Sleeping with John Updike by Julian Barnes

February 2nd, 2010 books, elsewhere

Resentment, jealousy, dishonesty simmers along (for 40 years?). Nothing boils over in this story of two women on a train on the way home. Found here on guardian books.

“They liked that story of yours about Graham Greene.”
“They usually do,” Jane replied with a slight air of complacency.
“I’ve always meant to ask you, is it true?”
“You know, I never worry about that any more. It fills a slot.”

More on Supernatural

January 11th, 2010 elsewhere, screen

I love this long post about Sam Winchester (the character).

“When The Levee Breaks” is another example — we had Sam’s version of events, for about twenty minutes. However, it wasn’t so much Sam as Sam’s sub-conscious (Sam’s brain and body were going through detox) experiencing wild withdrawal symptoms. Sam wasn’t himself; he was too busy conjuring his biggest fears to both absolve and accuse himself before taking on the role of judge, jury and executioner, again for himself. We learned about what Sam feared the most; but little was uttered about exactly WHY Sam was convinced drinking demon blood to go after Lillith (to save the world) was not only an option, but the only option.

It is why I fear showing “The End” while leaving Sam’s motivations –and entire experience– for later will only set up a disappointing and/or anti-climatic explanation that will not satisfy or even explain Sam’s troubled thinking to us or to Dean. It could be a gross disservice to a complex character. I’m not spoiled, and I absolutely don’t wish to be; but future titles give me hope we will see more of Sam from the inside when season 5 resumes.

Convention videos! Woohoo! Big plus: Misha Collins is extremely entertaining – hilarious!

Painting from life?

December 31st, 2009 elsewhere, radio

Listening to Van Gogh: Seeing Red on BBC it occurred to me how different his paintings were to his life. Van Gogh lived an isolated life and his intense relationships with Theo and Gaugin hinted of loneliness yet his art was not lonely. They were complete and happy to me.

Hopper who was not lonely, had friends and a supportive wife in Jo knew loneliness so well.

Barbara Novak tells a story about a party she and O’Doherty threw in the Sixties, towards the end of the Hoppers’ lives. Edward and Jo were the first to arrive. They sat down next to each other on a settee, and as the other guests – many of whom were the most successful artists of that new generation – piled in, they thought the Hoppers seemed happy and left them alone. Halfway through the party Novak turned to look at them and saw that a large empty space had been left around the Hoppers’ sofa. It was an image straight out of one of his paintings: even in a crowded room, they radiated isolation – together.

‘We don’t know what she died of,’ Novak says when I ask about Jo. ‘I think she died for lack of him. And,’ she adds, ‘he would have died for lack of her. It really was a folie à deux.’

From here

Effect Enid Blyton had on from former British colonies

December 29th, 2009 elsewhere

Could it be Blyton’s fault that I’m always tweeting about food? The children in Enid Blyton were always eating delicious spreads – whether at tea, supper or at midnight: ham, boiled eggs, tongue sandwiches, fruitcake, pound cake, tea,  scones and jam, muffins with so much butter they run down your chins, apples, treacle (sounds absolutely delicious), eclairs, ginger buns, ginger ale, biscuits, jellies, eggs, bacon, milk, fresh bread. She could make boiled egg and sardines sound delicious. So if I had not read Blyton when I was a child, I wouldn’t be obsessed about food, I wouldn’t have the problem of love handles and I won’t be self-conscious about being in a sari for J’s wedding.

On The Psychology of Social Status

December 28th, 2009 elsewhere

A report found on SciAm talks about gaining better social standing makes the brain go mmmmm extends the topic further in another report (also found on SciAm) on the protection of social standing.

Henry took on the traditional Culture of Honor hypothesis to suggest instead that differences between herding and farming cultures in violence actually stem from differences in status. His theory is based on a considerable psychological literature demonstrating that individuals from low-status groups (e.g. ethnic minorities) tend to engage in more vigilant psychological self-protection than those from high-status groups. Low-status people are much more sensitive to being socially rejected and are more inclined to monitor their environment for threats. Because of this vigilance toward protecting their sense of self-worth, low-status individuals are quicker to respond violently to personal threats and insults.

The interesting bit about this article is that it includes a short mention of another study where it is found that generous and helpful behaviour improves social status – that is, the aggressive behaviour employed by persons trying to protect their status is not a successful strategy.

