Will Self on Melvyn Bragg: “I find it staggering that something like one in 30 of the adult population of Britain has a regular appetite for listening to a trio of academics discussing the Siege of Vienna, Mary Wollstonecraft or the possibility of a perfect vacuum — to mention just three recent programmes”. * An interview with Steve Strange. * The Helene Hegemann controversy. More here. * Kindle Armageddon. * “This author is beyond psychiatric help”. * The JG Ballard exhibition. More here. * More Kim Fowley rarities. * Ronald Sukenick video interview. * Bauhaus documentary. * Writers’ 10 rules for writing fiction. Geoff Dyer: “Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire”. Dyer again: “Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something”. Jonathan Franzen: “It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction”. David Hare: “The two most depressing words in the English language are ‘literary fiction’”. PD James: “Don’t just plan to write — write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style”. Michael Moorcock: “For a good melodrama study the famous ‘Lester Dent master plot formula’ which you can find online. It was written to show how to write a short story for the pulps, but can be adapted successfully for most stories of any length or genre”. Andrew Motion: “Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary”. Will Self: “The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement — if you can’t deal with this you needn’t apply”. Self again: “Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment“. Zadie Smith: “Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page”. More here. * Russian literary theory and the way Twitter is broken. * 10 of the best unfinished literary works. * Book swapping in Wimbledon. * Punk rock literati. * Edmund White on Patti Smith. * Short review of Wham! Bam! Story Slam! * Perversity Think Tank, the new book by Supervert. * Banksy’s film. * Andrei Platonov, the greatest Russian author you’ve never heard of. * Virgina Woolf on the radio (via @ElectricLit) * Blake Morrison on Reality Hunger. * 10 literary classics made better as comic books. * Are literary agents necessary? * Michael Kimball’s guest lecture series at HTMLGIANT. * Trailer for Jean-Luc Godard’s Socialisme (via @plumpesDenken) * Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. * Noam Chomsky remembers Howard Zinn. * Stuart Evers video. * A Kenneth Anger exhibition in Berlin. * Reviews of Justin Taylor’s excellent Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever. Interviews here and there. Oh, and another interesting review. * Ben Myers’s latest Message From the Country. * MTV’s launch in August 1981. * Early Japanese electronic museum. * Huw Nesbitt on Borges’s lost translations. * The New Faces mod photo exhibition. * Tom Waits’s tribute to the Ramones. * Descartes poisoned by a Catholic priest? * The benefits of smartphones for writers. * The meaning of social networking sites. * The most stupid action figures — ever. * Fox News turn anarchist manual into a bestseller.
First posted: Sunday, February 21st, 2010.
