was, I think, from being a biographer to a novelist rather than from being an Anglican to a Catholic. What happened is a tremendous interest. I think it's the most interesting moment in any life that I've ever written about is the moment of Sparks' conversion because it did break her life in two.She converted when she was in her mid-30s, and several things happened at once. She converted to Catholicism, she became a Catholic, she became a novelist, but she also had this breakdown. The breakdown was very much part of that conversion package. The breakdown was brought on, she says, by taking Dexys. There was slimming pills, amphetamines. She wanted to lose weight. She put on weight very easily, and her weight went up and down throughout her life.She wanted to take these diet pills, but I think she was also taking the pills because she needed to do all-nighters, because she never, ever, ever stopped working. She was addicted to writing, but also she was impoverished and she had to sell her work, and she worked all night. She was in a rush to get her writing done because she'd wasted so much of her life in her early 20s, in a bad marriage trapped in Africa. She needed to buy herself time. She was on these pills, which have terrible side effects, one of which is hallucinations.I think there were other reasons for her breakdown as well. She was very, very sensitive and I think psychologically fragile. Her mother lived in a state of mental fragility, too. She had a crash when she finished her book. She became depressed. Of course, a breakdown isn't the same as depression, but what happened to her in her breakdown was a paranoid attack rather than a breakdown. She didn't crack into nothing and then have to rebuild herself. She just became very paranoid. That paranoia was always there.Again, it's what's exciting about her writing. She was drawn to paranoia in other writers. She liked Cardinal Newman's paranoia. She liked Charlotte Brontë's paranoia, and she had paranoia. During her paranoid attack, she felt very, very interestingly, because nothing that happened in her life was not interesting, that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages. He was encoding these messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, in the program notes to the play, but also in the blurbs he wrote for Faber and Faber, where he was an editor. These messages were very malign and they were encoded in anagrams.The word lived, for example, became devil. I wonder whether one of the things that happened during her breakdown wasn't that she discovered God, but that she met the devil. I don't think that that's unusual as a conversion experience. In fact, the only conversion experience she ever describes, you'll remember, is in The Girls of Slender Means, when she's describing Nicholas Farrington's conversion. That's the only conversion experience she ever describes. She says that his conversion is when he sees one of the girls leaving the burning building, holding a Schiaparelli dress. Suddenly, he's converted because he's seen a vision of evil.She says, "Conversion can be as a result of a recognition of evil, rather than a recognition of good." I think that what might have happened in this big cocktail of things that happened to her during her breakdown/conversion, is that a writer whom she had idolized, T.S. Eliot, who taught her everything that she needed to know about the impersonality of art. Her narrative coldness comes from Eliot, who thought that emotions had no place in art because they were messy, and art should be clean.I think a writer whom she had idolized, she suddenly felt was her enemy because she was converting from his church, because he was an Anglo-Catholic. He was a high Anglican, and she was leaving Anglo-Catholicism to go through the Rubicon, to cross the Rubicon into Catholicism. She felt very strongly that that is something he would not have approved of.Henry: She's also leaving poetry to become a prose writer.Frances: She was leaving his world of poetry. That's absolutely right.Henry: This is a very curious parallel because the same thing exactly happens to De Quincey with his worship of Wordsworth.Frances: You're right.Henry: They have the same obsessive mania. Then this, as you say, not quite a breakdown, but a kind of explosive mania in the break. De Quincey goes out and destroys that mossy hut or whatever it is in the orchard, doesn't he?Frances: Yes, that disgusting hut in the orchard. Yes, you're completely right. What fascinated me about De Quincey, and this was at the heart of the De Quincey book, was how he had been guided his whole life by Wordsworth. He discovered Wordsworth as a boy when he read We Are Seven, that very creepy poem about a little girl sitting on her sibling's grave, describing the sibling as still alive. For De Quincey, who had lost his very adored sister, he felt that Wordsworth had seen into his soul and that Wordsworth was his mentor and his lodestar.He worshipped Wordsworth as someone who understood him and stalked Wordsworth, pursued and stalked him. When he met him, what he discovered was a man without any redeeming qualities at all. He thought he was a dry monster, but it didn't stop him loving the work. In fact, he loved the work more and more. What threw De Quincey completely was that there was such a difference between Wordsworth, the man who had no genius, and Wordsworth, the poet who had nothing but.Eliot described it, the difference between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. What De Quincey was trying to deal with was the fact that he adulated the work, but was absolutely appalled by the man. Yes, you're right, this same experience happened to spark when she began to feel that T.S. Eliot, whom she had never met, was a malign person, but the work was still not only of immense importance to her, but the work had formed her.Henry: You see the Wasteland all over her own work and the shared Dante obsession.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's remarkably strong. She got to the point of thinking that T.S. Eliot was breaking into her house.Frances: Yes. As I said, she had this paranoid imagination, but also what fired her imagination and what repeated itself again and again in the imaginative scenarios that recur in her fiction and nonfiction is the idea of the intruder. It was the image of someone rifling around in cupboards, drawers, looking at manuscripts. This image, you first find it in a piece she wrote about finding herself completely coincidentally, staying the night during the war in the poet Louis MacNeice's house. She didn't know it was Louis MacNeice's house, but he was a poet who was very, very important to her.Spark's coming back from visiting her parents in Edinburgh in 1944. She gets talking to an au pair on the train. By the time they pull into Houston, there's an air raid, and the au pair says, "Come and spend the night at mine. My employers are away and they live nearby in St. John's Wood." Spark goes to this house and sees it's packed with books and papers, and she's fascinated by the quality of the material she finds there.She looks in all the books. She goes into the attic, and she looks at all the papers, and she asks the au pair whose house it is, and the au pair said, "Oh, he's a professor called Professor Louis MacNeice." Spark had just been reading Whitney. He's one of her favourite poets. She retells this story four times in four different forms, as non-fiction, as fiction, as a broadcast, as reflections, but the image that keeps coming back, what she can't get rid of, is the idea of herself as snooping around in this poet's study.She describes herself, in one of the versions, as trying to draw from his papers his power as a writer. She says she sniffs his pens, she puts her hands over his papers, telling herself, "I must become a writer. I must become a writer." Then she makes this weird anonymous phone call. She loved the phone because it was the most strange form of electrical device. She makes a weird anonymous phone call to an agent, saying, "I'm ringing from Louis MacNeice's house, would you like to see my manuscript?" She doesn't give her name, and the agent says yes.Now I don't believe this phone call took place. I think it's part of Sparks' imagination. This idea of someone snooping around in someone else's room was very, very powerful to her. Then she transposed it in her paranoid attack about T.S. Eliot. She transposed the image that Eliot was now in her house, but not going through her papers, but going through her food cupboards. [laughs] In her food cupboards, all she actually had was baked beans because she was a terrible cook. Part of her unwellness at that point was malnutrition. No, she thought that T.S. Eliot was spying on her. She was obsessed with spies. Spies, snoopers, blackmailers.Henry: T.S. Eliot is Stealing My Baked Beans would have been a very good title for a memoir.Frances: It actually would, wouldn't it?Henry: Yes, it'd be great.[laughter]Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now. Anything can happen. This is one of the reasons Spark was attracted to Catholicism because anything can happen, because it legitimizes the supernatural. I felt so strongly that the supernatural experiences that Spark had were real, that what Spark was describing as the spookiness of our own life were things that actually happened.One of the things I found very, very unsettling about her was that everything that happened to her, she had written about first. She didn't describe her experiences in retrospect. She described them as in foresight. For example, her first single authored published book, because she wrote for a while in collaboration with her lover, Derek Stanford, but her first single authored book was a biography of Mary Shelley.Henry: Great book.Frances: An absolutely wonderful book, which really should be better than any of the other Mary Shelley biographies. She completely got to Mary Shelley. Everything she described in Mary Shelley's life would then happen to Spark. For example, she described Mary Shelley as having her love letters sold. Her lover sold Mary Shelley's love letters, and Mary Shelley was then blackmailed by the person who bought them. This happened to Spark. She described Mary Shelley's closest friends all becoming incredibly jealous of her literary talent. This happened to Spark. She described trusting people who betrayed her. This happened to Spark.Spark was the first person to write about Frankenstein seriously, to treat Frankenstein as a masterpiece rather than as a one-off weird novel that is actually just the screenplay for a Hammer Horror film. This was 1951, remember. Everything she described in Frankenstein as its power is a hybrid text, described the powerful hybrid text that she would later write about. What fascinated her in Frankenstein was the relationship between the creator and the monster, and which one was the monster. This is exactly the story of her own life. I think where she is. She was really interested in art monsters and in the fact that the only powerful writers out there, the only writers who make a dent, are monsters.If you're not a monster, you're just not competing. I think Spark has always spoken about as having a monster-like quality. She says at the end of one of her short stories, Bang-bang You're Dead, "Am I an intellectual woman, or am I a monster?" It's the question that is frequently asked of Spark. I think she worked so hard to monsterize herself. Again, she learnt this from Elliot. She learnt her coldness from Elliot. She learnt indifference from Elliot. There's a very good letter where she's writing to a friend, Shirley Hazzard, in New York.It's after she discovers that her lover, Derek Stanford, has sold her love letters, 70 love letters, which describe two very, very painfully raw, very tender love letters. She describes to Shirley Hazzard this terrible betrayal. She says, "But, I'm over it. I'm over it now. Now I'm just going to be indifferent." She's telling herself to just be indifferent about this. You watch her tutoring herself into the indifference that she needed in order to become the artist that she knew she was.Henry: Is this why she's attracted to mediocrities, because she can possess them and monsterize them, and they're good feeding for her artistic programme?Frances: Her attraction to mediocrities is completely baffling, and it makes writing her biography, a comedy, because the men she was surrounded by were so speck-like. Saw themselves as so important, but were, in fact, so speck-like that you have to laugh, and it was one after another after another. I'd never come across, in my life, so many men I'd never heard of. This was the literary world that she was surrounded by. It's odd, I don't know whether, at the time, she knew how mediocre these mediocrities were.She certainly recognised it in her novels where they're all put together into one corporate personality called the pisseur de copie in A Far Cry from Kensington, where every single literary mediocrity is in that critic who she describes as pissing and vomiting out copy. With Derek Stanford, who was obviously no one's ever heard of now, because he wrote nothing that was memorable, he was her partner from the end of the 40s until-- They ceased their sexual relationship when she started to be interested in becoming a Catholic in 1953, but she was devoted to him up until 1958. She seemed to be completely incapable of recognising that she had the genius and he had none.Her letters to him deferred to him, all the time, as having literary powers that she hadn't got, as having insights that she hadn't got, he's better read than she was. She was such an amazingly good critic. Why could she not see when she looked at his baggy, bad prose that it wasn't good enough? She rated him so highly. When she was co-authoring books with him, which was how she started her literary career, they would occasionally write alternative sentences. Some of her sentences are always absolutely-- they're sharp, lean, sparkling, and witty, and his are way too long and really baggy and they don't say anything. Obviously, you can see that she's irritated by it.She still doesn't say, "Look, I'm going now." It was only when she became a novelist that she said, "I want my mind to myself." She puts, "I want my mind to myself." She didn't want to be in a double act with him. Doubles were important to her. She didn't want to be in a double act with him anymore. He obviously had bought into her adulation of him and hadn't recognised that she had this terrifying power as a writer. It was now his turn to have the breakdown. Spark had the mental breakdown in 1950, '45. When her first novel came out in 1957, it was Stanford who had the breakdown because he couldn't take on board who she was as a novelist.What he didn't know about her as a novelist was her comic sense, how that would fuel the fiction, but also, he didn't recognize because he reviewed her books badly. He didn't recognise that the woman who had been so tender, vulnerable, and loving with him could be this novelist who had nothing to say about tenderness or love. In his reviews, he says, "Why are her characters so cold?" because he thought that she should be writing from the core of her as a human being rather than the core of her as an intellect.Henry: What are her best novels?Frances: Every one I read, I think this has to be the best.