Author Archive for Susha

The top ten cartoon clichés

Published
by
Susha
on February 1, 2008
in Prospect affairs
. 21 Comments

As Prospect’s cartoon editor, I have the task of sifting through the many cartoons that we receive each month, before the editor makes a final choice of the ten or so we publish in the magazine. (And we always welcome cartoon submissions—email cartoons at prospect-magazine.co.uk). It is, as you’d expect, a fun job, involving a lot of laughing, something which cannot be said about the chore of sorting through the articles that we are sent. I often find that the cartoons en masse capture the Zeitgeist, highlighting the subjects that people are thinking about the most—at the moment, it seems to be carbon emissions, obesity and Facebook.

At the same time, there are the perennial topics for cartoons—or clichés, if you prefer. But, while clichés and good writing do not mix, a hackneyed setting is no bar to a funny cartoon. In fact, the cliché often adds to the humour, with the joke lying in the updating of the familiar setting to recent events. Mostly for my own amusement, I’ve compiled a list of the top cartoon clichés, illustrated by some of the best clichéd cartoons Prospect has published over the years. (Thanks to all the cartoonists involved for letting me use their work.)

The runners-up are: 20. Confessionals. 19. Medieval sieges. 18. “Back in 5 minutes” signs. 17. Adam and Eve. 16. Cavemen. 15. Fairy tales (especially the three bears, the three little pigs and Rapunzel). 14. Business meetings. 13. Ordering in a restaurant. 12. Witch hunts. 11. Hell.

And so, without further ado, here are Prospect’s top 10 cartoon clichés.

10. The Grim Reaper
by Benita Epstein

Grim Reaper

Continue reading ‘The top ten cartoon clichés’

From the archive

Published
by
Susha
on January 30, 2008
in History
. 0 Comments

GandhiAs noted earlier today on First Drafts, it’s 60 years to the day that Mahatma Gandhi was killed. In Prospect’s April 2004 issue, Bhikhu Parekh, the author of several books on the Indian hero, imagined what a debate between Gandhi and Osama Bin Laden might look like. How would the greatest advocate for non-violence challenge Bin Laden’s world view? More recently, Prospect published a web exclusive by the late Horace Alexander, who spent Indian independence day with Gandhi in Calcutta, and saw him broker peace between Muslims and Hindus.

From the archive

Published
by
Susha
on January 28, 2008
in Asia
. 0 Comments

General Suharto, former president of Indonesia, died today at the age of 86. Suharto took power in 1965, officially replacing Indonesia’s first president Sukarno in 1967. He governed for 32 years before the effects of the Asian financial crisis forced him out in May 1998. In Prospect’s March 1998 issue, Charles Glass saw the end of his dictatorship approaching, and assessed his legacy to his country.

We the people

Published
by
Susha
on January 24, 2008
in Books
. 0 Comments

Browsing through the books recently arrived in the Prospect office, I picked up “How Fiction Works” by literary critic James Wood, which will be published next month. Wood starts his first chapter, Narrating, with a typically clear statement: “The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors. I can tell the story in the third person or in the first person, and perhaps in the second person singular or in the first person plural, though successful examples of these latter two are rare indeed. And that is it.”

Which got me thinking. I’ve read quite a few stories in second person, but I find the style usually begins to grate after a while. It also never really seems apparent what the author is trying to achieve—an even closer identification with the reader than first person singular? A homage to Choose Your Own Adventure books? (While I’m on the topic, has anyone ever written a novel in the second person plural, which is a distinct form in some languages such as Spanish?)

But I’ve also read several novels in the past few years that have successfully—as far as I’m concerned—utilised the first person plural. Most recently, Joshua Ferris’s And Then We Came to the End, which rightly made it onto several “best books of 2007” lists, and is almost entirely written in the first person plural. Going back a few years, Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) is partly written in it, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993) exclusively uses it. (There are others including, inevitably the great experimentalist William Faulkner.)

These novels work for me because the narrative device isn’t purely a gimmick. In Ferris’s novel “we” is the collective voice of the employees in a Chicago advertising agency, capturing the camaraderie of working life: “We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours. Then a day would pass in perfect harmony with our projects, our family members, and our coworkers, and we couldn’t believe we were getting paid for this.” The Virgin Suicides is narrated by a Greek chorus of men telling the story of five doomed sisters they knew during their teenage years—”We saw her only rarely, in the morning, fully dressed though the sun hadn’t come up, stepping out to snatch up the dewy milk cartons.” It’s a haunting book that derives its emotional impact from the first person plural, and probably wouldn’t work as a novel without it. Finally, and least essentially, Joy Fowler’s “we” stands for the members of a book group, “We suspected a hidden agenda, but who would put Jane Austen to an evil purpose?”; its use echoes the whimsical nature of the book as a whole.

