Nigella Lawson, British domestic goddess and former book critic, seems to have offended her novelist friend Sophie Waugh in a move reminiscent of the beginnings the hallowed hissy fit between V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux.
OK, this is complicated
Writing By Heart
We’ve told you about The Atlantic’s By Heart series a few times before. Now, here’s a compendium of some of the series’ best advice on writing collected from the past year.
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“Exorbitant cost aside, if I can have the complete works of Shakespeare electronically beamed into my brain in under ten minutes, can I really say I’ve experienced Shakespeare? There is something organic about the experience of moving your eyeballs from left to right over an LCD screen in order to take in a sequence of marks the brain then must interpret as words, all the while using your hands to grip a lightweight, durable device.” Arguing for e-books over beaming text into your brain.
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On Remembering and Forgetting
“We have all heard the claim, ‘the victors write the textbooks.’ Among the many ways to unpack the phrase is this: that once upon a time history was bound to and relied on communally agreed upon facts. That is to say, there was not a culture of record the way there is now. There were not cameras and photographs capturing all human movement or digital archives where information was stored in ‘clouds.’ While our methods for remembering have evolved, the ethical question at the heart of recollection remains: how do we tell about the past and who gets to tell it?” Lindsey Drager writes for the Michigan Quarterly Review about memory and storytelling.
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Lynda Barry on the Painted Novel
“I came back to my studio and tried to think of the slowest possible way to write a novel, and the slowest way is with frosting.” The Paris Review interviews cartoonist Lynda Barry about writing novels with a paintbrush.
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Not what he, nor I, expected.
Teju Cole on partying, though very civilly, with V.S. Naipaul: “The combination of ego, tenderness, and sly provocation was typical.”
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Deep In Yakuza Territory
Photographer Christopher Jue journeyed with People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry into the four-story headquarters of the Kudō-kai, a Yakuza group headquartered on the Kyushu island of Japan. “My mental note to myself,” says Jue, “was ‘once I step foot into their property, anything can happen.’”
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Truly the kind of high society drama that belongs in Evelyn Waugh’s novels. Too funny.