[laughter]This is particularly the case in the early novels, where I'm dazzled by The Comforters and think there cannot have been a better first novel of the 20th century or even the 21st century so far. The Comforters. Then read Robinson, her second novel, and think, "Oh God, no, that is her best novel. Then Memento Mori, I think, "Actually, that must be the best novel of the 20th century." [laughs] Then you move on to The Ballad of Peckham Rye, I think, "No, that's even better."The novels landed. It's one of the strange things about her; it took her so long to become a novelist. When she had become one, the novels just landed. Once in one year, two novels landed. In 1959, she had, it was The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, both just completely extraordinary. The novels had been the storing up, and then they just fell on the page. They're different, but samey. They're samey in as much as they're very, very, very clever. They're clever about Catholicism, and they have the same narrative wit. My God, do the plots work in different ways. She was wonderful at plots. She was a great plotter. She liked plots in both senses of the world.She liked the idea of plotting against someone, also laying a plot. She was, at the same time, absolutely horrified by being caught inside someone's plot. That's what The Comforters is about, a young writer called Caroline Rose, who has a breakdown, it's a dramatisation of Sparks' own breakdown, who has a breakdown, and believes that she is caught inside someone else's story. She is a typewriter repeating all of her thoughts. Typewriter and a chorus repeating all of her thoughts.What people say about The Comforters is that Caroline Rose thought she is a heroine of a novel who finds herself trapped in a novel. Actually, if you read what Caroline Rose says in the novel, she doesn't think she's trapped in a novel; she thinks she's trapped in a biography. "There is a typewriter typing the story of our lives," she says to her boyfriend. "Of our lives." Muriel Sparks' first book was about being trapped in a biography, which is, of course, what she brought on herself when she decided to trap herself in a biography. [laughs]Henry: I think I would vote for Loitering with Intent, The Girls of Slender Means as my favourites. I can see that Memento Mori is a good book, but I don't love it, actually.Frances: Really? Interesting. Okay. I completely agree with you about-- I think Loitering with Intent is my overall favourite. Don't you find every time you read it, it's a different book? There are about 12 books I've discovered so far in that book. She loved books inside books, but every time I read it, I think, "Oh my God, it's changed shape again. It's a shape-shifting novel."Henry: We all now need the Frances Wilson essay about the 12 books inside Loitering with Intent.Frances: I know.[laughter]Henry: A few more general questions to close. Did Thomas De Quincey waste his talents?Frances: I wouldn't have said so. I think that's because every single day of his life, he was on opium.Henry: I think the argument is a combination of too much opium and also too much magazine work and not enough "real serious" philosophy, big poems, whatever.Frances: I think the best of his work went into Blackwood's, so the magazine work. When he was taken on by Blackwood's, the razor-sharp Edinburgh magazine, then the best of his work took place. I think that had he only written the murder essays, that would have been enough for me, On Murder as a Fine Art.That was enough. I don't need any more of De Quincey. I think Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is also enough in as much as it's the great memoir of addiction. We don't need any more memoirs of addiction, just read that. It's not just a memoir of being addicted to opium. It's about being addicted to what's what. It's about being a super fan and addicted to writing. He was addicted to everything. If he was in AA now, they'd say, apparently, there are 12 addictions, he had all of them. [laughs]Henry: Yes. People talk a lot about parasocial relationships online, where you read someone online or you follow them, and you have this strange idea in your head that you know them in some way, even though they're just this disembodied online person. You sometimes see people say, "Oh, we should understand this more." I think, "Well, read the history of literature, parasocial relationships everywhere."Frances: That's completely true. I hadn't heard that term before. The history of literature, a parasocial relationship. That's your next book.Henry: There we go. I think what I want from De Quincey is more about Shakespeare, because I think the Macbeth essay is superb.Frances: Absolutely brilliant. On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.Henry: Yes, and then you think, "Wait, where's the rest of this book? There should be an essay about every play."Frances: That's an absolutely brilliant example of microhistory, isn't it? Just taking a moment in a play, just the knocking at the gate, the morning after the murders, and blowing that moment up, so it becomes the whole play. Oh, my God, it's good. You're right.Henry: It's so good. What is, I think, "important about it", is that in the 20th century, critics started saying or scholars started saying a lot, "We can't just look at the words on the page. We've got to think about the dramaturgy. We've got to really, really think about how it plays out." De Quincey was an absolute master of that. It's really brilliant.Frances: Yes.Henry: What's your favourite modern novel or novelist?Frances: Oh, Hilary Mantel, without doubt, I think. I think we were lucky enough to live alongside a great, great, great novelist. I think the Wolf Hall trilogy is absolutely the greatest piece of narrative fiction that's come out of the 21st century. I also love her. I love her work as an essayist. I love her. She's spooky like Spark. She was inspired.Henry: Yes, she is. Yes.Frances: She learnt a lot of her cunning from Spark, I think. She's written a very spooky memoir. In fact, the only women novelists who acknowledge Spark as their influencer are Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel, although you can see Spark in William Boyd all the time. I think we're pretty lucky to live alongside William Boyd as well. Looking for real, real greatness, I think there's no one to compare with Mantel. Do you agree?Henry: I don't like the third volume of the trilogy.Frances: Okay. Right.Henry: Yes, in general, I do agree. Yes. I think some people don't like historical fiction for a variety of reasons. It may take some time for her to get it. I think she's acknowledged as being really good. I don't know that she's yet acknowledged at the level that you're saying.Frances: Yes.Henry: I think that will take a little bit longer. Maybe as and when there's a biography that will help with that, which I'm sure there will be a biography.Frances: I think they need to wait. I do think it's important to wait for a reputation to settle before starting the biography. Her biography will be very interesting because she married the same man twice. Her growth as a novelist was so extraordinary. Spark, she spent time in Africa. She had this terrible, terrible illness. She knew something. I think what I love about Mantel is, as with Spark, she knew something. She knew something, and she didn't quite know what it was that she knew. She had to write because of this knowledge. When you read her, you know that she's on a different level of understanding.Henry: You specialise in slightly neglected figures of English literature. Who else among the canonical writers deserves a bit more attention?Frances: Oh, that's interesting. I love minor characters. I think Spark was very witty about describing herself as a minor novelist or a writer of minor novels when she was evidently major. She always saw the comedy in being a minor. All the minor writers interest me. Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. No, they have heard Elizabeth Bowen has been treated well by Hermione Lee and Henry Green has been treated well by Jeremy Treglown.Why are they not up there yet? They're so much better than most of their contemporaries. I am mystified and fascinated by why it is that the most powerful writers tend to be kicked into the long grass. It's dazzling. When you read a Henry Green novel, you think, "But this is what it's all about. He's understood everything about what the novel can do. Why has no one heard of him?"Henry: I think Elizabeth Bowen's problem is that she's so concise, dense, and well-structured, and everything really plays its part in the pattern of the whole that it's not breezy reading.Frances: No, it's absolutely not.Henry: I think that probably holds her back in some way, even though when I have pushed it on people, most of the time they've said, "Gosh, she's a genius."Frances: Yes.Henry: It's not an easy genius. Whereas Dickens, the pages sort of fly along, something like that.Frances: Yes. One of the really interesting things about Spark is that she really, really is easy reading. At the same time, there's so much freight in those books. There's so much intellectual weight and so many games being played. There's so many books inside the books. Yet you can just read them for the pleasure. You can just read them for the plot. You can read one in an afternoon and think that you've been lost inside a book for 10 years. You don't get that from Elizabeth Bowen. That's true. The novels, you feel the weight, don't you?Henry: Yes.Frances: She's Jamesian. She's more Jamesian, I think, than Spark is.Henry: Something like A World of Love, it requires quite a lot of you.Frances: Yes, it does. Yes, it's not bedtime reading.Henry: No, exactly.Frances: Sitting up in a library.Henry: Yes. Now, you mentioned James. You're a Henry James expert.Frances: I did my PhD on Henry James.Henry: Yes. Will you ever write about him?Frances: I have, actually. Just a little plug. I've just done a selection of James's short stories, three volumes, which are coming out, I think, later this year for Riverrun with a separate introduction for each volume. I think that's all the writing I'm going to do on James. When I was an academic, I did some academic essays on him for collections and things. No, I've never felt, ever, ready to write on James because he's too complicated. I can only take tiny, tiny bits of James and home in on them.Henry: He's a great one for trying to crack the code.Frances: He really is. In fact, I was struck all the way through writing Electric Spark by James's understanding of the comedy of biography, which is described in the figure in the carpet. Remember that wonderful story where there's a writer called Verica who explains to a young critic that none of the critics have understood what his work's about. Everything that's written about him, it's fine, but it's absolutely missed his main point, his beautiful point. He said that in order to understand what the work's about, you have to look for The Figure in the Carpet. It's The Figure in the CarpetIt's the string on which my pearls are strung. A couple of critics become completely obsessed with looking for this Figure in the Carpet. Of course, Spark loved James's short stories. You feel James's short stories playing inside her own short stories. I think that one of the games she left for her biographers was the idea of The Figure in the Carpet. Go on, find it then. Find it. [laughs] The string on which my pearls are strung.Henry: Why did you leave academia? We should say that you did this before it became the thing that everyone's doing.Frances: Is everyone leaving now?Henry: A lot of people are leaving now.Frances: Oh, I didn't know. I was ahead of the curve. I left 20 years ago because I wasn't able to write the books I wanted to write. I left when I'd written two books as an academic. My first was Literary Seductions, and my second was a biography of a blackmailing courtesan called Harriet Wilson, and the book was called The Courtesan's Revenge. My department was sniffy about the books because they were published by Faber and not by OUP, and suggested that somehow I was lowering the tone of the department.This is what things were like 20 years ago. Then I got a contract to write The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, my third book, again with Faber. I didn't want to write the book with my head of department in the back of my mind saying, "Make this into an academic tome and put footnotes in." I decided then that I would leave, and I left very suddenly. Now, I said I'm leaving sort of now, and I've got books to write, and felt completely liberated. Then for The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, I decided not to have footnotes. It's the only book I've ever written without footnotes, simply as a celebration of no longer being in academia.Then the things I loved about being in academia, I loved teaching, and I loved being immersed in literature, but I really couldn't be around colleagues and couldn't be around the ridiculous rules of what was seen as okay. In fact, the university I left, then asked me to come back on a 0.5 basis when they realised that it was now fashionable to have someone who was a trade author. They asked me to come back, which I did not want to do. I wanted to spend days where I didn't see people rather than days where I had to talk to colleagues all the time. I think that academia is very unhappy. The department I was in was incredibly unhappy.Since then, I took up a job very briefly in another English department where I taught creative writing part-time. That was also incredibly unhappy. I don't know whether other French departments or engineering departments are happier places than English departments, but English departments are the most unhappy places I think I've ever seen.[laughter]Henry: What do you admire about the work of George Meredith?Frances: Oh, I love George Meredith. [laughs] Yes. I think Modern Love, his first novel, Modern Love, in a strange sonnet form, where it's not 14 lines, but 16 lines. By the time you get to the bottom two lines, the novel, the sonnet has become hysterical. Modern Love hasn't been properly recognised. It's an account of the breakdown of his marriage. His wife, who was the daughter of the romantic, minor novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. His wife had an affair with the artist who painted the famous Death of Chatterton. Meredith was the model for Chatterton, the dead poet in his purple silks, with his hand falling on the ground. There's a lot of mythology around Meredith.I think, as with Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, he's difficult. He's difficult. The other week, I tried to reread Diana of the Crossways, which was a really important novel, and I still love it. I really recognise that it's not an easy read. He doesn't try, in any way, to seduce his readers. They absolutely have to crawl inside each book to sit inside his mind and see the world as he's seeing it.Henry: Can you tell us what you will do next?Frances: At the moment, I'm testing some ideas out. I feel, at the end of every biography, you need a writer. You need to cleanse your palate. Otherwise, there's a danger of writing the same book again. I need this time, I think, to write about, to move century and move genders. I want to go back, I think, to the 19th century. I want to write about a male writer for a moment, and possibly not a novelist as well, because after being immersed in Muriel Sparks' novels, no other novel is going to seem good enough. I'm testing 19th-century men who didn't write novels, and it will probably be a minor character.Henry: Whatever it is, I look forward to reading it. Frances Wilson, thank you very much.Frances: Thank you so much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

