The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about. At that moment he’s alive and you leave it to him.
-Graham Greene
Do youse want to be a writer? Write as if you were drowning. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients ... Write Till You Drop
Literature & Art Across Frontiers: So Many Books: Forgotten moments in the history of reading
City Journal is running a fascinating piece by Jonathan Rose on the role the classics have historically played in the lives of working people. Will Crooks (b. 1852), a cooper living in extreme poverty in East London, once spent tuppence on a secondhand Iliad, and was dazzled:
What a revelation it was to me! Pictures of romance and beauty I had never dreamed of suddenly opened up before my eyes. I was transported from the East End to an enchanted land. It was a rare luxury for a working lad like me just home from work to find myself suddenly among the heroes and nymphs of ancient Greece." Nancy Sharman (b. 1925) recalled that her mother, a Southampton charwoman, had no time to read until her last illness, at age 54. Then she devoured the complete works of Shakespeare, and "mentioned pointedly to me that if anything should happen to her, she wished to donate the cornea of her eyes to enable some other unfortunate to read.
• The Classics in the Slums [Another vote for homeschooling ; We're Your Key to the Media Dragons]
• · The Lost Night is after all a true story about an unsolved murder, and friends and family will undoubtedly learn more than they ever cared to know about, for instance, my past sex life. Disclaimer: It’s not all that graphic, in case you’re titillated We thought you were pure, we thought you were different. We were wrong ...
• · · A Picture of the Future, You're not in It: When the second wave of al-Qaeda attacks hit America." A leading expert on counterterrorism imagines the future history of the war on terror. A frightening picture of a country still at war in 2011 Ten Years Later ; Liquid Sculpture
• · · · Let's throw the book at publishing They say there are three ways of achieving immortality: rear a child, plant a tree, or write a book
• · · · · At the dawn of this psychotic decade, I proposed, on instinct, that we should call it the Uh-Oh's. Decades need names. How else are we map their unique zeitgeists in our subsequent reflections on them? Imagine, for example, how awkward our historical recollections would become if we could not refer to "the 60's," a decade which needed no adjective, unlike, say, "the Roaring 20's?" The name is the frame, and the frame says it all. A Tale of the Uh-Oh's: Amelia Takes A Fall
• · · · · · If a picture speaks a thousand words, a love letter speaks a thousand more For passionate readers and lovers of words, a letter is irresistible
