........................................................................................ - a weBlog by Snowy and me.

Friday 30 March 2012

Now That Is The Kind Of Book Burning I like

In 2011 BBC Northern Ireland
adapted the book 'Christopher And His Kind',
a memoir of life in 1930's Germany by Christopher Isherwood.

They filmed the script in Belfast.
This afforded the locals the glorious sight
of their City Hall shrouded in swastikas,
which raised many eyebrows
and caused many knowing smiles
about the sad state of provincial politics.

Better than that, a book burning scene
was part of the script. The BBC contacted
every local charity shop in Belfast asking
for all the books donated to them
that the public won't buy second hand,
because the print run is bigger than the author's talent.
The sort of  books where the publishers hope
was that the author's fame would sell
the book and disguise how leaden their prose was.

The BBC probably paid the charity shops
for these literary sloppy seconds by weight,
thus creating a win-win scene
in which one book infused with talent,
'Christopher and His Kind' became the means
of temporarily cleansing one small corner
of the world of books in which the hope
of translating talent into sales
was solely down to the publishers' PR department.

I forgot to ask, did the BBC's fires
also burn the deadly prose of 'Mein Kampf'?

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