Eric de Vroedt is regisseur, schrijver en artistiek leider van Het Nationale Theater. Hier regisseert hij naast zelfgeschreven teksten ook hedendaags en nieuw geschreven repertoire. In zijn werk is hij op zoek naar de dingen die ons als mens binden. Dit deed hij in stukken als ‘The Nation', ‘De eeuw van mijn moeder' en 'Brown Sugar Baby'.  Op Holland Festival gaat ‘De seizoenen' in première, een grootse theatermarathon naar de boeken ‘Herfst', ‘Winter', ‘Lente' en ‘Zomer' van Ali Smith. In haar romans verweeft de Schotse auteur grote maatschappelijke veranderingen met intieme persoonlijke verhalen. Het is een theatertrip vol vriendschappen, natuurbeelden, vergeten kunstenaars en verzet. Bij ‘De seizoenen' maak je in één dag een heel jaar mee. Femke van der Laan gaat met Eric de Vroedt in gesprek.

Today's BOOKSPO ventures beyond the human as I talk to Catherine Bush about her sixth book, which is also her first short story collection, SKIN. She tells me about how she, like many writers, began writing short fiction, but soon realized that the novel was the container for the stories she was telling, and would focus on novel-writing for years…until an interest in flash fiction brought her back to short stories. SKIN includes some of those flash fictions, as well as longer pieces, stories she's written recently and other reworkings of stories she'd written in the past, the result a collection that's rich and eclectic (in terms of form and approach), but with fascinatingly recurring touchpoints, which reflect Bush's preoccupations as a thinker and an author over the years. Pickle Me This is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.And her BOOKSPO pick is Ali Smith's COMPANION PIECE, a book that inspired Bush for the ways in which it seems to be fiction pushing right up against our present moment, with both humour and urgency at once. She talks about the sense of play in the book, which is a sense that infuses her own stories in SKIN. And about how she admires the role that animals play in Smith's novel, which—like her own book—gives a vision of the world that's more than merely human. A blistering book of short fiction from one of Canada's most loved novelists.In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush's stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher's behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.Catherine Bush is the author of five novels. Her work has been critically acclaimed, published internationally, and shortlisted for numerous awards. Her most recent novel, Blaze Island, was a Globe and Mail and Writers' Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year, and the Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. Her other novels include the Canada Reads longlisted Accusation; the Trillium Award shortlisted Claire's Head; the national bestselling The Rules Of Engagement, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year; and Minus Time, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. The recipient of numerous fellowships, Bush has been Writer-in-Residence/Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich and a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Delmenhorst, Germany. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto and in an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kerryreads.substack.com/subscribe

Gliff, the latest novel from Ali Smith, forms the first part of a duology; its title, the Scots word for a glimpse or shock, will be echoed but not replicated in next year's Glyph. In a dystopian, Kafkaesque fictional lanscape, Smith explores how we make meaning and are made by it, and what it would actually mean for the next generation to sort out our increasingly toxic world.Smith read from the novel and was in conversation with artist and filmmaker Sarah Wood.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodGet the book: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/gliff-ali-smith Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Let's Talk Gardening 8 March 2025 with Paul & Linda Michener and Ali Smith by CurtinFM 100.1 in Perth, Western Australia

Gliff by Ali Smith is the story of two siblings navigating a dystopian world that feels timely and hopeful amid themes of isolation and identity. Smith joins us to talk about the meaning of the title, the beauty of physical books, creating empathy and understanding through reading and more with cohost Jenna Seery.    This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.                      New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.   Featured Books (Episode):   Gliff by Ali Smith  How to be both by Ali Smith  Autumn by Ali Smith  The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood  Brave New World by Aldous Huxley   Metamorphoses by Ovid  Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser  Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser  The Bee Sting by Paul Murray  Skippy Dies by Paul Murray  Baumgartner by Paul Auster 

Se estás sem paciência para os livros da moda e procuras leituras diferentes, este episódio é para ti. Reunimos uma lista de recomendações que acabaram por cair no esquecimento ou que não tiveram a atenção que deveriam ter tido. Partilhem connosco as vossas sugestões de livros que merecem ser relembrados! Livros mencionados: - Yours Truly (Para Sempre Teu), Abby Jimenez (01:41) - ⁠A Viagem do Elefante, José Saramago (03:46) - Girl in White, Sue Hubbard (10:35) - Maus Hábitos, Alana S. Portero (14:00) - All my Friends are Superheroes, Andrew Kaufman (16:00) - ⁠Lei da Gravidade, Gabriela Ruivo (17:46) - Beautiful Ruins (A Bela Americana), Jess Walter (19:31) - ⁠Boys Don't Cry & May All Your Skies be Blue, Fíonna Scarlett (20:59) - Nothing to See Here, Kevin Wilson (23:57) - Da Meia-Noite às Seis, Patrícia Reis (26:44) - Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, Raphael Bob-Waksberg (28:49) - Soldier Sailor, Claire Kilroy (30:15) - The Final Revival of Opal and Nev, Dawnie Walton (31:44) - Freckles, Cecelia Ahern (33:54) - Snowflake, Louise Nealon (37:06) - The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (O Estranho Desaparecimento de Esme Lennox), Maggie O'Farrell (38:44) - The Last Letter From Your Lover (A Última Carta de Amor), Jojo Moyes (40:37) - What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher (42:59) - How to be Good (Como Ser Bom), Nick Hornby (44:42) - Water & Earth & The Heart's Invisible Furies, John Boyne (46:43) - My Oxford Year, Julia Whelan (49:36) - Mercy Street, Jennifer Haig (51:37) - Would Like to Meet (Um Amor Como nos Filmes), Rachel Winters (53:50) - ⁠Nightcrawling, Leila Mottley (56:07) - Three Wishes (Três Desejos), Liane Moriarty (58:29) - Panenka, Rónán Hession (01:00:15) - Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking (Silêncio: O poder dos introvertidos num mundo que não para de falar), Susan Cain (01:01:34) - Mayflies, Andrew O'Hagan (01:02:45) - ⁠Laços, Domenico Starnone (01:03:40) - Wayward, Dana Spiotta (01:05:31) - A Família Caserta, Aurora Venturini (01:06:47) - How to be Both (Como Ser Uma e Outra), Ali Smith (01:07:43) ________________ Falem connosco: livratepodcast@gmail.com. Encontrem-nos em: www.instagram.com/julesdsilva // www.instagram.com/ritadanova Identidade visual: Mariana Cardoso (marianarfpcardoso@hotmail.com) Genérico: Vitor Carraca Teixeira (www.instagram.com/oputovitor)

Ali Smith, a portrait and documentary photographer, moved to the UK from NYC, where she built a career shooting for The Guardian, The New York Times, and more. She's shot campaigns for Rimmel, Disney, and Johnson & Johnson and published two acclaimed photography books—Momma Love earned praise from The NY Times and Gloria Steinem. Her work, rooted in gender equality and environmentalism, includes a grant-funded project on incarcerated mothers. She's exhibited and taught internationally, mentoring young women in photography. Also a writer and former touring musician, her memoir The Ballad of Speedball Baby dropped back in January 2024 via Blackstone Publishing.

In Ali Smith's Gliff, two children wake up to find that someone has painted a red line around their home. They've been marked "unverifiable" and they're at risk of being captured. The dystopian near-future in which they live is a world of government surveillance and environmental destruction – and one without libraries. In today's episode, Smith talks with NPR's Scott Simon about the authoritarian themes in her novel. They discuss what makes authoritarianism feel attractive and safe, Smith's former career as an advertising copywriter, and the connection between slogans and tribalism.To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookofthedayLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In Part 2 (a continuation from last week's episode), I'm chatting with Ali Smith Story of Smith Story Wines, who shares how her handsome and intelligent doodle inspired a heartwarming initiative called Socks for Sandwich!You'll also hear about: This delightful backstory of their dog, Sandwich, and how his quirky name brings joy to many. Her remarkable journey as a breast cancer survivor and how it sparked her passion for helping others through her "Brave" label. Some Listener Questions where we get to hear Eric Story's insights into managing a business with a spouse and the need for balance and boundaries. The importance of good wine and the journey of learning what makes a wine truly special. Ali heartfelt story from a recent Taylor Swift concert that ties beautifully to her Brave label and breast cancer awareness. Check out their website to purchase their delicious small lot wines and set up your visit to heir awesome tasting room in Healdsburg! Be sure to use the discount code "sip'" at checkout to save 10% on 4+ bottle purchases, online or in person. (Ends 3/1/25). You can also become a STORYTELLER and support this small family business in the best way possible by being a member.Follow Sandwich the doodle on IGFollow Smith Story Wines on IG Other Podcast resources and links: Podcast website: www.sipwithnikki.com: Sign up there to be part of our SIP Community and receive Nikki's free Wine Tips download.Nikki's 2021 Sollevato Sangiovese is available to be shipped to most US States. Use the code PODLISTENER for 10% off. It's a delicious, medium bodied, aromatic red wine that is perfect with pizza, pasta and your charcuterie spread!You NEED some delicious California Olive Oil from our awesome sponsor American Olive Farmer. Use code SipWithNikki for $10 off your order!If you'd like to Support the Podcast, you can buy Nikki and Ali a glass of wine and get a shoutout on a future episode.Please leave a RATING or a REVIEW (on your podcast listening platform), or thumbs up and subscribe (on YouTube!)Questions? Comments? nikki@sipwithnikki.comPlease Follow Nikki on INSTAGRAM

Iniciámos a edição de 2025 do clube com duas leituras muito diferentes, mas que nos proporcionaram bons momentos à sua maneira. Como não podia faltar, falámos também dos livros escolhidos para o mês de fevereiro e o que antecipamos dessas leituras. Não se esqueçam de que estas discussões têm spoilers, consultem as marcas temporais abaixo. Livros mencionados: - Evenings and Weekends, Oisín Mckenna (01:38) - ⁠The First Person and Other Stories (A Primeira Pessoa e Outras Histórias), Ali Smith (03:54) - ⁠Outline (Contraluz), Rachel Cusk (27:22) - French Braid, Anne Tyler (28:12) - A Thousand Splendid Suns (Mil Sóis Resplandecentes), Khaled Hosseini (50:53) - In Memoriam, Alice Winn (50:59) - All My Rage (Toda a Minha Raiva), Sabaa Tahir (51:25) Sobre os livros de Janeiro: - Os Detalhes, Ia Genberg (09:17) - As Long as The Lemon Trees Grow (Onde Crescem os Limoeiros), Zoulfa Katouh (28:46) ✨ Livros de Fevereiro do Clube do Livra-te ✨ - Out on a Limb (Parte de Nós), Hannah Bonam-Young (55:33) - Limpa, Ali Trabucco Zerán (57:40) ________________ Falem connosco: livratepodcast@gmail.com. Encontrem-nos em: www.instagram.com/julesdsilva // www.instagram.com/ritadanova Identidade visual: Mariana Cardoso (marianarfpcardoso@hotmail.com) Genérico: Vitor Carraca Teixeira (www.instagram.com/oputovitor)

A new, indie friendly platform for buying e-books; we have a great discussion with the prolific and wonderous Ali Smith about her latest novel, Gliff! Thank you for listening! If you like what you hear, give us a follow at: X: Across the Pond, Galley Beggar Press, Interabang Books, Lori Feathers, Sam JordisonInstagram: Across the Pond, Galley Beggar Press, Interabang Books, Lori Feathers, Sam JordisonFacebook: Across the Pond, Galley Beggar Press, Interabang BooksBluesky: @acrossthepondbooks.bsky.socialThe Big Book Project https://substack.com/@thebigbookprojectTheme music by Carlos Guajardo-Molina

