The February 20 issue of the Guardian contained something remarkable, 28 authors offering advice on how to write fiction (see here and here). It’s a hugely varied recipe book, ranging from terse to wordy, from flippant to earnest, but it’s definitely worth scanning. I noted the following snippets that chimed with me:
Diana Athill: ‘Read it [...]
I’m still savouring Hilary Spurling’s Matisse biography (I’m a third of the way through her second volume Matisse the Master). One aspect of Matisse that captivates and astounds me is how he is driven by some volcanic impetus, again and again, to innovate, at huge cost to his psyche and his family. In June 1914, [...]
Does anyone else feel fear at the news I first got from the wonderful Andrew Leonard at How the World Works? I put stuff on the cloud – now I wonder whether I should. Here’s Leonard’s intro:
The news that Microsoft has somehow managed to permanentlylose the data stored online by tens of thousands of T-Mobile [...]
In Matisse the Master, biographer Hilary Spurling writes that Matisse’s friend Henri Cross
was one of the few – possibly the only person apart from Amélie Matisse [Matisse's wife] – who fully understood the state of barely suppressed panic that underlay Matisse’s own unremitting experimentation.
How exciting to read about artistic courage, to find confirmation that such [...]
The closing day was docos galore:
Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ captures, courtesy of anonymous citizens with handy cams, the 2007 uprising in totalitarian Myanmar. It’s spellbinding, well structured, and a tribute to the spirit of mankind. 4 stars.
Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect, made by Markus Heidingsfelder, is a doco about a controversial architect. Although some [...]
Mainly docos on a busy Saturday:
The Entrepreneur, made by Jonathan Bricklin, is a doco about Bricklin’s father, an irrepressible businessman in the car industry over decades. It proves to be a fascinating look at the unstoppable force of business, as the father chases investors and car manufacturing partners in China. 4 stars.
Josh Whiteman’s Shadow Play: The [...]
Viewed a few days ago:
The third one in the series, Red Riding: 1983, is a corker, coming with a virtuoso plot knitting together the first two. In some ways darker than the first two, with its main protagonist one of the corrupt West Yorkshire policemen, it nonetheless offers a ray of sunshine at the end. [...]
Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?: Misadventures in Music is a memoir by Stephen Cummings, a sometimes brilliant songwriter and always impressive vocalist who achieved brief, incandescent fame as frontman for The Sports in the early 1970s. Since then Cummings has relaeased a couple of dozen solo albums and written three novels. A Melburnite through and [...]
Made by Masha Zur Glozman and Yonathan Zur, Amos Oz: the Nature of Dreams is yet another of the great docos I’ve seen this film festival that manage to grip and inspire. Amos Oz comes across as a prolific writer and thinker, and his peculiar role in Israeli society – loved yet reviled for being [...]
A secondary pleasure with The Landscape of History (see my earlier comments) is its instructive, encompassing set of references, from which I have extracted two for onward reading. My guiding criteria were that each should be relatively recent and usable as a ‘how to’ (beyond its main purpose):
Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals edited by Niall [...]