Brainstorm is a solid addition to Eric Maisel’s lifesaving body of work. 3 stars.

• The debut novel by Australian-born Evie Wyld, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, tackles the cascading effect of violence, the violence of men at war, through generations. Wyld is an evocative, sure-footed stylist, and her portrait of two Australians, one a Vietnam war soldier, the other an irresolute semi drunk, is compelling in small doses. If the plot is a little too light to make for a fully compelling book, the author’s rich writing carries the reader through. 3 stars
• Beg, Borrow, Steal by Michael Greenberg is subtitled A Writer’s Life, but is in reality reworked Times Literary Supplement columns over five years. Greenberg obliquely skates over the harsh life he adopted in order to write but his passion shines through. New York vignettes are presented in a most endearing pared-down style in which every word carries weight. Lacking a strong narrative thread, the articles are nonetheless a pleasure to read. 3 stars

• Diana Athill: ‘Read it aloud to yourself because that’s the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear).’
• Helen Dunmore: ‘Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.’
• ‘Try to be accurate about stuff,’ suggests Anne Enright. Also: ‘Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.’
• Michael Morpurgo: ‘Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works wonders: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.’
• Andrew Motion: ‘Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.’
• Will Self: ‘Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.’

Annie Proulx offers this lifetime manifesto:

Proceed slowly and take care.

To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.

Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

Rewrite and edit until you achieve the most felicitous phrase/sentence/paragraph/page/story/chapter.

. . . Matisse reversed his brush at the end of the final sitting and scratched great white lines in the wet paint, circling the body and swirling out from it like a bud unfurling or wings clapping open. The slight, grave, pale figure within this vortex of whorls and claw marks conveys a poignant sense of human vulnerability and endurance. . . . ‘Matisse says himself it’s a bit of an enormity,’ Prichard wrote from Germany on 7 July. ‘His picture shocks even him a little, he feels uneasy and slightly surprised. He seems to me like a sparrow hawk that has hatched an eagle. He feels in himself something greater than himself, a Socratic demon, the enemy.’

The news that Microsoft has somehow managed to permanentlylose the data stored online by tens of thousands of T-Mobile Sidekick smartphone users has the technology world in an absolute uproar. Beyond the immediate, baffling question — How is it possible that the data was not backed up properly? — there is a larger issue: What does this mean for the credibility of “cloud computing”?

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 courage is as worthy as, or perhaps worthier than, the physical courage most people value!

• 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 of it is most interesting, the structure mirrors the language of architecture, that is, almost indecipherable. Presumably if you’re a student of architecture this would fascinate, otherwise, like me, it could bore. 2 stars.
• Eric Bergkraut’s tribute to Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative Russian journalist assassinated in 2006, Letter to Anna, is exquisitely rendered and heartbreaking. 4 stars.

• 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 Making of Anton Corbijn documents the move of the famed portrait photographer to film. Corbijn is as enigmatic as his camera work but the doco generates great warmth and tension, and I found it to be a teasing meditation on creativity. 4 stars.
• Directed by Benôit Jacquot, Villa Amalia, a drama about a woman recreating life anew, exudes drama even though the underlying plot (apparently based on a book) is not event laden. Isabella Huppert is outstanding but the end fizzles. 3 stars.

• 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. 4 stars.
• I saw Van Gogh: Brush with Genius at the monster IMAX cinema. This must be a short doco for TV, only three quarters of an hour long. The central premise, an accented artist-from-the-beyond the grave talking about his works, is twee, but I must admit that being able to see the gorgeous colour of Van Gogh’s works portrayed so large, with the camera zooming in to reveal individual brush strokes, was a wonderful experience. 3 stars.

Well, Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy? is a stunningly original take on the memoir genre. I can only describe it as very loosely linked riffs (the word is apt) on his chaotic life. Chronological order is retained at the beginning but by the middle of the book, it can be hard to tell what decade is being explored. Cummings’s jerky style, mixing the profane with the lyrical in seemingly random sequencing, should not work but does, brilliantly. He dishes the dirt, savaging his industry, acquaintances, and, most harshly, himself. My abiding impression from the memoir is of a highly self-aware, neurotic soul who would be a delight to know but hard to live with. Yet the seemingly naked honesty disguises an opaqueness that leaves Cummings more, not less, visible by the end of the book. The descriptions of a musical life in Melbourne are semi poetic in their telling vividness. Cynical humour shines through the pages, but also a vein of sadness mastered.

Your first thought on this description of Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy? could well be that it is too obscure and difficult. Not so – this is a unique, revelatory recollection of a highly creative soul.