I'm finally sitting down with the inspiring Ali Smith Story from Smith Story Wine Cellars in Healdsburg, CA! Ali shares her journey from TX to CA and the unique story behind launching the first ever fully crowdfunded winery. You'll hear about how she and her husband Eric approach winemaking in a way that emphasizes supporting family farmers and growers and using old-world techniques.You'll hear about: How Ali and I met and bonded over two of our favorite common loves The importance of following one's passion and the connection between wine and community How eloping to Hawaii resulted in the naming of the brand Their unique crowdfunded approach to starting Smith Story Wine Cellars The concept of 'equanimity' shared during the episode reflects the balance that both wine and yoga bring to life, emphasizing mindfulness Why 2025 is the year of Sauvignon BlancJoin us next week in Part 2!Check out their website to purchase their delicious small lot wines and set up your visit to heir awesome tasting room in Healdsburg! Be sure to use the discount code "sip'" at checkout to save 10% on 4+ bottle purchases, online or in person. (Ends 3/1/25). You can also become a STORYTELLER and support this small family business in the best way possible by being a member.Follow Sandwich the doodle on IGFollow Smith Story Wines on IG Other Podcast resources and links: Podcast website: www.sipwithnikki.com: Sign up there to be part of our SIP Community and receive Nikki's free Wine Tips download.Nikki's 2021 Sollevato Sangiovese is available to be shipped to most US States. Use the code PODLISTENER for 10% off. It's a delicious, medium bodied, aromatic red wine that is perfect with pizza, pasta and your charcuterie spread!You NEED some delicious California Olive Oil from our awesome sponsor American Olive Farmer. Use code SipWithNikki for $10 off your order!If you'd like to Support the Podcast, you can buy Nikki and Ali a glass of wine and get a shoutout on a future episode.Please leave a RATING or a REVIEW (on your podcast listening platform), or thumbs up and subscribe (on YouTube!)Questions? Comments? nikki@sipwithnikki.comPlease Follow Nikki on INSTAGRAM

John Safran has been a fixture in Australian media since his breakthrough in 1997 with ABC TV's Race Around the World. After several TV series of his own that explored ideas about faith, race and culture, John made the shift to book-length journalism. This week, Michael sits down for a conversation with John about his latest book, Squat, and he reveals the deeper story behind his week living in Kanye West's Malibu mansion.Reading list:Murder in Mississippi, John Safran, 2013Depends What You Mean By Extremist, John Safran, 2017Puff Piece, John Safran, 2021Squat, John Safran, 2024Glyph, Ali Smith, 2024You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store. Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram and TwitterGuest: John SafranSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

John Safran has been a fixture in Australian media since his breakthrough in 1997 with ABC TV's Race Around the World. After several TV series of his own that explored ideas about faith, race and culture, John made the shift to book-length journalism. This week, Michael sits down for a conversation with John about his latest book, Squat, and he reveals the deeper story behind his week living in Kanye West's Malibu mansion. Reading list: Murder in Mississippi, John Safran, 2013 Depends What You Mean By Extremist, John Safran, 2017 Puff Piece, John Safran, 2021 Squat, John Safran, 2024 Glyph, Ali Smith, 2024 You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.  Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram and Twitter Guest: John Safran

Jenna Todd of Time Out Bookstore reviews Gliff by Ali Smith published by Hamish Hamilton.

Blitz - Ali Smith - The Hays Code

Arifa Akbar and Peter Bradshaw join Tom Sutcliffe to review the film Anora which was written and directed by Sean Baker. Set in contemporary New York the romantic drama won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. They also review the stage production of Dr. Strangelove. The original film version of the black comedy starred Peter Sellers in three roles, in this version Steve Coogan takes on four parts. And they discuss Ali Smith's 13th novel Gliff which focuses on a brutal surveillance state in the future.Plus, French composer Gabriel Faure is best known for his Requiem – but to mark 100 years since his death, cellist Steven Isserlis tells Tom how he's playing a series of concerts at London's Wigmore Hall, to highlight his other work including his cello sonatas and piano quintets. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Claire Bartleet

After the completion of her seasonal quartet, readers will have been wondering where Ali Smith might take us next and it shouldn't be a surprise that a writer who had so successfully captured our present moment should seek to extend her gaze just a little further into an all too imaginable near future. Gliff forms the first part of a two book sequence, followed next year by its sister novel, Glyph. We sat down with her to discuss the process of storytelling, the nature of dystopia, and why she still has hope for our future.

Big_Bed_Ali_Smith

In this episode of The Writing Life, novelists and NCW Academy tutors Benjamin Johncock and Megan Bradbury give insight into their writing lives, and offer their advice to emerging novelists and writers of all kinds.   Benjamin Johncock is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and journalist. His debut novel, The Last Pilot, was published in the U.S. and U.K. to widespread critical acclaim. It won the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, was shortlisted for the East Anglian Book of the Year, selected for Brave New Reads, and was one of The Observer's Hidden Gems of 2016.   Megan Bradbury is a British writer, tutor, and mentor, and author of the critically acclaimed novel, Everyone is Watching. Described as a ‘beating heart of a novel' by Ali Smith and ‘kaleidoscopic' by Eimear McBride, the novel was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, and was listed as one of the Guardian's Best Books of 2016.   Benjamin and Megan will be teaching on our beginner and intermediate online tutored fiction courses, which begin on Monday 23 September. This podcast is a great first look into the practical advice and guidance they offer on their courses, and an excellent insight into their writing and teaching styles. If you listen to this podcast and would like the opportunity to learn more from Benjamin or Megan, you can go to nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/academy/tutored-courses/ to find out more.   In this podcast, Benjamin and Megan discuss the writing tools, programmes and learning opportunities available for emerging writers, and the benefits of continued learning. They also touch on the early influences in their writing, how their routines have changed over time, and the challenge of separating your creative life from your domestic life.

The Scottish author reflects on the stories she grew up with, the influence of feminism and how time moves in circular patterns. Ali Smith has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times. Her 2014 novel How to Be Both won the Women's Prize for fiction and the Costa Book Award for novel. She spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2018 about the first two books in her Seasonal Quartet series, Autumn and Winter.

In this episode of the Project Narrative Podcast, Jim Phelan and Dorothee Birke discuss Ali Smith's short story, “Text for the Day,” from her 1995 collection, Free Love and Other Stories. Dorothee Birke is professor for Anglophone Literatures at the University of Innsbruck, and her many areas of expertise include the history of the novel,… Continue reading Episode 34: Jim Phelan & Dorothee Birke — Ali Smith's “Text for the Day”

Nádasdy Ádám nemcsak új verseskötettel jelentkezett az idei könyvhétre, de beszédet is mondott a megnyitó ünnepségen, így adta magát, hogy elhívjuk a Nem rossz könyvek nyári epizódjába. Az új, Billeg a csónak című kötet mellett beszélgettünk az angol nyelv változásairól, magyar klasszikusok „újrafordításáról”, melegség és írás kapcsolatáról, Petőfiről és az életnél és halálnál általánosabb kérdésekről.  A tartalomból: 00.00 Mennyire lehet olvasni választási kampány véghajrájában? (Spoiler: nem nagyon.) És egy kapcsolódó könyv: Ali Smith - Ősz. A könyvhéten azért jártunk: két könyv, amivel távoztunk: Giorgio Agamben: A nyitott és Mircea Cărtărescu - Ne kiáltsd sohasem segítség (Visky András fordításában.) 4.20 Vendégünk: Nádasdy Ádám. Hogyan kezd el már valaki gyerekként foglalkozni a nyelvekkel?  És hogyan kezdett el valaki épp angolul tanulni a szocializmusban?  Az angol, mint egzotikus, távoli nyelv, ami jó befektetésnek bizonyult. És mit tett az angollal, hogy azóta ennyire domináns nyelvvé vált?  19.10 Magyar klasszikusok újrafordítása: Bánk bán, Csongor és Tünde és Az ember tragédiája. Miért kellett ezeket újrafordítani, és miért pont ezekre esett a választás? Amiért az esztétika professzorok haragszanak: a gondolat, hogy a tartalom fontosabb, mint a tényleges szövegi létük. És mit lehet kezdeni a Szigeti veszedelemmel? 26.25 Segíti vagy hátráltatja a versírást, ha valaki ennyire ismeri a nyelvet? És mikor jut egyáltalán idő az írásra? Tanítás és versírás egymás mellett. A legjobb múzsa a határidő.  31.30 Az első verses kötete csak 37 évesen jelent meg. Eleve lassan készültek a kötetek akkoriban + melegként nehéz volt még erről írni. Fiatalkori versek a mostani kötetben bukkannak fel. És mi változott azzal és azóta, amikor megjelentek az első novellái a melegségről?  37.55 Megidézett költők a Billeg a csónak kötetben, és Petőfi státusza: ő az, akit Nádasdy Ádám sosem irigyelt. Hülyét csinált magából sokszor, kérdés, öregkorában mit szólt volna néhány fiatalkori próbálkozásához. És beszélünk az új versek nyomán az öregkor veszélytelenségéről és az életnél meg halálnál általánosabb kérdésekről. „Olvasmányainkból is tudjuk, hogy meg kell halnunk előbb-utóbb, de olyan nehéz erről írni”.  39.55 Könyvheti nyitóbeszédében gazdaságról, gazdagokról és irodalomtámogatásokról, magándíjakról beszélt. Miért ezt a témát választotta?  48.20 Egy Shakespeare dráma, ami méltánytalanul kevés figyelmet kap: II. Richárd (elérhető Spiró György fordításában). És három könyv a nyárra Nádasdy Ádám ajánlásában: Kállay Eszter - Vérehulló fecskefű, Krusovszky Dénes - Levelek nélkül, George Orwell - 1984.  Továbbra is várjuk a könyv- és témaötleteket a facebookos csoportunkban! Addig is további könyves tartalmakért ajánljuk Anna Instagramját és Bence Nemrosszkönyvek Instagramját, ahonnan a podcast nevét is kölcsönöztük. A műsor meghallgatható a 444 Spotify- és Apple Podcast-csatornáján is, az eddigi részek: #1 Kedvenc könyveink korábbi életszakaszainkból #2 Miért szeretjük annyira a skandináv irodalmat? #3 Mit tud kezdeni az irodalom a magyar politikával? #4 Mit olvasol, amikor gyereked születik? – anyaság az irodalomban #5 Ezek voltak a kedvenc könyveink 2023-ban #6 Hogy lesz egy könyv az év legjobb könyve? #7 Hogyan érdemes Krasznahorkait olvasni? #8 Hogyan lehet regényt írni egy bipoláris depresszió történetéből? #9 Tízmillió kis privát pokolban él mindenki, erről nem lehet regényt írni #10 A népmesék sokszor túl korán jönnek, a kiskamaszok valós problémáiból viszont nem kérünk #11 Aki úgy tud a lélekről írni, hogy közben elkerülte a guruvá válást #12 10 évvel a halála után jelenik meg Márquez új könyve, amit nem is akart kiadni #13 Szabó Magdának fontos volt, hogy a szomszédasszony is megértse, de mégse hazudjon #14 Mit jelent ma költőnek lenni Magyarországon? #15 Túlmentünk már azon, hogy mindent érdemes ironikus gúnnyal kezelni #16 A legfontosabb, hogy a tanár ne utáltassa meg az irodalmat a diákokkal #17 Ilyen az, amikor valódi tétje van az irodalomnak Címlapkép és hang: Kiss BenceSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this video, host Angela Brown and guest Ali Smith, who has trained over 1,200 dogs and runs the acclaimed dog blog Rebarkable, dive into the often overlooked yet crucial topic of pet clean-up for pet sitters. Together, they explore practical strategies for sitters to seamlessly adapt to a pet's routine, underscoring the importance of open and realistic discussions with pet owners. Prepare to gain a deeper appreciation for the nuances involved in caring for pets and maintaining a clean living space through proper pet clean-up, all while fostering open communication and mutual understanding between all parties involved. Educating Pet Sitters On Pet Clean-Up Chapters 00:00 Introducing Ali Smith 00:52 The Challenges and Realities of Pet Sitting 02:16 Navigating Pet Care and Cleanliness Standards 03:59 Understanding the Pet's Perspective During Owner Absence 04:43 Collaboration and Communication in Pet Care RESOURCES ----------------- Simple Solution Extreme Pet Stain And Odor Remover - https://amzn.to/3VwfLSP Arm & Hammer for Pets Gentle Puppy Bath Wipes - https://amzn.to/4a8xMuJ BISSELL CleanView Swivel Upright Bagless Vacuum - https://amzn.to/3IWakFd Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Lithium Ion Cordless Hand Vacuum - https://amzn.to/3vEBKw9 HARRIS Cleaning Vinegar - https://amzn.to/4a9Dv3n (When available, we use affiliate links and as Amazon Associates, we earn a commission on qualifying purchases.) *** RATE THIS PODCAST ***  https://ratethispodcast.com/askahousecleaner  *** TRAINING & CLEANING CERTIFICATION*** https://savvycleaner.com/join *** MOST REQUESTED LIST OF CLEANING STUFF I USE *** https://www.Amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown  SOCIAL MEDIA --------------- *** CONNECT WITH ALI SMITH ON SOCIAL MEDIA *** Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rbrkbl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/re.barkable/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/rbrkbl YouTube: www.youtube.com/@rebarkable URL: https://rebarkable.com/ *** CONNECT WITH ANGELA BROWN ON SOCIAL MEDIA ***  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AskAngelaBrown Facebook: https://www.Facebook.com/AskAngelaBrown Twitter: https://Twitter.com/AskAngelaBrown Instagram: https://instagram.com/AskAngelaBrown Pinterest: https://Pinterest.com/AskAngelaBrown Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/AskAngelaBrown TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@askangelabrown Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown URL: https://AngelaBrown.com NEED MORE CLEANING HELP? ------------- *** GOT A QUESTION FOR A SHOW? *** Please email it to Angela[at]AskaHouseCleaner.com Voice Mail: Click on the blue button at https://askahousecleaner.com  *** PROFESSIONAL HOUSE CLEANERS PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/ProfessionalHouseCleaners/ *** VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/VRBO.Airbnb.Cleaning/ *** LOOKING FOR A WAY TO GET MORE CLEANING LEADS *** https://housecleaning360.com SPONSORSHIPS & BRANDS ------------------- Today's #AskaHouseCleaner sponsor is #SavvyCleaner training and certification for house cleaners and maids. (https://savvycleaner.com/join) And your host today is #AngelaBrown - https://g.page/r/CbMI6YFuLU2GEBI/review *** ADVERTISE WITH US ***  We do work with sponsors and brands. If you are interested in working with us and you have a product or service that makes sense for the cleaning industry here's how to work with us -https://savvycleaner.com/brand-deals *** SAVVY CLEANER BRANDS ***  SAVVY CLEANER - House Cleaner Training and Certification – https://savvycleaner.com/join VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING – Cleaning tips and strategies for your short-term rental  https://TurnoverCleaningTips.com  FUNNY CLEANING SHIRTS – Incentive and thank-you gifts for house cleaners and maids. https://FunnyCleaningShirts.com  HOARDING WORLD - Helping you change your relationship with stuff https://HoardingWorld.com REALTY SUCCESS HUB - Helping you sell your home fast https://realtysuccesshub.com CREDITS -------------------------- Show Produced by: Savvy Cleaner: https://savvycleaner.com Show Host: Angela Brown Show Editor: Anna Nikitchuk Show Producer: Anna Nikitchuk

