Among the many curses that plague writers is the humiliation of happening upon an old, and shall we say, awkwardly realised piece of writing. ‘I wrote that! How could I? I’m so ashamed. No one should ever see this. Let me burn it before someone sees it and I become the laughing stock of the writing world!’
Anaïa Nin exerted a huge influence on me through most of my college years, which feel like they happened a long time ago. I would buy her books impulsively and carry them around everywhere. For a brief while I even became an Anaïs Nin lending library. Not that I had all of her books with me. Her diaries are hard to find, but I have some of her novels and, of course, Delta of Venus.
… metaphors are nothing in themselves. They have no value except as a means of indirect expression of that which is missing in this omnibus language. If speaking and feeling were perfectly commensurate, the use of metaphors would be not only superfluous, but injurious to expression.
Zadie Smith on the lyrical Realist novel (via China Miéville)
These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland [a novel by Joseph O'Neill], our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done – in a sense that’s the problem.
There have been many elegies for handwriting, most notably, perhaps, by Umberto Eco. I suppose it is a lost art, especially cursive. But writing is in my life almost every day. I write in cursive, like most English-literate Indians my age. In the grand scheme of things, I am not very old, but it surprises me to know that people of my generation from other parts of the world haven’t learnt cursive. India is old-fashioned like that.
A lovely note last night saying I’ve been included in the editors’ choice for ‘The Ten Best of Soundzine’ – thank you, Charles, Gene, Phill and Annie, and many congratulations on your tenth issue. This is a wonderful set of editors, and they’ve just invited a new poetry editor to the team — Mary Meriam.
Dr Nathan limped along the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital — the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor.
Shockingly, I’ve had one wonderful day last week. Even more shockingly, it was a Monday. I’ve begun to think that waking up early is a highly underrated activity. A couple of years ago, I used to wake up at 5.45 am everyday to get to French classes before college classes. It was disciplining and beautiful. Must do again.
Mills & Boons writers reveal their secret formulae
For [Penny] Jordan , the hero also has to have a charitable side. “He’s obviously got to be sexy and high powered because they go together. And they always like them to be well off. But for me he has to have some interest in charity, to do something for the good,” she says.
Toto Funds the Arts in association with the British Council is hosting a reading and discussion with award-winning fantasy-fiction writer China Miéville on the 1st of March at the British Library.
Kamala Das was first introduced to me in an anthology of contemporary Indian poetry that I had sought out because I didn’t know who contemporary Indian poets were. The poem was titled, aptly enough, ‘An Introduction.’ I read and promptly forgot all about it until I was in college and forced to take a paper called ‘Literatures of India 1.’
