The Monday Morning Review (May 29, 2006)
The temperatures this week ranged from 26 through 29 degrees Celsius. I turned on the air-conditioning, installed only last September.
Panos’s book order arrived in the post. He’ll be reading the following books in this order:
1. Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse
2. Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister
3. Patricia Highsmith’s The Animal-Lover’s […]

 
A review of the novel in the manner of the novel
In my hands, you have to imagine how it feels, this copy of Roger Morris’s Taking Comfort. It all starts with how it feels in my hands.
It’s a hardcover edition of the novel. I always appreciate hardback editions and I’m more willing than most to […]

The Dictionary.com Word of the Day for Thursday, May 18, 2006 was:
palimpsest \PAL-imp-sest\,
noun: 1. A manuscript, usually of papyrus or parchment, on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible.
2. An object or place whose older layers or aspects are apparent beneath its surface.
Palimpsest is from […]

There was no response to my email (dated 18th April) from Mustafa Ertek, the president of the Refik Saydam Hygiene Center in Turkey responsible for cutting horses’ throats for blood. I posted a letter.

I sprayed the rose bushes with some terrible insecticide to save them. But killed an entire ecosystem living on them.
Panos […]

I’ve been thinking about the condition of my life. Its absurdity. On the one hand, I take things so seriously; I take myself seriously. I believe I am a writer, I create this website, with its fresh and optimistic colour and design, and I make polite postings on matters I find serious. I think about […]

Yesterday, Martyn was talking about happiness. Today, I remember that I’m asking myself questions so as to populate my R.A.Q. page. And in that hazy place I call my mind comes a memory of a story by my friend Tom Saunders. The story, “Aerobatics,” is found in his brilliant collection, Brother, What Strange Place Is […]

Of all the critique and debate I’ve read on Kaavya Viswanathan this NY Times Op-Ed piece has to be the cleverest and most to the point. I found it while visiting Bookslut yesterday. John Kenney is being interviewed by Larry King about his new bestselling novel “The Great Gatsby.”
MR. KING Are there similarities between your […]

I’ve started asking myself questions for my R.A.Q page. I asked myself about my earliest writing memory. Here it is:
1. What is your earliest writing memory?
I remember back to first or second class. My teacher, she asked us to write a story. I selected my narrator, she was a little Australian girl, a real Australian, […]

Found this mp3 featuring Henry Miller talking about writing and the writer. [Download the 10.3MB Mp3 here]
Miller talks about starting to write out of desperation because he wasn’t good at anything else. He started late - an interviewer interjects with ‘that is so encouraging’ and he replies that ‘there is no age or time. The […]