Puppy proofing your home is essential for any new dog owner, and this engaging video dives deep into this crucial topic. Angela Brown is joined by Ali Smith, an expert who has trained over 1,200 dogs and runs the acclaimed dog blog Rebarkable. Together, they explore the importance of creating a safe, puppy-proof space that not only prevents accidents but also promotes positive learning experiences for your furry companion. The discussion also tackles the challenges of generalizing behaviors in puppies, a common hurdle that many new owners face. Ali's insights offer practical strategies for overcoming these obstacles, emphasizing the power of positive reinforcement over punishment in shaping desirable behaviors. Puppy Proofing Your Space Chapters 00:00 Introducing Ali Smith 00:53 The Concept of Puppy Proof Space Explained 02:17 Understanding and Training Your Puppy with Positive Reinforcement 03:13 The Power of Positive Reinforcement in Training RESOURCES ----------------- Pet Hair Remover Roller - Dog & Cat Fur Remover - https://amzn.to/43E6R7U Professional Urine Enzyme Odor Eliminator - https://amzn.to/43DeFXy Bissell Professional Pet Urine Eliminator - https://amzn.to/4awblzr Bissell TurboClean PowerBrush Pet Carpet Cleaner - https://amzn.to/3vxldtZ Dog Cat Hair Remover for Deep Cleaning - https://amzn.to/3TRoIVA (When available, we use affiliate links and as Amazon Associates, we earn a commission on qualifying purchases.) *** RATE THIS PODCAST ***  https://ratethispodcast.com/askahousecleaner  *** TRAINING & CLEANING CERTIFICATION*** https://savvycleaner.com/join *** MOST REQUESTED LIST OF CLEANING STUFF I USE *** https://www.Amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown  SOCIAL MEDIA --------------- *** CONNECT WITH ALI SMITH ON SOCIAL MEDIA *** Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rbrkbl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/re.barkable/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/rbrkbl YouTube: www.youtube.com/@rebarkable URL: https://rebarkable.com/ *** CONNECT WITH ANGELA BROWN ON SOCIAL MEDIA ***  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AskAngelaBrown Facebook: https://www.Facebook.com/AskAngelaBrown Twitter: https://Twitter.com/AskAngelaBrown Instagram: https://instagram.com/AskAngelaBrown Pinterest: https://Pinterest.com/AskAngelaBrown Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/AskAngelaBrown TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@askangelabrown Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown URL: https://AngelaBrown.com NEED MORE CLEANING HELP? ------------- *** GOT A QUESTION FOR A SHOW? *** Please email it to Angela[at]AskaHouseCleaner.com Voice Mail: Click on the blue button at https://askahousecleaner.com  *** PROFESSIONAL HOUSE CLEANERS PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/ProfessionalHouseCleaners/ *** VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/VRBO.Airbnb.Cleaning/ *** LOOKING FOR A WAY TO GET MORE CLEANING LEADS *** https://housecleaning360.com SPONSORSHIPS & BRANDS ------------------- Today's #AskaHouseCleaner sponsor is #SavvyCleaner training and certification for house cleaners and maids. (https://savvycleaner.com/join) And your host today is #AngelaBrown - https://g.page/r/CbMI6YFuLU2GEBI/review *** ADVERTISE WITH US ***  We do work with sponsors and brands. If you are interested in working with us and you have a product or service that makes sense for the cleaning industry here's how to work with us -https://savvycleaner.com/brand-deals *** SAVVY CLEANER BRANDS ***  SAVVY CLEANER - House Cleaner Training and Certification – https://savvycleaner.com/join VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING – Cleaning tips and strategies for your short-term rental  https://TurnoverCleaningTips.com  FUNNY CLEANING SHIRTS – Incentive and thank-you gifts for house cleaners and maids. https://FunnyCleaningShirts.com  HOARDING WORLD - Helping you change your relationship with stuff https://HoardingWorld.com REALTY SUCCESS HUB - Helping you sell your home fast https://realtysuccesshub.com CREDITS -------------------------- Show Produced by: Savvy Cleaner: https://savvycleaner.com Show Host: Angela Brown Show Editor: Anna Nikitchuk Show Producer: Anna Nikitchuk

In this video, Angela Brown and guest expert Ali Smith tackle the messy reality that all pet owners face - cleaning up after their furry friends. As a seasoned dog trainer, Ali shares her wealth of experience, revealing practical methods for dealing with common pet-related cleaning challenges. From dogs tracking mud inside the house to managing dog slobber and even addressing male dog protein stains, she offers invaluable tips for the tough mishaps that come with pet ownership. Throughout the episode, Ali provides detailed advice on cleaning techniques tailored to the type of mess and surface, offering solutions to keep homes clean and fresh despite the inevitable accidents that come with caring for our furry friends. Cleaning Up Tough Mishaps After Your Furry Friends Chapters 00:00 Introducing Ali Smith 00:52 Practical Tips for Keeping Your House Clean with Dogs 02:26 Innovative Solutions for Dog Slobber and Mud 04:18 Tackling Tough Protein Stains 05:43 Advanced Cleaning Techniques for Pet Owners 06:17 Q&A: Addressing Common Pet Cleaning Concerns RESOURCES ----------------- BISSELL SpotClean Pet Pro Portable Carpet Cleaner - https://amzn.to/3Tr631t OdoBan Pet Solutions Neutral pH Floor Cleaner Concentrate - https://amzn.to/3vpnY0n Nature's Miracle Urine Destroyer Plus for Cats - https://amzn.to/3PsHiRa Bissell Oxy Stain Remover - https://amzn.to/3x5vYEg Shark Navigator Lift Away Upright Vacuum - https://amzn.to/3vuUf69 (When available, we use affiliate links and as Amazon Associates, we earn a commission on qualifying purchases.) *** RATE THIS PODCAST ***  https://ratethispodcast.com/askahousecleaner  *** TRAINING & CLEANING CERTIFICATION*** https://savvycleaner.com/join *** MOST REQUESTED LIST OF CLEANING STUFF I USE *** https://www.Amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown  SOCIAL MEDIA --------------- *** CONNECT WITH ALI SMITH ON SOCIAL MEDIA *** Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rbrkbl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/re.barkable/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/rbrkbl YouTube: www.youtube.com/@rebarkable URL: https://rebarkable.com/ *** CONNECT WITH ANGELA BROWN ON SOCIAL MEDIA ***  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AskAngelaBrown Facebook: https://www.Facebook.com/AskAngelaBrown Twitter: https://Twitter.com/AskAngelaBrown Instagram: https://instagram.com/AskAngelaBrown Pinterest: https://Pinterest.com/AskAngelaBrown Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/AskAngelaBrown TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@askangelabrown Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown URL: https://AngelaBrown.com NEED MORE CLEANING HELP? ------------- *** GOT A QUESTION FOR A SHOW? *** Please email it to Angela[at]AskaHouseCleaner.com Voice Mail: Click on the blue button at https://askahousecleaner.com  *** PROFESSIONAL HOUSE CLEANERS PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/ProfessionalHouseCleaners/ *** VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/VRBO.Airbnb.Cleaning/ *** LOOKING FOR A WAY TO GET MORE CLEANING LEADS *** https://housecleaning360.com SPONSORSHIPS & BRANDS ------------------- Today's #AskaHouseCleaner sponsor is #SavvyCleaner training and certification for house cleaners and maids. (https://savvycleaner.com/join) And your host today is #AngelaBrown - https://g.page/r/CbMI6YFuLU2GEBI/review *** ADVERTISE WITH US ***  We do work with sponsors and brands. If you are interested in working with us and you have a product or service that makes sense for the cleaning industry here's how to work with us -https://savvycleaner.com/brand-deals *** SAVVY CLEANER BRANDS ***  SAVVY CLEANER - House Cleaner Training and Certification – https://savvycleaner.com/join VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING – Cleaning tips and strategies for your short-term rental  https://TurnoverCleaningTips.com  FUNNY CLEANING SHIRTS – Incentive and thank-you gifts for house cleaners and maids. https://FunnyCleaningShirts.com  HOARDING WORLD - Helping you change your relationship with stuff https://HoardingWorld.com REALTY SUCCESS HUB - Helping you sell your home fast https://realtysuccesshub.com CREDITS -------------------------- Show Produced by: Savvy Cleaner: https://savvycleaner.com Show Host: Angela Brown Show Editor: Anna Nikitchuk Show Producer: Anna Nikitchuk

