May 2011
31 posts
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Silver Water by Amy Bloom →
one of One Story’s top 10 short stories of all time, and NO WONDER. Via @GrantaMag on Twitter.
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e-books are the way to go, publishers: Max Barry...
Thanks to Lisa Dempster, the Emerging Writers’ Festival director, for inviting me to First Words last night, where I heard Max Barry say in his keynote address that he has read more books he wants to read in the last two months on his e-reader than he had in the previous twelve.
The availability of e-books is something publishers should be embracing, instead of fearing their potential to...
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“Our time is a time of erasing the lines that divided things neatly. Today we...”
– Sister Corita Kent (via viafrank). Also see here.
I am particularly fond of the Immaculate Heart Art Department rules, which I’ve blogged elsewhere. I’ll put them up here as well in the next post…
“Does this mean that the written “voice” is never spontaneous and natural but...”
– Bad Comma : The New Yorker
Some rather nice, personal stuff on writing from the great Louis Menand at the end of his tough review of Lynne Truss’s famous book in 2004. Rediscovered by chance on my laptop. As you were.(Now fixed the typo, too. Phew.)
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sales: to go
as mentioned on Twitter earlier, if anyone in Melbourne would like to buy two or three tickets to the Soweto Gospel Choir’s matinee performance at the
Palais Theatre, St. Kilda
4 pm Saturday 28 May
please email me as quick as you can!!
I am happy to dispose of them for $30 each (cost $75).
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“At first it felt strange to be sitting in a large multi-layered building, with...”
– A Christchurch librarian reports on The Press/Christchurch session at the recent Auckland Writers and Readers festival. CCL has a fantastic blog and I read it often.
This one’s for Christchurch « Christchurch City Libraries Blog
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a belated pile of stuff #15
Pynchon offered to parachute into a book exhibition, then changed his mind. The Guardian reported on Phyllis Gebauer’s donation of signed books towards scholarships for a writers program in Los Angeles.
Woody Allen had five books he wanted to talk about, here.
Scott Esposito reported on Tim Parks’ NYRB essay on the impact of Jonathan Franzen.
Richard Nash has finally released Red...
“I started writing in a rather curious way. At the school I attended, the...”
– Great voices of science fiction | Books | The Guardian
Excerpts from five interviews with Asimov, Ballard, Douglas Adams, Arthur C Clarke and (oddly enough) Kurt Vonnegut.
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“New works by Ludwig Wittgenstein — original manuscripts of more than...”
– Daniel Silliman: Lost Wittgenstein work found
via Hi Spirits, Andrew Burke’s blog.
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Judge withdraws over Philip Roth's Booker win (and... →
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“Another slim-line elf returning from LOTR, is a local: New Zealand’s...”
– Ian McKellen | The Hobbit | Blog | 10 May 2011
As reported in The Guardian. HEH. But sadly, no Sam this time, to catch people if they try anything.
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Frank Chimero experiments with blog formats at a... →
viafrank:
I’ve always wanted to have a blog where I could share the things I like: items of timely interest and the different curiosities I’ve amassed in my personal files the past few years. These things really should be shared (in the true sense) because they are gifts. Many of them were given to me, and if there is a benefit to the idea of giving a digital gift, it is that each time it...
Tom Phillips: A Humument for your delectation →
thanks to @orwellski on Twitter for this fine link.
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Sound Advice: Online audio archives & repositories... →
so many audio records, so little time… an article from Freepint newsletter.
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Why do book reviewers insist on being so nice?... →
As Hilary McPhee noted last year at the Wheeler Centre, writers continue to learn, if they are reviewed.
In Prospect mag, Leo Benedictus asks for more reviews, not less, on the grounds that ‘…If a fairer literary culture is what we want, then we should embrace this slightly tougher one’.
Bad reviews will also make books better, in the end. I may regret saying this, but as a...
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Stumbling onto the art of the introduction: at the... →
(Found this a little while ago, a piece on a dazzling introduction by James Salter to a novel. I have just read Salter’s prose for the first time myself (Light Years) and can testify that as a master of elliptic prose, he’d be an excellent judge of what someone else is throwing out in their work. After a tough couple of weeks doing other things, it’s a bonus to find this in the...
Giving up the ghost - essay by Mark Mordue in The... →
Antigone Kefala spoke to Mark Mordue a few weeks ago, on the peculiar lack of involvement with death in Australian thinking and writing:
There is a lack of intensity here. People are not fully engaged with what they are writing. A lot of it is journalistic, I feel. But serious writing must have passion, must have a tenseness to it.
And we must not be ashamed of passion,” she says....
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What Defines a Meme? | Arts & Culture |... →
Thanks to GW at forestofwords, I have this TO READ:
The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment. “If you want to understand life,” Dawkins wrote, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about...
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books created with 'modest talents', says Ahlberg,...
“Ahlberg was once a very promising young children’s writer. Of course, today he is very old and semi-retired,” laughs Briggs. “Decades ago he was taken under the wing of the brilliant Janet Ahlberg, who had consented to become his wife in order to help his immigration status.
Janet created superb illustrations for ‘their’ picture books and Ahlberg added...
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Shapiro includes Schoenbaum of course, in this... →
From the compelling FiveBooks feed at The Browser, a recent recommendations discovery that I find very enjoyable indeed.