Why is this strategy pursued continually if it is not effective? One answer is that the aggression is innate – it becomes an expression of persons being protective of their statuses, so the aggressive behaviour isn’t a strategy, it is an outlet. Within the a particular status group, there will be persons who can, through generous and helpful behaviour, rise to the top of the group. Social status is tied closely to economic status so jumping status group could be hard without the money part. Even with the money, jumping status group is probably rather difficult.

Peter Carey’s Post-Event Pep Talk

December 2nd, 2009 elsewhere

This is Peter Carey’s pep talk for nanowrimo (not yet on the site)

Dear Writer,

Writing is the easiest thing in the world. Anyone can do it. It’s like hitting a tennis ball against a wall. It’s like swimming. Anyone can learn. You don’t have to be the best. You don’t need to compete in anything. On the other hand, you may aspire to be a celebrated star.
Like swimming, like playing tennis, there are people writing at all levels. If you just want to amuse yourself writing the weekends, just keep on keeping on. If you want to bash out a novel, you need no more advice than to keep on keeping on.

But if you dream of making something original and beautiful and true, if you imagine seeing your book reviewed, or in the window of a book store, you’re in the same position as the ambitious swimmer—you’ve got a lot of training to do, a lot of muscles to build, a lot of habits to start establishing right now, today.

If you know what these good writing habits are, there’s nothing more I can give you. Perhaps you know what I’m going to tell you—you have to write regularly, every day. You have to treat this as the single most important part of your life. You do not need anything as fancy as inspiration, just this steady habit of writing regularly even when you’re sick or sad or dull. Nothing must stop you, not even your beloved children. If you have kids you do what Toni Morrison did—write in the hours before they wake. If you wish to be a like the champion who swims for four hours every day of the year, you will need extraordinary will. You either have this or you don’t, but you won’t know unless you try .

Let’s say you (quietly, secretly) want to be a genius. Then you must teach yourself to be self-critical. Trust me—your own uncertain opinions are worth one hundred times more than the judgments of your friends. Your friends love you and are may be very smart. But they cannot imagine what you have not yet imagined. So don’t show them stuff you fear may not be right.

If you feel at all unhappy with your work, there is a good reason for it. Trust your judgment. Write the draft again, and again. This is the strength you must build—to work alone, in solitude, and write and rewrite and rewrite. Even when you finally succeed in making the original work you wished, you will still live with doubt and uncertainty. All writers learn to live with this. In this way you and I feel exactly the same about our work today.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you’ll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you’ll have to do that too.

That is the first half of the good habits you must develop.

Here’s the second half.

First, turn off your television. The television is your enemy. It will stop you doing what you wish to do. If you wish to watch TV, you do not want to be a serious writer, which is fine.
But if you do pull that plug you’ve just created time for that exercise which is going to build up your writing muscles like nothing else. It’s called reading. Perhaps you are already reading good books for several hours a day, in which case you don’t need me to preach at you. Forgive me. I only mention this because I have met an extraordinary number of beginners who don’t think they need to read anything too much.

I don’t doubt these people enjoy their writing, and perhaps they will even get to publish something. But you can not play the top game without reading every day. There are so many extraordinary books waiting for you, some writing by living writers, the majority by those a long time dead. This is not because writers used to be better than they are now, but because a lot of generations have come before us and we would be crazy not to know what miracles they achieved.

Some of the great books are about people with lives just like you. Some will have characters you can ‘identify’ with, but some of the very greatest will tell stories you could never have imagined, were written in languages you cannot speak, and tell the stories of people like none we have ever known.

Now you’ve killed the TV, you should invest in a very good dictionary.

I know it is a major drag to stop reading and look up a word in a dictionary, but it is less of a drag than continuing to read not knowing what the story really means. No-one wants to do it. I never want to do it, but it is always worth the trouble. In my own case I often write the new word down, not because I am stupid, but because it helps me remember it.

So what books should you read if your greatest aim is to lift your game?

Clearly “Goose Bumps” is not going to help you in your ambitions, but where to start, where to continue the adventure you’re already on?

I’d suggest a wonderful new book by Francine Prose, “Reading Like a Writer.”

Go buy this now. You may already be a disciplined, talented original writer but you will not be sorry to read this for two hours tomorrow.

- Peter Carey

Writing Longhand

November 23rd, 2009 elsewhereTags: Pens

Found a link to “How to Write a Great Novel” on FPN (in which the article talks about a writer’s habits and not how a great novel is written.)

- Amitav Ghosh (”He insists black ink Pelikan pens are the best, and buys white, lined paper from a French manufacturer.”)
- Kazuo Ishiguro does a first draft by hand
- Michael Ondaatje’s writes in a 8½-by-11-inch Muji brand lined notebooks.