Pet hair is the central theme of this video, where host Angela Brown and guest expert Ali Smith discuss the challenges of managing pet messes and fur shedding. Ali, a seasoned dog trainer with her acclaimed blog Rebarkable, shares her expertise on the intricacies of different coat types among various dog breeds. From double-coated breeds like German Shepherds and Huskies to hair-based coats like Labradoodles and Poodles, and even slick-coated dogs like Greyhounds, Ali showcases specific grooming tools tailored for each fur type. She emphasizes the importance of seasonal grooming, as dogs tend to shed more during the transition between hot and cold seasons. The discussion also covers the need for specialized cleaning strategies during peak shedding seasons to manage fur accumulation effectively. Reclaim Your Home From Pet Hair Chapters 00:00 Introducing Ali Smith 00:50 The Challenge of Dog Fur: Types and Grooming Tips 03:54 Seasonal Shedding and Cleaning Strategies 05:26 Grooming Frequency and Techniques for Different Coats RESOURCES ----------------- BISSELL SpotClean Pet Pro Portable Carpet Cleaner - https://amzn.to/3Tr631t MIU COLOR Pet Grooming Brush - https://amzn.to/3ILOFzm iRobot Roomba 694 Robot Vacuum-Wi-Fi Connectivity - https://amzn.to/3VqrZMy Pettom Pet Steel Grooming Tool - https://amzn.to/43pBLRg Shark Navigator Lift Away Upright Vacuum - https://amzn.to/3vuUf69 (When available, we use affiliate links and as Amazon Associates, we earn a commission on qualifying purchases.) *** RATE THIS PODCAST ***  https://ratethispodcast.com/askahousecleaner  *** TRAINING & CLEANING CERTIFICATION*** https://savvycleaner.com/join *** MOST REQUESTED LIST OF CLEANING STUFF I USE *** https://www.Amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown  SOCIAL MEDIA --------------- *** CONNECT WITH ALI SMITH ON SOCIAL MEDIA *** Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rbrkbl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/re.barkable/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/rbrkbl YouTube: www.youtube.com/@rebarkable URL: https://rebarkable.com/ *** CONNECT WITH ANGELA BROWN ON SOCIAL MEDIA ***  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AskAngelaBrown Facebook: https://www.Facebook.com/AskAngelaBrown Twitter: https://Twitter.com/AskAngelaBrown Instagram: https://instagram.com/AskAngelaBrown Pinterest: https://Pinterest.com/AskAngelaBrown Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/AskAngelaBrown TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@askangelabrown Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown URL: https://AngelaBrown.com NEED MORE CLEANING HELP? ------------- *** GOT A QUESTION FOR A SHOW? *** Please email it to Angela[at]AskaHouseCleaner.com Voice Mail: Click on the blue button at https://askahousecleaner.com  *** PROFESSIONAL HOUSE CLEANERS PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/ProfessionalHouseCleaners/ *** VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/VRBO.Airbnb.Cleaning/ *** LOOKING FOR A WAY TO GET MORE CLEANING LEADS *** https://housecleaning360.com SPONSORSHIPS & BRANDS ------------------- Today's #AskaHouseCleaner sponsor is #SavvyCleaner training and certification for house cleaners and maids. (https://savvycleaner.com/join) And your host today is #AngelaBrown - https://g.page/r/CbMI6YFuLU2GEBI/review *** ADVERTISE WITH US ***  We do work with sponsors and brands. If you are interested in working with us and you have a product or service that makes sense for the cleaning industry here's how to work with us -https://savvycleaner.com/brand-deals *** SAVVY CLEANER BRANDS ***  SAVVY CLEANER - House Cleaner Training and Certification – https://savvycleaner.com/join VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING – Cleaning tips and strategies for your short-term rental  https://TurnoverCleaningTips.com  FUNNY CLEANING SHIRTS – Incentive and thank-you gifts for house cleaners and maids. https://FunnyCleaningShirts.com  HOARDING WORLD - Helping you change your relationship with stuff https://HoardingWorld.com REALTY SUCCESS HUB - Helping you sell your home fast https://realtysuccesshub.com CREDITS -------------------------- Show Produced by: Savvy Cleaner: https://savvycleaner.com Show Host: Angela Brown Show Editor: Anna Nikitchuk Show Producer: Anna Nikitchuk

It's our first 'interview-only' show! Join Rob and Bubba this week as they welcome Ali Smith back on the show to talk about sponsor switches, putting woes and updates on Ali's 2024 tour so far. The Am Side is proud to be partnered with DGA discs, so make sure to check out discgolf.com for your plastic needs and use code 'amside' for 10% off your order!

In this video, Angela Brown is joined by Ali Smith, an expert dog trainer who has worked with over 1200 pups and runs the popular blog Rebarkable. Together, they tackle a common challenge faced by pet owners: dealing with pet stains and accidents in the home. Ali shares her wealth of knowledge, offering practical solutions for removing various pet stains from carpets, upholstery, and other surfaces. The discussion also covers the impact of diet on a pet's health and behavior, shedding light on how dietary choices can influence shedding, odor, and overall well-being. Whether you're a seasoned pet owner struggling with pet stains or a new fur parent seeking knowledge, this episode promises to equip you with the tools to handle messes with ease while fostering a deeper understanding of your four-legged friend's needs. Handling Pet Stains With Ease Chapters 00:00 Introducing Ali Smith 00:57 Engaging with the Audience: Pet Owners Share Their Stories 01:23 Expert Advice on Handling Pet Odors and Diet Tips 03:00 Importance of Diet for Pets 03:30 Cleaning Up Accidents  04:06 The Misconceptions and Realities of Owning Trendy Dog Breeds 04:30 Misconceptions About Trendy Breeds  RESOURCES ----------------- BISSELL SpotClean Pet Pro Portable Carpet Cleaner - https://amzn.to/3Tr631t Bissell Professional Pet Urine Elimator - https://amzn.to/3Pvx4jb HARRIS Cleaning Vinegar - https://amzn.to/3THV3Oy BISSELL Pet Stain Eraser Plus - https://amzn.to/3Vs8NhA Resolve Professional Strength Spot and Stain Carpet Cleaner - https://amzn.to/3x3QIw8 (When available, we use affiliate links and as Amazon Associates, we earn a commission on qualifying purchases.) *** RATE THIS PODCAST ***  https://ratethispodcast.com/askahousecleaner  *** TRAINING & CLEANING CERTIFICATION*** https://savvycleaner.com/join *** MOST REQUESTED LIST OF CLEANING STUFF I USE *** https://www.Amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown  SOCIAL MEDIA --------------- *** CONNECT WITH ALI SMITH ON SOCIAL MEDIA *** Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rbrkbl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/re.barkable/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/rbrkbl YouTube: www.youtube.com/@rebarkable URL: https://rebarkable.com/ *** CONNECT WITH ANGELA BROWN ON SOCIAL MEDIA ***  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AskAngelaBrown Facebook: https://www.Facebook.com/AskAngelaBrown Twitter: https://Twitter.com/AskAngelaBrown Instagram: https://instagram.com/AskAngelaBrown Pinterest: https://Pinterest.com/AskAngelaBrown Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/AskAngelaBrown TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@askangelabrown Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown URL: https://AngelaBrown.com NEED MORE CLEANING HELP? ------------- *** GOT A QUESTION FOR A SHOW? *** Please email it to Angela[at]AskaHouseCleaner.com Voice Mail: Click on the blue button at https://askahousecleaner.com  *** PROFESSIONAL HOUSE CLEANERS PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/ProfessionalHouseCleaners/ *** VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/VRBO.Airbnb.Cleaning/ *** LOOKING FOR A WAY TO GET MORE CLEANING LEADS *** https://housecleaning360.com SPONSORSHIPS & BRANDS ------------------- Today's #AskaHouseCleaner sponsor is #SavvyCleaner training and certification for house cleaners and maids. (https://savvycleaner.com/join) And your host today is #AngelaBrown - https://g.page/r/CbMI6YFuLU2GEBI/review *** ADVERTISE WITH US ***  We do work with sponsors and brands. If you are interested in working with us and you have a product or service that makes sense for the cleaning industry here's how to work with us -https://savvycleaner.com/brand-deals *** SAVVY CLEANER BRANDS ***  SAVVY CLEANER - House Cleaner Training and Certification – https://savvycleaner.com/join VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING – Cleaning tips and strategies for your short-term rental  https://TurnoverCleaningTips.com  FUNNY CLEANING SHIRTS – Incentive and thank-you gifts for house cleaners and maids. https://FunnyCleaningShirts.com  HOARDING WORLD - Helping you change your relationship with stuff https://HoardingWorld.com REALTY SUCCESS HUB - Helping you sell your home fast https://realtysuccesshub.com CREDITS -------------------------- Show Produced by: Savvy Cleaner: https://savvycleaner.com Show Host: Angela Brown Show Editor: Anna Nikitchuk Show Producer: Anna Nikitchuk

In this video, host Angela Brown and guest expert Ali Smith tackle a common challenge faced by many pet owners - dealing with pet odors. Ali, a renowned dog trainer who has trained over 1,200 dogs and runs the acclaimed dog blog Rebarkable, brings her expertise to the discussion. The episode explores the delicate issue of handling pet accidents in the home, specifically dog poop, and the importance of addressing these situations with sensitivity to avoid stress for both pets and their owners. Ali shares her invaluable insights on approaching pet-related cleanliness tactfully, assisting less able individuals, and investigating the root causes of these messes. Throughout the discussion, Ali provides practical tips and solutions for effective odor removal and clean-up. The conversation emphasizes the importance of open communication, kindness, and maintaining a stress-free environment for pets and their families during the cleaning process. Winning The Battle Against Pet Odors Chapters 00:00 Introducing Ali Smith 00:37 Interactive Q&A: Tackling Your Pet Mess Queries 01:32 Expert Advice: Handling Pet Accidents Gracefully 02:42 Practical Tips for Dealing with Pet Messes RESOURCES ----------------- Rocco & Roxie Supply Co. Stain & Odor Eliminator for Strong Odor - https://amzn.to/3PvBXsf OdoBan Professional Disinfectant and Odor Eliminator Concentrate - https://amzn.to/3TIU68z Pet Hair Removal Tool - https://amzn.to/3vjBz9q B-Land Carpet Rake for Pet Hair Removal - https://amzn.to/4a0M8NJ Pet Hair Remover for Couch - https://amzn.to/3THB5DA (When available, we use affiliate links and as Amazon Associates, we earn a commission on qualifying purchases.) *** RATE THIS PODCAST ***  https://ratethispodcast.com/askahousecleaner  *** TRAINING & CLEANING CERTIFICATION*** https://savvycleaner.com/join *** MOST REQUESTED LIST OF CLEANING STUFF I USE *** https://www.Amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown  SOCIAL MEDIA --------------- *** CONNECT WITH ALI SMITH ON SOCIAL MEDIA *** Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rbrkbl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/re.barkable/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/rbrkbl YouTube: www.youtube.com/@rebarkable URL: https://rebarkable.com/ *** CONNECT WITH ANGELA BROWN ON SOCIAL MEDIA ***  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AskAngelaBrown Facebook: https://www.Facebook.com/AskAngelaBrown Twitter: https://Twitter.com/AskAngelaBrown Instagram: https://instagram.com/AskAngelaBrown Pinterest: https://Pinterest.com/AskAngelaBrown Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/AskAngelaBrown TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@askangelabrown Store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/AngelaBrown URL: https://AngelaBrown.com NEED MORE CLEANING HELP? ------------- *** GOT A QUESTION FOR A SHOW? *** Please email it to Angela[at]AskaHouseCleaner.com Voice Mail: Click on the blue button at https://askahousecleaner.com  *** PROFESSIONAL HOUSE CLEANERS PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/ProfessionalHouseCleaners/ *** VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING FACEBOOK GROUP *** https://www.facebook.com/groups/VRBO.Airbnb.Cleaning/ *** LOOKING FOR A WAY TO GET MORE CLEANING LEADS *** https://housecleaning360.com SPONSORSHIPS & BRANDS ------------------- Today's #AskaHouseCleaner sponsor is #SavvyCleaner training and certification for house cleaners and maids. (https://savvycleaner.com/join) And your host today is #AngelaBrown - https://g.page/r/CbMI6YFuLU2GEBI/review *** ADVERTISE WITH US ***  We do work with sponsors and brands. If you are interested in working with us and you have a product or service that makes sense for the cleaning industry here's how to work with us -https://savvycleaner.com/brand-deals *** SAVVY CLEANER BRANDS ***  SAVVY CLEANER - House Cleaner Training and Certification – https://savvycleaner.com/join VRBO AIRBNB CLEANING – Cleaning tips and strategies for your short-term rental  https://TurnoverCleaningTips.com  FUNNY CLEANING SHIRTS – Incentive and thank-you gifts for house cleaners and maids. https://FunnyCleaningShirts.com  HOARDING WORLD - Helping you change your relationship with stuff https://HoardingWorld.com REALTY SUCCESS HUB - Helping you sell your home fast https://realtysuccesshub.com CREDITS -------------------------- Show Produced by: Savvy Cleaner: https://savvycleaner.com Show Host: Angela Brown Show Editor: Anna Nikitchuk Show Producer: Anna Nikitchuk

The vibrant style Ali Smith has brought to her writing and photography—featured regularly in The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications internationally—was forged in New York's underground music scene where she played bass in the seminal punk / blues / avant-garde band, Speedball Baby. After touring worldwide and recording several albums, Ali released two books of photography about women's lives. The first, Laws of the Bandit Queens, led to a feature on OWN, Oprah Winfrey's television network. The second, Momma Love: How the Mother Half Lives, won two International Book Awards, was praised by The New York Times, and Gloria Steinem called it “a gift to moms.” Since its release in January, 2024, Ali's memoir The Ballad of Speedball Baby has garnished much critical acclaim and impassioned reader responses, reached #1 on Amazon, and led (amongst other things) to a BBC Sounds interview. Find out more at AliSmith.com , @mommaloveAli on Instagram and Ali Smith Photo on FB.

