A Brief Delay

Many apologies, folks. The next edition will be a couple of days later in arriving than usual - let’s say Wednesday. Just a few technical hitches!

Third Edition: Telling It Like It Is

One of the many things I appreciate about bloggers is the way that they use their voice and their opinions for the enlightenment and entertainment of the community. The mainstream media seems to indulge a tendency to become either shrieky and hysterical or else bullying and cynical these days, and that’s not what I want to read. Bloggers give me hope that you can write something based on opinion or experience and do so in an intelligent and reflective manner, or else with coruscating humour.

The focus of this issue is not on creative writing, but I couldn’t resist beginning with a poem. Becoming Amethyst wrote such a delightfully dark, tender and sexy one about desire, which I felt was a topic to which we could all relate, one way or another.

Next up is Natalia Antonova’s wonderful tribute to two actors we tragically lost this week. No prurient postmortems, no prying, no sentimentality here; instead a beautifully written meditation on what these celebrities mean in our lives.

Think Buddha is a new blog to me, but I very much appreciated the author’s accessible style and profound understanding of what we might call the philosophy of living. In this post he considers Epicureans and Stoics and thinks about what we are doing when we read their doctrines. I’m on tenterhooks now to find out how his class got on with deprivation.

I’m always on the lookout for fantastic book reviews, and the winner for real class this fortnight had to be the formidable Mark Thwaite, who is such a powerful force in literary blogging on the net. In this post he combines an excellent review with his intriguing thoughts on the visibility of the author’s hand in the writing.

A wonderful new, distinctive voice I’ve recently been following is Jew Eat Yet?, another blogger who manages to sustain an impressive level of quality in his posts. I urge you to visit the site as I had a hard time choosing which one to crosspost here. But in the end I went for his account of watching two post-apocalyptic cinematic blockbusters. I just loved it; enough said.

The Existence Machine is another blog that is stunning in its wisdom and intelligence. Another hard choice for me, but this time I went with a complex, detailed meditation on the art of writing via the author’s thoughts on Proust. I thought it was worthy of Proust himself.

If you like your humour black and bitter you’ll love The airport diaries, a scathingly hilarious account of being an ex-cog in the commercial wheel. If Sisyphus had had a sense of humour and access to a keyboard, he might have written like this.

Finally, one of my favourite blogs, The Public, The Private and Everything In Between, on the joys and despairs of sitting around in airport lounges waiting for delayed flights. This is one blogger who manages to write just so delectably well on the everyday, and is brilliant at transforming the ordinary occasions of life into something extraordinary.

I hope you enjoy the blogging feast on offer. Please, please do send in further suggestions for blogs and posts. I can’t do this without your continued and much valued support.

Turning

From Becoming Amethyst

If he’d have stolen a kiss, what
would’ve happened next? If he’d

leant in hard and pressed against
my heart-shaped mouth, his tongue

Renfro, Ledger, It’s Been Nice

From Natalia Antonova 

I was in the middle of writing Heath Ledger’s obit when I realized that Brad Renfro died last week. Somehow, I had missed the news of Renfro’s death. Two of my teenage crushes gone in one fell swoop. Bizarrely, I had their pictures tacked up side-by-side on my closet door at one point.

My bedroom in Charlotte went through many changes, but I can still picture certain details clearly: the garland of lights woven around the windows, the enormous Beatles poster, the incense sticks in the green glow of the alarm clock radio on top of the new-yet-rickety dresser, and, at one point, two of the Western world’s most gifted actors staring down onto my rather un-fancy little bed. Neither one smiling.

Comments (1)

Philosophy and Practice

Filed under: Essay, Writing — litlove @ 12:05 pm

From Think Buddha

The other day I was at the university attending a seminar on practical philosophy. The seminar was being led with considerable verve and gusto by Italian philosopher Franco Volpi, who was talking about practical philosophy, drawing on Foucault’s book The Hermeneutics of the Subject, a book I haven’t yet had the chance to read.

The main thesis in the talk was that there has been a tendency in the Western philosophical tradition to conflate what Foucault call the “care of the self” – the various practices that make up much of Hellenistic philosophy, for example Stoicism – with knowledge of the self – the Socratic imperative. As a result philosophy has become impoverished.

Comments (0)

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it”

Filed under: Review, Writing — litlove @ 12:04 pm

From ReadySteadyBook 

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it”: some thoughts on The Tartar Steppe

Elizabeth A. Brown reviews Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Good Writing over at csmonitor.com. Brown says, Leonard wants the writer to be invisible: “Good writing is not about the writer (and the way he sounds or the size of her vocabulary), but about the story.”

Not for me.

Comments (0)

War on Terror

Filed under: Essay, Writing — litlove @ 12:03 pm

From Jew Eat Yet? 

Why do we humans go out of our way to terrorize ourselves? Why do we love watching our adrenaline levels shoot through the roof? Being the movie snob that I am, I tend to avoid most major blockbusters and head straight for the smaller independent or foreign films. But Kendall and I have been on a mainstream kick lately. In the past few weeks, we saw not one but two mega-popular post-apocalyptic films set in New York, “I Am Legend” and “Cloverfield.”

God, I’m exhausted.

Comments (0)

Proust and the Problems of Writing

Filed under: Essay, Writing — litlove @ 12:02 pm

From The Existence Machine

A little over a year ago, I wrote about the impulse to write, and those thought processes that have prevented me from writing. I wrote about the impossibility of saying anything new. If I wasn’t going to say anything new, the thinking went, why would I bother to write at all? For—to repeat myself—a great many things have already been written about a great many topics. Later, I wrote about my sense of enveloping chaos when I look on the various forms available to the fiction writer. How does one choose the correct form? What makes a form “correct”? How does a writer make these kinds of decisions?

Comments (0)

In a Uniform Manner

Filed under: Essay, Humour, Writing — litlove @ 12:01 pm

From The airport diaries 

My cries affirming my liberty were premature. The department store has many grasping tentacles it seems, and they are spurting their acrid slime all over my soul. I was “reminded” that my final pay cheque would be held back if I didn’t return my uniform, which is fair enough, but it meant venturing out to that barren place to deposit my washed, tumble dried/electrified polyester slave clothes. It speaks volumes that the only rebellion I could make was not to iron the uniform before stuffing it into a plastic bag. It crackled angrily at me and I smothered the urge to drown it in a canal, with bricks as ballast.

Comments (0)

« Previous Page — Next Page »