Some months ago — in that strange, hushed lull after finishing the manuscript of one book, and starting to think about another — I sat down to write. I fired up my laptop. I flipped through my notebook to the page where I had written …
More on those four great mysteries…
When I was in Suzhou a few weeks ago, I gave a talk about my Sixty-Four Chance Pieces at the wonderful Bookworm bookshop, called ‘Four Great Mysteries’ (see the blog post here). In preparation for the talk, I scrawled the following notes, and although the talk itself diverged …
Turning About Once Again
I only have one more day in Bodhgaya, after which I fly back to Kolkata for the book fair; and it’s been absolutely delightful to be here. I’ve just been pedalling around, making the most of the local food, meditating when I feel like it, …
Thunk, thunk, thunk…
Bicycles are my favourite mode of transport. They are less grouchy than camels, they don’t have minds of their own the way horses do, they are cheaper than cars, and they are speedier than going on foot. So it was a pleasure today to borrow …
Guard-Dogs and Sausages
Tomorrow the results of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework are to be announced, and in universities up and down the country, anxieties are running high. For those who don’t know, the REF is an exercise that aims to evaluate the quality of university research outputs. …
Amateurs, Professionals and Bullshit Going Forwards
The new academic year has started at De Montfort University, and I’m teaching a course on Professional Writing Skills. It’s good to be back in the swing of teaching, and a pleasure to see my students from last year once again. This is a course that …
Take Ten Books
Over on Facebook, a number of friends have tagged me in one of those chain-letter things, asking me to provide a list of ten books that have (“regardless of literary merit”) shaped or affected me deeply one way or another. I’m not a big fan …
Because we are too menny?
A couple of weeks back, the novelist Javier Marías wrote an article for the Independent on the subject of why to not write novels (and one reason why you might want to write them). Briefly, the reasons were these: i) because there are too many …
Storytellers and Anthropologists
I’m currently in the middle of editing a book that I’ve been working on about the Tanimbar islands in Indonesia. I was in Tanimbar some twenty years ago as a fledgling anthropologist, and it was in Tanimbar that I started writing seriously. In fact, I find it hard to …
The Pleasure and Difficulty of Writing
There’s a spectacularly stupid quote attributed to Hemingway that seems to be everywhere on the internet these days. It goes like this, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” It turns out that Hemingway probably never said …
Prisoners on Tanimbar?
I got home yesterday to find an exciting package waiting for me: a small parcel from France, inside of which was a copy of a French comic dating from the 1960s. It was a copy of Akim (no. 247, to be precise), which started life …
How Satisfied Are You With This Poll?
One evening last week, the phone rang. At the other end was a polite man who said he worked for Ipsos MORI, the market research company. He asked me if I would mind answering a few questions. Having nothing else to do, I agreed. Besides, …
What do you want to talk about?
It is always interesting to get reviews, even if they are not entirely favourable — or perhaps particularly if they are not entirely favourable — and so I was pleased this morning to see that my book Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling (the original title, incidentally, was the much …
Big Beasts, Little Beasts, and the Value of Creative Writing
In this week’s Times Higher Education, there is an interview with the writer Hanif Kureishi, who has recently been made professor of creative writing at Kingston University. When it comes to creative writing, universities are fond of appointing Big Beasts of literature to professorial posts, …