With no Imps game to talk about this weekend, we're taking a look at a couple of talking points instead. First up, we take a look at our loanees and give their current situations a once over. Sam Long, Jaden Brown, Ali Smith and more all get a look in here!Next up, we're talking about the big thing. The run-in. We look at Oxford, Stevenage and Blackpool's fixtures, and have a little game of predicting where the four teams will finish! Will the Imps land 6th place according to us? We've tried to be as unbiased as possible, so let's see how we go...Of course, we have the regularly scheduled Stacey West fun and games as well, with the lads giving a brief update on our running progress with only three weeks until the Lincoln 10k...We'll see you Thursday where we'll be previewing the Orient game - Up the Imps!This Podcast has been created and uploaded by Gary Hutchinson of the Stacey West Podcast. The views in this Podcast are not necessarily the views of talkSPORT. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For today's episode, I am joined by award-winning author, photographer, and musician Ali Smith to discuss her thrilling new memoir 'The Ballad of a Speedball Baby.' We discuss her early stages of creativity, playing in an art-punk band in the '90s and her goal to always prioritize women's stories and the female gaze in her work. ✨ MORE ABOUT ALI SMITH ✨ Ali Smith is a visual artist, photographer, and musician from New York. She is the award-winning author of 3 books, 'Laws of the Bandit Queens,' 'Momma Love,' and her current memoir, 'The Ballad of a Speedball Baby,' which details her early life and her time playing bass in the '90s art-punk band Speedball Baby. ✨ KEEP UP TO DATE WITH ALI SMITH ✨ Web: www.alismith.com/ Instagram: instagram.com/mommaloveali/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alismithphoto ✨ CONNECT WITH IZZY ✨ YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠youtube.com/channel/UCv6SBgiYCpYbx9BOYNefkIg⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠agrrrlstwosoundcents.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠instagram.com/agrrrlstwosoundcents/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠twitter.com/grrrlsoundcents⁠

Matías Rivas, Sofía García-Huidobro y Arturo Fontaine comentaron películas, libros y entrevistas.

"Ali Smith's The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a sometimes-harrowing ride poetically described in neon prose. Ali takes me to places I've been myself as a fellow 'woman of the road' and rocked and rolled. She brings it all back home so vividly with humor, originality, and love-and 'oh-yeah-that-happened-to-me-too' truthfulness. Like the touring band's rite of passage: crashing in a stranger's house in Where-am-I? USA and barely escaping with your life and bass guitar.or bartending in an East Village dive bar. It's a special experience being a Woman in Rock, and as Ali's story unfolds, she'll bring you along for the trip of your life." -- Kate Pierson, the B-52's A Stylist Magazine (UK) Pick of Best New Nonfiction A Kobo Pick of Best Book of the Month in Biographies & Memoirs The Ballad of Speedball Baby is the thrilling, darkly hilarious, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable story of Ali Smith's coming-of-age in '90s New York as she commits to the messy, exhilarating life of a musician and must survive the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply.As an only child reeling from the demolition of her parents' toxic marriage, the New York City underground music scene offers a young Ali a different family of misfits and talented outsiders to belong to. She becomes the bass player for edgy band Speedball Baby, a decision that will take her around the world-from onstage at the legendary CBGBs to the red-light district of Amsterdam. She's often the only girl in a broken-down tour van, being strip-searched at the Croatian border, chased by lunatics, and navigating the seedy underbelly of a male-dominated music scene full of addiction, violence, and misogyny-all while keeping her sharp wit and dark humor intact. Rimmed with heavy black eyeliner and smelling faintly of cheap booze, The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a pulse-quickening, unpredictable ride through the '90s music scene-alternately terrifying, hilarious, and painfully evocative-as well as a love letter to the power of female solidarity

ABOUT ALI SMITH AND THE BALLAD OF SPEEDBALL BABY"Ali Smith's The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a sometimes-harrowing ride poetically described in neon prose. Ali takes me to places I've been myself as a fellow 'woman of the road' and rocked and rolled. She brings it all back home so vividly with humor, originality, and love-and 'oh-yeah-that-happened-to-me-too' truthfulness. Like the touring band's rite of passage: crashing in a stranger's house in Where-am-I? USA and barely escaping with your life and bass guitar.or bartending in an East Village dive bar. It's a special experience being a Woman in Rock, and as Ali's story unfolds, she'll bring you along for the trip of your life."-- Kate Pierson, the B-52'sA Stylist Magazine (UK) Pick of Best New NonfictionA Kobo Pick of Best Book of the Month in Biographies & MemoirsThe Ballad of Speedball Baby is the thrilling, darkly hilarious, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable story of Ali Smith's coming-of-age in '90s New York as she commits to the messy, exhilarating life of a musician and must survive the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply.As an only child reeling from the demolition of her parents' toxic marriage, the New York City underground music scene offers a young Ali a different family of misfits and talented outsiders to belong to.She becomes the bass player for edgy band Speedball Baby, a decision that will take her around the world-from onstage at the legendary CBGBs to the red-light district of Amsterdam. She's often the only girl in a broken-down tour van, being strip-searched at the Croatian border, chased by lunatics, and navigating the seedy underbelly of a male-dominated music scene full of addiction, violence, and misogyny-all while keeping her sharp wit and dark humor intact.Rimmed with heavy black eyeliner and smelling faintly of cheap booze, The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a pulse-quickening, unpredictable ride through the '90s music scene-alternately terrifying, hilarious, and painfully evocative-as well as a love letter to the power of female solidarityALI SMITH BIOThe vibrant style Ali Smith has brought to her writing and photography-featured regularly in The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications internationally-was forged in New York's underground music scene where she played bass in the seminal punk / blues / avant-garde band Speedball Baby. After touring worldwide and recording nine albums, Ali released two books of photography about women's lives. The first, Laws of the Bandit Queens, led to a feature on OWN, Oprah Winfrey's television network. The second,Momma Love: How the Mother Half Lives, won a Silver IPPY and an International Book Awards prize, was praised by the New York Times, and Gloria Steinem called it "a gift to moms." With a passion for telling women's stories, Ali's memoir,The Ballad of Speedball Baby, is her literary debut. Learn more at AliSmith.com and @mommaloveAli on Instagram.Get the book: https://a.co/d/4DDlINI http://www.alismith.com/the-ballad-of-speedball-baby https://www.facebook.com/alismithphoto/ https://www.instagram.com/mommaloveali/ Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/i-am-refocused-radio--2671113/support.

"Ali Smith's The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a sometimes-harrowing ride poetically described in neon prose. Ali takes me to places I've been myself as a fellow 'woman of the road' and rocked and rolled. She brings it all back home so vividly with humor, originality, and love-and 'oh-yeah-that-happened-to-me-too' truthfulness. Like the touring band's rite of passage: crashing in a stranger's house in Where-am-I? USA and barely escaping with your life and bass guitar.or bartending in an East Village dive bar. It's a special experience being a Woman in Rock, and as Ali's story unfolds, she'll bring you along for the trip of your life." -- Kate Pierson, the B-52's A Stylist Magazine (UK) Pick of Best New Nonfiction A Kobo Pick of Best Book of the Month in Biographies & Memoirs The Ballad of Speedball Baby is the thrilling, darkly hilarious, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable story of Ali Smith's coming-of-age in '90s New York as she commits to the messy, exhilarating life of a musician and must survive the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply.As an only child reeling from the demolition of her parents' toxic marriage, the New York City underground music scene offers a young Ali a different family of misfits and talented outsiders to belong to. She becomes the bass player for edgy band Speedball Baby, a decision that will take her around the world-from onstage at the legendary CBGBs to the red-light district of Amsterdam. She's often the only girl in a broken-down tour van, being strip-searched at the Croatian border, chased by lunatics, and navigating the seedy underbelly of a male-dominated music scene full of addiction, violence, and misogyny-all while keeping her sharp wit and dark humor intact. Rimmed with heavy black eyeliner and smelling faintly of cheap booze, The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a pulse-quickening, unpredictable ride through the '90s music scene-alternately terrifying, hilarious, and painfully evocative-as well as a love letter to the power of female solidarity

