Writing
Texts
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Writers and their Professions
The compulsion to write is a mysterious one. After all, there’s something suspect, something unattractive and childish about wanting to impose your words on others, lashing your every passing sensation to the alphabet. The invitation to read one’s particular arrangement of words, therefore, always comes circumscribed, with excessively humble titles and self-lacerating prefaces. In more... -
“I will come back and I will be millions”
Already in 1936 Walter Benjamin could write that even the existence of Letters to the Editor had changed the whole game. Things have certainly become more pronounced since then and now almost everyone in a developed country, and many in not-so-developed ones have access to the means of production of publication in the strongest sense. True, not everyone has access to the big budgets that... -
Procrastination
In 1962, Donald Knuth accepted a commission to write a book about compiler design. When he began to tackle his subject he realised that before he could write his book, a deeper analysis of the basic concepts of computer programming was required. He started writing what soon became a twelve volume book. Each volume was initially conceived as a chapter until he realised that he had miscalculated... -
Text 234
The language of wine description struggles with différance, particularly with the deferral part. We are often told that a particular wine has hints of lemon, an after-taste of chocolate. The obvious question is, But which lemon? Which chocolate? Are we talking a ripe Sicilian . Columbian or Brazilian? Eager to emphasise the complexity of the wine palate, wine tasters necessarily oversimplify...
Citations
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The use of voice-overs by actors or comedians from working-class backgrounds not only obfuscates the class origins of those making the programme; it also bolsters the programme’s claims to authenticity.
“Classless broadcasting: Benefits Street | New Humanist” at newhumanist.org.uk -
In many respects, post-reality TV documentary—like reality TV before it—goes out of its way to conceal the class differences between those who are making the programmes and those who feature in them. Like tabloid...
“Classless broadcasting: Benefits Street | New Humanist” at newhumanist.org.uk -
It seems to me that Hughes wanted to be a writer more than he wanted to write; the difference isn’t always obvious, even to the person doing the wanting, and talent, which you feel ought to be a clue, may be a red herring.
“On Putting Things Off” at www.lrb.co.uk -
Clean Reader—“the only e-reader that gives you the power to hide swear words”—sells more than a million ebooks from its online book store. Its app allows users to search the text, and “put a non-transparent “highlight””...
“Books without swearwords? There’s an app for that” at www.theguardian.com -
But when the country that designed globalisation, imposed it and benefited from it most votes against it, you have to consider the possibility that it is going to end, and suddenly. If so, you also have to consider a...
“The Soviet Union collapsed overnight. Don’t assume western democracy will last for ever | Paul Mason” at www.theguardian.com -
it shouldn’t surprise us that this is the convulsive form taken by the literary novel during its senescence; some of the same factors implicated in its extinction are also responsible for the rise of the creative writing...
“The novel is dead (this time it’s for real)" at www.theguardian.com -
The creative writing programmes burgeoning throughout our universities are exactly this; another way of looking at them is that they’re a self-perpetuating and self-financing literary set-aside scheme purpose built to...
“The novel is dead (this time it’s for real)" at www.theguardian.com -
the toppling of solitary and silent reading as the most powerful and important medium were already waiting in the wings while Sassoon, Graves and Rosenberg dipped their pens in their dugouts.
“The novel is dead (this time it’s for real)" at www.theguardian.com -
unlike Ernest Hemingway or F Scott Fitzgerald, the novel has also had a second life. The form should have been laid to rest at about the time of Finnegans Wake, but in fact it has continued to stalk the corridors of our minds...
“The novel is dead (this time it’s for real)" at www.theguardian.com -
Writers who aim at effect by describing possible novels but never write them also impress me less these days. Borges, the arch-indexer of synopses, may have kicked this ball into play, but when Calvino’s character Silas...
“David Mitchell rereads Italo Calvino” at www.theguardian.com -
Levine announced to the world that he was cancelling all his classes to lock himself away for three months in 1973 to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Eight hours a day. No remission. He emerged, as he put it, “giddy” but convinced...
“My top 10 unfinishable novels” at www.theguardian.com -
Levine announced to the world that he was cancelling all his classes to lock himself away for three months in 1973 to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Eight hours a day. No remission. He emerged, as he put it, “giddy” but convinced...
“My top 10 unfinishable novels” at www.theguardian.com -
INTERVIEWER Do you write down your dreams? FERRANTE The rare times that I seem to remember them, yes. I’ve done it since I was a girl. It’s an exercise that I would recommend to everyone. To subject a dream experience to the...
“Paris Review—Art of Fiction No. 228 Elena Ferrante” at www.theparisreview.org -
Compared to other contemporary programming languages, Ruby does sometimes look old-fashioned. But it’s important to keep in mind that “never be too innovative” is also a key to creating beautiful code.”
Yukihiro Matsumoto in Beatiful Code p. 480 -
Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling says: “The future composts the past.” There’s even a law to describe this, Riepl’s Law—which says “new, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes...
“Reports of blogging’s death have been greatly exaggerated” in www.guardian.co.uk
Links
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Writing from the Oulipo
Image: Killoffer, “La Manif,” 2009, Graphite on Paper48 x 63 cm, Courtesy of Galerie Anne Barrault
- www.wordswithoutborders.org
- Fiction bySakumi Tayama
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Robert Hanks
other people talking about procrastination, I find myself getting proprietorial: surely their fleeting pauses are as nothing to mine. Procrastination is the main way I express anxiety and depression, if I can use these medicalised, dignifying terms. It’s franker to say that I put things off because much of the time I’m frightened and sad (too frightened and sad for procrastination to be enough of an outlet: I also have an array of psychosomatic symptoms: rashes, headaches and stomach disorders—not that the line between procrastination and illness is necessarily sharp, if it’s there at all). I can remember putting off projects at primary school—chronically illegible handwriting as much as anything, I think—and a reluctance to put things down on paper dogged me through school and university; learning to type didn’t stop it pursuing me into a career in newspapers, an industry helpfully rife with deadlines and consequences, which meant that I was always forced to produce something in the end.
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Stefan Collini
the American journal n+1 was launched in 2004, an editorial in the first number lamented the state of contemporary culture. We are living, it said, at “a time when serious writing about culture has become the exclusive province of bullies, reactionaries and Englishmen.” The prominence of a number of male English writers in the leading US organs of opinion had been remarked elsewhere, but here that fact was turned, with an engaging exaggeration that became one of the journal’s hallmarks, into a symptom of wider cultural debility. Examined at all closely, the indictment starts to creak: if the writing is by “bullies” and “reactionaries” can it really be judged “serious”?
- www.lrb.co.uk
- Against Everything On Dishonest Times
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The Personal Essay Economy Offers Fewer Rewards for Black Women
Writing a personal essay can be a full-body activity, replete with tremors and tears and physical aches. Recollection is strenuous. Recreating a scene can be…
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In partial defence of an unloved grammatical tool
PITY the passive voice. No feature of the grammar of English has such a bad reputation. Style guides, including that of The Economist, as well as usage books like the celebrated American “Elements of Style”, warn writers off the passive, and automated grammar-checkers often suggest that passive clauses be redrafted. There are just two problems with this advice.
- www.economist.com
- The Economist
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Permission to Footnote
In print and online today
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Big advances are often pure fiction
Saturday 24 June 2000 01.47 BST
- www.guardian.co.uk
- Mark Lawson