February 2012
1 post
4 tags
“Sperm is very cheap, and womb space is very expensive; our reproductive...”
– This particular comment on the hebephilia debate, though witty is problematic and a reductionist view of sexuality.
When discussing evolutionary mating strategies, it’s not immediately clear that young males are incapable of providing. Isn’t it more likely that pre-civilisation males...
October 2011
2 posts
2 tags
What is wrong with a bad analogy?
Quoth Ben Archer,
You could make snide comparisons to see-ability in art and hear-ability in music, but I think the best analogy might be livability and architecture. Can a house be excellent if it is not also livable? If you find yourself stumbling on the stairs because they’re not big enough for your feet, or if you get wet when it rains because there are cleverly carved holes in the roof, I...
5 tags
You are mourning the wrong way
When a celebrity passes away, there is public mourning. In the case of a visionary who has had such a long-lasting and important impact as Steve Jobs, this mourning is even more widespread and deeply felt. * However, there is a tone to some of this mourning that strikes me as extremely distasteful, self-serving and insensitive.
Upon Steve Jobs passing, one hash-tag that was continuously...
September 2011
3 posts
4 tags
“But the specter of the slut is inhibiting even in a relatively permissive...”
– Elaine Blair’s review of Nicholson Baker’s “House of Holes”
4 tags
“Certainly the very mixed quality of the books on the long- and short-lists for...”
– Paul Bowes in a Not The Booker discussion of Chris Morton’s debut novel, “English Slacker”.
4 tags
On Sloppy Writing: Lev Grossman's "The Magicians"
Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”, published in 2009 and “The Magician King”, published two years later, are best-sellers and critically acclaimed. Grossman is an alumnus of Harvard and Yale. He’s a senior writer and book critic for TIME. With all those credentials, it’s natural to expect that his writing would be nothing short of virtuosic. The first...
July 2011
1 post
8 tags
The tyranny of Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The Transformers franchise and its impresario Michael Bay have a dual gift: a way of making tremendous amounts of money, and a way of infuriating large portions of the population. The Transformers films manage to be so abhorrent that they spark analysis and criticism of such a high calibre that the existence of the films seems justified, if only as cultural objects to be critiqued. These movies...
March 2011
1 post
3 tags
“Doctor, I ask you, who was it that made the suggestion in the first place? Since...”
– Philip Roth, “Portnoy’s Complaint”. p. 49.
February 2011
2 posts
4 tags
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The...”
– D.H. Lawrence, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. p. 1.
5 tags
January 2011
1 post
3 tags
What to read in 2011
Why
The first task of 2011 is to draw up my reading schedule for the year. I encourage everyone, including casual readers and writers, to do the same. The most important thing is to always have something to read close at hand; to never find yourself wasting time wondering “what on earth will I read next?”
Planning early ensures that you can keep the momentum and discipline going...
December 2010
3 posts
3 tags
“America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked...”
– James Ellroy. “American Tabloid”. Forward.
3 tags
Strether meets Gloriani
Henry James is notorious for having produced very difficult fiction. His only rival in this regard is the other James, namely, Joyce. They use English in ways that make it seem alien. After several readings —which are demanded and assumed— it emerges that the ostensible difficulty is but a side-effect of the supreme beauty of their language.
The golden rule of writing fiction is...
5 tags
Scott Pilgrim and the disdain for Generation Y
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a fascinating film but it performed relatively poorly at the Box Office. I find that particularly strange especially because another film which I consider similar in important ways, performed an order of magnitude better. Both films have roots deep in the Animé tradition. Scott Pilgrim respectfully acknowledges it and does its best to transcribe it to screen but...
November 2010
1 post
6 tags
Kanye West dumbs down Bon Iver's "Woods"
Kanye West has released a tremendous amount of high quality material this year. His G.O.O.D Fridays series has irreversibly changed the world of hip-hop and set the bar so high that it is unlikely anyone else will attempt to surpass it; better to ignore the pyramid dominating the horizon and not draw attention to the inadequacy of one’s own work.
The most emotive bit of his work is...
October 2010
4 posts
4 tags
Can a man write from a woman's perspective?
In a recent article, Maryann Johanson asserts that “throughout Western art, from the Renaissance painters through modern film, television, advertising, video-games, and comic books, there is an unspoken assumption underlying the vast majority of the work that the viewer/reader/consumer/player is male and heterosexual, because the creators have been and are, in the vast majority, male and...
1 tag
The tyranny of present tense
Philip Pullman1 believes that the usage of present-tense
narrative is increasing, and that the increase is an unfortunate
development. If I were to take a sample of my own work and the work
I’ve seen published in recent years, I would have to agree.
It is not surprising that a first-person, present-tense style is
increasingly common. The past decade has seen an explosion of Reality
TV...
1 tag
Movie review: How to train your dragon
Today, over lunch, I decided to preview “How to train your dragon” so that I could decide whether to watch it over the weekend. I usually preview a movie for ten or fifteen minutes randomly picking two or three scenes in a bid to get an impression of the overarching themes and delivery.
I ended up extending my lunch by one hour and watching the entire movie.
I think the movie is...
1 tag
How much of life do I need to experience in order...
I often worry that I haven’t lived enough and seen enough to be able to competently write a novel of appreciable depth. I also worry that I have lived too sheltered an existence to be able to understand the human condition and render it on paper with any degree of fidelity.
Then I remember that Jane Austen managed to write beautiful pieces of literature that were both inspired and...
September 2010
3 posts
2 tags
The novel that is going nowhere.
Learning to write a novel
The novel will not write itself. It would be nice if it could and
would. But it can’t and won’t. That is the sordid truth. My
counsellor instructs me that speaking or writing the facts of my chosen
life will somehow aid in the reconciliation of said realities. But at
the end of this paragraph, I feel exactly the same as I did when I
began it.
...
3 tags
Close writing demands close reading
When I read Faulkner, Roth and Nabokov one of the things that becomes
apparent is the huge gap, both intellectual and technical between
myself and those authors.
Their vocabulary seems an order of magnitude larger than mine, and I
notice the huge variety of words they draw upon in order to capture
every nuance of the phenomena they attempt to describe. Where I
would describe the impressions...
4 tags
Short story: Detective Hussein's Promotion
Below is a short story I wrote over a year ago after elections in Kenya led to a great deal of violence, and the death of an opposition politician that seemed typical of numerous untimely deaths of controversial politicians in the past.
Reading this last night, I realised just how far I have yet to go before the quality of my writing is something I can be proud of.
...
March 2010
1 post
2 tags
Why the classics are so important (pt. 1)
In recent years, I have noticed a complete shift in my reading habits away from the Modern Novel to The Classics. This is actually less a shift and more a return, after all, I grew up in a household filled with the classics.
My father devoted one of the largest rooms in the house to storing them. I remember the day he came to the house with our pick-up truck stacked high with cartons. We...
January 2010
1 post
3 tags
Writer's Block: The Holiday Malaise
The holiday period bracketed by the first day of Christmas
and the New Year is the worst time of the year for me. For
the past decade, I have spent all that time alone. Never
before has it been a problem but now I find myself feeling
genuinely lonely and trapped in a hovel with only my
flagging intellectual powers to keep me company.
I’m not sure when my brain started dying and I write...
December 2009
1 post
1 tag
The Writer's Duty Pt. 2
All men are not created equal. I’ve been conscious of this
fact since the day I could think. The variance in condition
or environment one is birthed into is of least importance:
One may be born rich or poor, sickly or vigorous, in a
stable family or in chaos but these seem to be irrelevant in
the long run. We all have to contend with the burden of our
own problems and personal histories...