The ideal of ‘conversation' recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice central to ethics, democratic politics, and thinking itself. Interweaving readings of fiction and philosophy in a ‘conversational' style inspired by Stanley Cavell, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation (Edinburgh UP, 2023) clarifies this lofty yet vague ideal, while developing a revitalizing model for interdisciplinary literary studies. It argues that conversation is key to exemplary responses to sceptical doubt in ordinary language and political philosophy – where scepticism threatens ethics and democratic politics – and in works of British fiction spanning from Jane Austen through Ali Smith. It shows that for these writers, conversation can shift attention from metaphysical doubts regarding our capacity to know ‘reality' and other people, to ethical, democratic, and aesthetic action. The book moreover proposes – and models – ‘conversational criticism' as a framework linking literary studies to broader political and ethical commitments, while remaining responsive to aesthetic form. Erin Elizabeth Greer is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. She teaches and writes about modern and contemporary British and Anglophone literature, ordinary language philosophy, political philosophy, feminist theory, and critical new media studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Contemporary Literature, JML, Camera Obscura, Salmagundi, and Stanley Cavell and Aesthetic Experience. Tong He is Lecturer of English at Central China Normal University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The ideal of ‘conversation' recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice central to ethics, democratic politics, and thinking itself. Interweaving readings of fiction and philosophy in a ‘conversational' style inspired by Stanley Cavell, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation (Edinburgh UP, 2023) clarifies this lofty yet vague ideal, while developing a revitalizing model for interdisciplinary literary studies. It argues that conversation is key to exemplary responses to sceptical doubt in ordinary language and political philosophy – where scepticism threatens ethics and democratic politics – and in works of British fiction spanning from Jane Austen through Ali Smith. It shows that for these writers, conversation can shift attention from metaphysical doubts regarding our capacity to know ‘reality' and other people, to ethical, democratic, and aesthetic action. The book moreover proposes – and models – ‘conversational criticism' as a framework linking literary studies to broader political and ethical commitments, while remaining responsive to aesthetic form. Erin Elizabeth Greer is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. She teaches and writes about modern and contemporary British and Anglophone literature, ordinary language philosophy, political philosophy, feminist theory, and critical new media studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Contemporary Literature, JML, Camera Obscura, Salmagundi, and Stanley Cavell and Aesthetic Experience. Tong He is Lecturer of English at Central China Normal University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The ideal of ‘conversation' recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice central to ethics, democratic politics, and thinking itself. Interweaving readings of fiction and philosophy in a ‘conversational' style inspired by Stanley Cavell, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation (Edinburgh UP, 2023) clarifies this lofty yet vague ideal, while developing a revitalizing model for interdisciplinary literary studies. It argues that conversation is key to exemplary responses to sceptical doubt in ordinary language and political philosophy – where scepticism threatens ethics and democratic politics – and in works of British fiction spanning from Jane Austen through Ali Smith. It shows that for these writers, conversation can shift attention from metaphysical doubts regarding our capacity to know ‘reality' and other people, to ethical, democratic, and aesthetic action. The book moreover proposes – and models – ‘conversational criticism' as a framework linking literary studies to broader political and ethical commitments, while remaining responsive to aesthetic form. Erin Elizabeth Greer is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. She teaches and writes about modern and contemporary British and Anglophone literature, ordinary language philosophy, political philosophy, feminist theory, and critical new media studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Contemporary Literature, JML, Camera Obscura, Salmagundi, and Stanley Cavell and Aesthetic Experience. Tong He is Lecturer of English at Central China Normal University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The ideal of ‘conversation' recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice central to ethics, democratic politics, and thinking itself. Interweaving readings of fiction and philosophy in a ‘conversational' style inspired by Stanley Cavell, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation (Edinburgh UP, 2023) clarifies this lofty yet vague ideal, while developing a revitalizing model for interdisciplinary literary studies. It argues that conversation is key to exemplary responses to sceptical doubt in ordinary language and political philosophy – where scepticism threatens ethics and democratic politics – and in works of British fiction spanning from Jane Austen through Ali Smith. It shows that for these writers, conversation can shift attention from metaphysical doubts regarding our capacity to know ‘reality' and other people, to ethical, democratic, and aesthetic action. The book moreover proposes – and models – ‘conversational criticism' as a framework linking literary studies to broader political and ethical commitments, while remaining responsive to aesthetic form. Erin Elizabeth Greer is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. She teaches and writes about modern and contemporary British and Anglophone literature, ordinary language philosophy, political philosophy, feminist theory, and critical new media studies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Contemporary Literature, JML, Camera Obscura, Salmagundi, and Stanley Cavell and Aesthetic Experience. Tong He is Lecturer of English at Central China Normal University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Author, Artist and Musician Ali Smith has popped in this week for a chat about her latest tome "The Ballad of Speedball Baby". This memoir charts the trials, tribulations and dream crushing of attempting to navigate the world of major labels in the 90s, at the height of their post Nirvana feeding frenzy. Which original punk band need their electrics looking at? Which Beatle was upstaged by a drum destroying singer? Should we pay any heed to the wants and needs of Sloveinian bikers? Listen and find out the answers to all these questions, as well as ones you didn't know you had.Tom and Niallism talk mis-matched line ups, Tom's talking up his parenting and Niall hits a milestone.Music for you this week comes courtesy of: Against Me!, Rats! Rats! Rats!, Falling Sickness, The Buzzcocks, Liz Phair,Hazel O'Connor, Zoinks, and The Great St. Louis.I'm Sorry Zero Points ~ Eurovision podcast with Adrian & Seamus.It's season 3 of I'm Sorry Zero Points. Adrian & Seamus bring...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

When does a book transcend from contemporary literature to a classic? Does someone have to confirm its classic status? And can all Booker Prize novels be considered classics just by being part of the Booker canon? This, and more, is what Jo and James are trying to get to the heart of in this week's episode. Listen in as they discuss what makes a classic novel and chat about which Booker books should be known as classics. In this episode Jo and James: Consider what makes a classic Each pick three novels from the Booker Library that are – or should be – considered classics Discuss the plots of their chosen novels and why they are deserving of classic status Reading list: Something to Answer For by P.H. Newby: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/something-to-answer-for A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/a-month-in-the-country How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/how-late-it-was-how-late St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/st-urbains-horseman Atonement by Ian McEwan: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/atonement The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-remains-of-the-day The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-handmaids-tale Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/shuggie-bain Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/schindlers-ark The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-english-patient Autobiography by Morrisey The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/midnights-children The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-siege-of-krishnapur The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-conservationist Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/oscar-and-lucinda The Ghost Road by Pat Barker: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-ghost-road Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/disgrace Staying On by Paul Scott: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/staying-on The Famished Road by Ben Okri: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-famished-road Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/cloud-atlas The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/the-line-of-beauty Autumn by Ali Smith: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/autumn Crudo by Olivia Laing No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/no-one-is-talking-about-this Waterland by Graham Swift: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/waterland G. by John Berger: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/g Read Alex Clark's piece, “Which novels in the Booker Prize archives should be considered classics?”: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/which-booker-prize-novels-should-be-considered-classics A full transcript of the episode is available at our website: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/the-booker-prize-podcast-episode-33-what-makes-a-classic-novel Follow The Booker Prize Podcast so you never miss an episode. Visit http://thebookerprizes.com/podcast to find out more about us, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Tiktok @thebookerprizes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Liam sits down with the extraordinary Ali Smith, author, photographer, and former bass player of the indie avant-garde punks Speedball Baby.From a pub in North London, Liam and Ali dive deep into her new book "The Ballad of Speedball Baby." This riveting book chronicles Ali's wild ride through the punk scene, from rebellious beginnings in New York to unforgettable moments on and off the stage at the iconic CBGBs. They discuss the hardcore punk scene's profound influence, the highs and lows of her time in Speedball Baby, and the tumultuous journey of signing with a major label.You can pick up a copy of Ali's book 'The Ballad of Speedball Baby' via this linkCheck out Ali's photography via this link.As the conversation unfolds, Ali shares insights into her transition from music to a solo career in writing and photography. However, a word of caution – this episode contains discussions about sensitive topics, including sexual assault and rape. Below are links to organisations who can help if this subject matter might affect you. Or you can Google. 'rape and sexual assault help needed.'UK: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/sexual-health/help-after-rape-and-sexual-assault/USA: https://www.crisistextline.org/topics/sexual-abuse/#understanding-sexual-abuse-1Thank you to Gutterblood for sponsoring this episode. Check out their latest EP, 'Hard Gandhi, ' via this link. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ali Smith in conversation with David Eastaugh http://www.alismith.com/ https://www.blackstoneindie.com/the-ballad-of-speedball-baby-gkno.html#541=2790081 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/feb/05/ali-smiths-90s-new-york-punk-scene-in-pictures The Ballad of Speedball Baby is the thrilling, extremely funny, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable story of Ali Smith―coming of age in '90s New York―who commits to the messy, exhilarating life of a musician and must survive the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply. As an only child reeling from the demolition of her parents' toxic marriage, the New York City underground music scene offers a young Ali a different family of misfits and talented outsiders to belong to. She becomes the bass player for edgy band Speedball Baby, a decision that will take her around the world―from onstage at the legendary CBGBs to the red-light district of Amsterdam. She's often the only girl in a broken-down tour van, being strip-searched at the Croatian border, chased by lunatics, and navigating the seedy underbelly of a male-dominated music scene full of addiction, violence, and misogyny―all while keeping her sharp wit and dark humor intact. Rimmed with heavy black eyeliner and smelling faintly of cheap booze, The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a pulse-quickening, unpredictable ride through the '90s music scene―alternately terrifying, hilarious, and painfully evocative―as well as a love letter to the power of female solidarity.  

After holding the team in second place to a draw at the weekend, the Imps face the team in second place at the Bank on Saturday, as Peterborough make the short journey over. Ben and Chris look ahead to the game, and dissect what could happen, while Charlie is joined by Kelan from the Real EFL podcast to get an opposition view on things!We also take a look at two outgoings from the club this week, as Hakeeb Adelakun and, somewhat surprisingly, Ali Smith head out on loan, and we also talk about the rumours of Jaden Brown heading north of the border.Add in to that a small discussion on the accounts (for a detailed chat, check out the special podcast with Kieran Maguire from The Price Of Football!) and a bit of the traditional Stacey West Podcast nonsense, and you've got yourself a bumper episode this week!As always, get subscribed, check out the YouTube channel, and we'll see you all on Sunday where hopefully we'll be talking about a shock three points. Up The Imps!"This Podcast has been created and uploaded by Gary Hutchinson of the Stacey West Podcast. The views in this Podcast are not necessarily the views of talkSPORT.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ali, Atman, and Andres shared their story of discovering yoga and how they were deeply influenced by their godfather's profound journey. Their godfather, a former Black Panther, shifted his focus from revolutionary change to inner evolution, finding solace and purpose in yoga during the 1960s. This pivotal shift shaped the foundation of their upbringing, instilling a deep connection to yoga and its transformative power. Their father's guidance to pursue entrepreneurship led to the formation of the Holistic Life Foundation, cementing their commitment to empowering individuals through yoga and mindfulness. In this episode, discover the profound impact of yoga on personal growth and societal change, illustrating the universal potential for self-discovery and positive transformation. In this episode, you will be able to: Cultivate mindfulness for emotional resilience Empower teachers and leaders with yoga and mindfulness for holistic support Explore the holistic benefits of yoga for overall well-being Harness the transformative power of pranayama for inner balance Embrace mantra meditation for healing and positive manifestation To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this week's episode, Kayla and Taylor discuss Ali Smith's 2018 novel Winter. Topics include politics?! In MY Christmas?? Sisterly love, floating heads, unwanted erections, and…Austin Powers. We're all over the place in this one, people.This week's drink: Sage Advice via findingtimeforcooking.comINGREDIENTS:3 fresh sage leaves2 oz bourbon (90 proof is best for this recipe)¾ oz cinnamon sage demerara simple syrup (see below for recipe)¾ oz freshly squeezed lime juice1 egg white, ideally room temperature (optional)Sage leaf for garnish (optional)INSTRUCTIONS:If using the egg white (strongly recommended!), put it in the shaker and do a 10-15 second dry shake with it first.Then add the 3 sage leaves and the sage cinnamon syrup to the cocktail shaker and use a muddler to lightly crush the sage.Add the lime juice and bourbon and shake everything for 10-15 seconds.Finally, add a bunch of ice and shake until chilled (at least 15 seconds, I recommend 20-30).Double strain (a.k.a. through the shaker and through a fine mesh sieve, to avoid tiny green bits) into a coupe glass and garnish with a sage leaf.Current reads, recommendations, and links:The rest of Ali Smith's Season Quartet: Autumn, Spring, & SummerGreedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much by Jen WinstonThe Woman in Me by Britney SpearsTerrace Story by Hilary LeichterFollow us on Instagram @literatureandlibationspod.Visit our website: literatureandlibationspod.com to submit feedback, questions, or your own takes on what we are reading. You can also see what we are reading for future episodes! You can email us at literatureandlibationspod@gmail.com.Please leave us a review and/or rating! It really helps others find our podcast…and it makes us happy!Purchase books via bookshop.org or check them out from your local public library. Join us next time as we discuss our favorite reads (and other things) of 2023!For the last episode of the year, pop a bottle of champagne! Full size or mini, on its own or with juice, enjoy this bubbly beverage with us as we celebrate a year full of good reads. Cheers!

You may remember hearing a massively viral story from a few years ago about a school in Baltimore that gave students meditation, instead of detention. Ali Smith, Atman Smith, and Andres Gonzalez founded the Holistic Life Foundation and are the authors of Let Your Light Shine, which recounts the story of their work helping traumatized children in one of America's most underserved cities, and how mindfulness tools can help children and communities not only survive, but thrive. In this episode we talk about: The story behind their meditation-instead-of-detention initiativeTheir experience asking principals to give them the most challenging studentsWhat it's like working in one of the most violent cities in the worldThe results from teaching students yoga and meditationHow we can apply the lessons they've learned to meditation and lifeContent Warning: Explicit language. For a clean version of this episode, please listen on the Ten Percent Happier app or at tenpercent.comFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/Ali-Smith-Atman-Smith-Andres-Gonzalez-513See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.