Do any other options for narrating a story exist? Wood is emphatic: “Anything else probably will not much resemble narration; it may be closer to poetry, or prose-poetry.” Is he wrong?

So now who do I vote for?

Published
by
Susha
on January 15, 2008
in United States
. 0 Comments

I took the test on the Electoral Compass website mentioned in this Crooked Timber post, and wasn’t at all surprised by the result—of the US presidential candidates, my views are closest to Barack Obama’s, and furthest away from Fred Thompson. In this particular model of the American political landscape, the main candidates of each party are closely grouped together, with Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Bill Richardson virtually on top of one another, and only Ron Paul (apparently my best choice from the Republican camp) any distance away from his fellows.

But for some reason I decided not to stop there, and tried out Glassbooth. Glassbooth covers a lot more candidates and informed me that Dennis Kucinich was the best match for my beliefs, followed by Mike Gravel and then John Edwards. Again, Ron Paul was the closest Republican, but this time Fred Thompson was the next closest.

I could go on (and I did). According to this site, I should be voting for Kucinich, followed by Gravel and then Clinton. The Washington Post thought my best choices from each party would be Edwards and McCain. On this site, I got Kucinich, Chris Dodd, then Obama with Rudy Giuliani the top Republican. This site recommended Bill Richardson.

I’m now hopelessly confused. But luckily for America, I don’t get to vote anyway.

Sign of the times

Published
by
Susha
on January 14, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

It’s much too easy to make fun of political correctness. So, even though the “Valuing Diversity” form sent to me by the housing department of my local council caused me some amusement, I am not going to mock it. I’ll let the question “How do you define your sexuality” go, especially as you can “prefer not to say.” I’ll carry on wondering what the “Easy Read” format they offered to send me future information is, and why it can’t just be made easy for everyone. And I won’t take issue with the option—separate from the main ethnicity question—to tick “if you are a Gypsy or Traveller” (can you be a traveller if you own a home?). But I can’t let it pass entirely, because it marks the first occasion that I’ve ever been offered three choices for “Gender”: Male, Female or Transgender.

Or perhaps I’m just behind the times and this is becoming common practice?

Today’s top links (about violence)

Published
by
Susha
on November 8, 2007
in Elsewhere on the web
. 0 Comments

Malcolm Gladwell fans will be pleased to see he is back in the New Yorker after a long break, with a characteristic take on criminal profiling.

Via the Freakonomics blog, Clive Thompson reveals how he became a suicide bomber—but only in Halo 3.

Despite being thoroughly sick of the phrase “rivers of blood,” I never realised before that it (sort of) comes from the Aeneid. Mary Beard explains.

Dogs in space

Published
by
Susha
on November 4, 2007
in Science and technology
. 0 Comments

SpacedogFifty years ago today, the Soviet Union launched the first living being—a dog—into orbit on the spacecraft Sputnik 2. A female mongrel, Laika was a stray found on the streets of Moscow. She was one of many candidates for the mission. With her fellow dogs, she was trained by being kept in increasingly small cages for weeks at a time. Laika’s calm manner under these conditions led to her being chosen.

It emerged later—and contrary to what the Soviet authorities had previously said—that Laika died a few hours into the flight, from overheating and stress. Her body continued to orbit the Earth for six months, before burning up in the atmosphere. Although Sputnik 2 paved the way for Yuri Gagarin’s successful spaceflight in 1961, a leading member of the Soviet space programme has since expressed regret, claiming that not enough had been learned from the mission to justify her death. She remains the only living creature sent knowingly into space to die.

Her tale inspired Russian writer Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) to write his short story “The Dog”, which Prospect published in our September 2006 issue. At the risk of spoiling it, I much prefer Grossman’s ending.

From the archive

Published
by
Susha
on October 17, 2007
in Books and In the news
. 0 Comments

Congratulations (again) to Anne Enright, surprise but welcome winner of this year’s Man Booker prize. Enright wrote for the magazine back in April 2001 with a moving article about the birth of her daughter, which eventually formed part of her 2004 non-fiction book, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. In the forthcoming issue of Prospect be sure to look out for a new short story by Indian-born author Indra Sinha, who joined Enright on the Man Booker shortlist with his novel Animal’s People.

Goodbye David Robins

Published
by
Susha
on October 12, 2007
in In the news
. 0 Comments

Prospect bids a sad farewell to journalist and sociologist David Robins, who has died of cancer aged 62. David appears in our current issue with an article on youth violence—a longstanding interest of his; he first wrote for the magazine in July 1997, providing the introduction for a piece on a similar theme. There’s more about David’s life and work in his obituary today in the Guardian.