From Mike Shea’s site
- Stephen King (”Stephen King wrote Dreamcatcher all in longhand using a Waterman pen: “This book was written with the world’s finest word processor, a Waterman cartridge fountain pen.”)
- Neal Stephenson does it (”The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was written by hand on 100% cotton paper using three different fountain pens: a Waterman Gentleman, a Rotring, and a Jorg Hysek.”)
- Neil Gaiman does it (”I’m writing my novel with two different fountain pens (a Lamy 2000, and a regular Lamy) filled with two different coloured inks (a greenish one and a reddish one), and I’m alternating pens each day, which means I can see at a glance how much writing I’ve actually done that day, or that week.)

I started googling the names on my best-love shelf and “longhand”:

- Graham Greene (”My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.”)
- John Irving, (”I write all my first drafts in long hand because you can only write so fast in longhand.”)
- Kurt Vonnegut (”Kurt Vonnegut, who always used a yellow legal pad to write his manuscripts longhand, and turned it in that way.”)
Margaret Atwood does her first draft in longhand.
RK Narayan (”Sometimes he wrote with a typewriter, sometimes with paper and pen, cooking his own food on a hot plate in the hotel room every day.”)
Umberto Eco does in pen and computer

Peter Carey is the only person on my list who writes on a Mac.

Into thin air

October 21st, 2009 elsewhere

I can picture them, Zelda 28, Scott 32, sitting down with in the dining room of a HDB 4 room flat with contemporary interiors puzzling over an excel spreadsheet showing
the monthly household budget while the Indonesian maid turns the kitchen light off to go to bed.

At year’s end he was 100 percent over his $18,000 budget, having spent $36,000. How had he spent $36,000? Like others who try to live by a budget, Fitzgerald discovered that a lot of money had definitely been spent but didn’t fall into any category that budgets provide—there is “leakage.” Of course, in his case, there was more leakage than is customary. Fitzgerald and Zelda prepared what they thought was a complete record of what they had spent running the household—it came to $1,600 a month. Then they added what they had spent on pleasure, trips to New York, the theater, and so on; that came to $400 a month. Together that totaled $2,000, but Fitzgerald knew he’d spent $3,000. Fitzgerald asked, “You don’t mean to say that every month we lose $1,000?” It was impossible. “People don’t lose $12,000 in a year, it’s just missing.” Somehow a “mysterious third of our income had vanished into thin air.”

They would both go quiet with suspicion that the other was keeping 私房钱.

Justice@Harvard

October 18th, 2009 elsewhere

Listening to the Michael Sandel (this year’s Reith Lecturer) present Moral Reasoning (”Justice”) lecture series , I find it very tempting to say things like “your assumption that such and such is incorrect”, or reply that “we don’t really know, do we”, or to wildly vacillate between two positions. My initial response, which I had wanted to write was this: “Well, to have a position about something and to stick to it is the right thing to do – it makes decision making easier for individuals and society, but is it correct to stick to one’s morals without tempering it with compassion, empathy or common sense? But how far do we go to temper before we hash things up – or that it doesn’t matter because it is better to err on the side of kindness? If so, why have principles in the first place?” Then after some thought, I fall into writing another agreeable notion: “Of course, it’s all a balancing act – to have a middle ground that everyone agrees on.”

Listening to it twice more, I began to realise that the point about learning moral reasoning is to walk away from the path of least resistance, to strip away easy, agreeable, acceptable notions and perhaps *gulp* discover that I have some extremely disagreeable ideas. Rather worrisome thought there.

Aside: I was listening to The Philosopher’s Zone during one of my walks and the topic was about the ethics of ethicists. The interesting conclusion is that ethicists are not any better than a non-ethicist. So, it is as difficult for them as it is for ordinary human beings.

Anecdote: Alexander von Humboldt

September 28th, 2009 elsewhere

[W]hen the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt told a friend, a Parisian doctor, that he wanted to meet a certifiable lunatic, he was invited to the doctor’s home for supper. A few days later, Humboldt found himself placed at the dinner table between two men. One was polite, somewhat reserved, and didn’t go in for small talk. The other, dressed in ill-matched clothes, chattered away on every subject under the sun, gesticulating wildly, while making horrible faces. When the meal was over, Humboldt turned to his host. “I like your lunatic,” he whispered, indicating the talkative man. The host frowned. “But it’s the other one who’s the lunatic. The man you’re pointing to is Monsieur Honoré de Balzac.”

From “When Writers Speak“