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Category: Writing

Published February 15, 2014

James Wood On Not Going Home

Norfolk

In an essay for the London Review of Books, critic James Wood considers what is to be an immigrant and the desire to return home even though one can’t:

When I left this country 18 years ago, I didn’t know how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have done? It’s one of time’s lessons, and can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’, which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.

I’ve lived in Canada for over 10 years now and I don’t have a ‘home’ to return to either. My parents no longer live where I grew up. My friends are scattered across the UK. Yet I still get pangs of homesickness at surprising moments — walking in a Toronto park on a rare foggy morning, or the smell of urban wood smoke — and it is a strange experience to feel nostalgic about a place that no longer exists and never really quite did. I know the England (and Scotland) that I miss is a fictional place — one that exists at least in part in books, film, and music as well as my memories — even as I miss it.  It doesn’t mean my feelings aren’t real, it just means that I know I can’t go home again. And it’s all right.

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Published February 2, 2014

Miriam Markowitz: ‘Here Comes Everybody’

I am very late to this, but Miriam Markowitz’s article for The Nation ‘Here Comes Everybody‘, on women and book publishing in 2013, is well worth reading:

More nuanced fiction that isn’t of an obvious commercial genre—much of which is written by women—often brushes up against the literary. Publishers have various terms for the books that straddle this line. One of the ugliest and yet most useful is “upmarket.” The writers who may be lumped in this category are diverse in their output and their ambitions.

One commercial editor told me that many of her writers once cherished literary aspirations, but that they’re comfortable in the “upmarket” category, in part because it’s more lucrative. “If you cash in on the monetary market, you won’t get prestige. A lot of writers are OK with that.” Few writers have control over their covers, let alone the way their books are marketed, but if an agent or publisher says that this lacy dress or that whispery veil might entice more readers, who are they to object? Readers of literary fiction, especially women, will buy commercial titles as well. But the phenomenal popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey or the Twilight series or Nora Roberts among women who do not specifically identify as “readers” suggests that the reverse is less true. It’s hard to blame women writers for trying their hand at the commercial market when the literary one is so inhospitable.

For writers of work that is unambiguously ambitious, this choice is more difficult in that it may not be an option at all.

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Published January 21, 2014

Homo Sapiens Solitarius by Tom Gauld


Tom Gauld.

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Published December 17, 2013

Tom Gauld: Four Obstacles to Writing


Nothing in the bank. Yep.

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Published January 18, 2013

John Hodgman’s Advice for Writers

Author and former literary agent John Hodgman (That Is All) gives disarmingly sincere tips on how to make it as a writer:

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Published September 5, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Steven Heller shares a few pages from Effective Type-use for Advertising, self-published by Benjamin Sherbow in 1922, at Imprint.

Lost in the Shuffle — Brian Appleyard profiles the writer and critic Clive James:

James’s television work, brilliant as it was, has tended to blur his identity as one of the most influential writers of his time. At one level every newspaper is still packed with James wannabes, his prose tricks and tropes are imitated everywhere; at another level, the whole 1980s wave of new British fiction, especially Martin Amis, showed signs of having learnt from James. Most important was his invention of a way of writing seriously about popular culture.

Listed — Phil Patton on the age of the list, for the New York Times:

We’re living in the era of the list, maybe even its golden age. The Web click has led to the wholesale repackaging of information into lists, which can be complex and wonderful pieces of information architecture. Our technology has imperceptibly infected us with “list thinking.”

Lists are the simplest way to organize information. They are also a symptom of our short attention spans.

And finally…

Swallowing Up the Past — John Gray on J. G. Ballard and memory, for BBC Magazine:

Through a kind of inner alchemy, the Shanghai of his childhood became the London of his first major novel The Drowned World, also published in 1962.

Irreversibly altered by climate change so that it has become a region of tropical lagoons and advancing jungle, the city is almost unrecognisable, though the weed-choked streets remain intact in the depths of the lagoons and the upper floors of a few crumbling hotels continue to be habitable.

Like many of Ballard’s characters, the novel’s central protagonist – a biologist who shares many of Ballard’s own preoccupations with time and memory – doesn’t regret the passing of the old world. At the end of the novel he finds fulfilment in the sun-filled wilderness that is swallowing up the past.

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Published July 4, 2011

Paula Fox | Writers & Company

Paula Fox, storied author of Desperate Characters, talks about writing and her memoir Borrowed Finery with Eleanor Wachtel in this archive interview for Writers & Company from 2002:

CBC RADIO WRITERS & COMPANY: Paula Fox Interview 2002

The cover above, from Fox’s collection of stories and essays News From the World published earlier this year by W. W. Norton, was designed by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich.

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Published June 30, 2011

Jarvis Cocker on Writing

Jarvis Cocker talks to Faber Publishing Director Lee Brackstone about songwriting and the publication of Mother, Brother, Lover, his first collection of lyrics:

Mother, Brother, Lover will be published by Faber in October.

(via Largehearted Boy)

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Published March 17, 2011

Alex Ross | School of Life

In this short interview, Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker and author of The Rest is Noise and Listen to This, discusses music and music criticism:

Thanks to the chaps at We Made This for directing me to The School Life of video series.

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Published January 18, 2011

Intellectual Messiness

Embracing…messiness and understanding its contribution to the creative process is something that writers and creative types, artists, whatever have got to cultivate, have to learn to be comfortable with. Because it goes against a lot of our kind of instincts and training as kind of educated people.

Writer Malcolm Gladwell at The Big Think:

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Published December 13, 2010

Bring the Noise: Alex Ross Talks to Paul Morley

Paul Morley interviews fellow music critic Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise and Listen to This,  for The Guardian:

Morley’s post about critics, and meeting Alex Ross, is also worth reading:

I’ve always liked a critic who doesn’t think like anyone else. Someone who takes me so much by surprise with their opinions, approach and rigour that they themselves become a kind of artist. I like a critic who demonstrates that they deserve to evaluate and document the work and art of others by writing in such a way that the work makes more sense, sometimes only makes sense, because of what they write and why they write it. I loved critics, whether it was Kenneth Tynan, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Richard Meltzer, John Updike, Roland Barthes, Pauline Kael, Angela Carter or Lester Bangs, for the way they made it clear, with such evangelical poise, precision and purpose, that without the great critic, the world, and the worlds of those that made up the world, was never properly finished off.

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Published July 21, 2010

What Is There In Life If You Do Not Work?

A winsome post by William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, on work and writing for The American Scholar:

I’ve never defined myself as a writer, or, God forbid, an author. I’m a person–someone who goes to work every morning, like the plumber or the television repairman, and who goes home at the end of the day to think about other things. I can’t imagine not going to work as long as I can…

…It may seem perverse that I compare my writing to plumbing, an occupation not regarded as high-end. But to me all work is equally honorable, all crafts an astonishment when they are performed with skill and self-respect. Just as I go to work every day with my tools, which are words, the plumber arrives with his kit of wrenches and washers, and afterward the pipes have been so adroitly fitted together that they don’t leak. I don’t want any of my sentences to leak. The fact that someone can make water come out of a faucet on the 10th floor strikes me as a feat no less remarkable than the construction of a clear declarative sentence.

(via  Coudal)

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