January 18, 2013
"If we have a million photos, we tend to value each one less than if we only had ten. The internet forces a general devaluation of the written word: a global deflation in the average word’s value on many axes. As each word tends to get less reading-time and attention and to be worth less money at the consumer end, it naturally tends to absorb less writing-time and editorial attention on the production side. Gradually, as the time invested by the average writer and the average reader in the average sentence falls, society’s ability to communicate in writing decays. And this threat to our capacity to read and write is a slow-motion body-blow to science, scholarship, the arts—to nearly everything, in fact, that is distinctively human, that muskrats and dolphins can’t do just as well or better."

— David Gelernter, who worries about the prevalence of drivel online. What do another 149 smart people worry about?

6:27am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHwfvc25dSK
Filed under: writing future internet new media literature lit 
August 22, 2012
William Dalrymple: "What is to become of travel writing now that the world is smaller?"

When In Xanadu was published at the end of the 80s, travel writing tended to highlight the narrator: his adventures were the subject; the people he met were often reduced to objects in the background. I have tried to invert this, and keep the narrator in the shadows, so bringing the lives of the people I have met to the fore and placing their stories centre stage.

Above all, I had to consider whether travel writing was still a form that could adapt to this very changed world. With the book finished, and having read a lot of the more recent travel books produced by younger writers, I have not the slightest doubt that the genre has a great deal of life in it yet. For wonderfully varied ingredients can be added to a travel book: politics, archaeology, history, philosophy, art or magic. It’s possible to cross-fertilise the genre with other literary forms - biography, or anthropological writing - or, perhaps more interesting still, to follow in Chatwin’s footsteps and muddy the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction by crossing the travel book with some of the wilder forms of the novel.

7:53pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHwfvRyH77S
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: travel travel writing longreads Long Reads longform travelreads literature william dalrymple 
August 7, 2012
"A creature can never be a perfect being, but may be a perfect creature — e.g. a good angel or a good apple-tree. Gaiety at its highest may be an (intellectual) creature’s delighted recognition that its imperfection as a being may constitute part of its perfection as an element in the whole hierarchical order of creation. I mean, while it is a pity there sh[oul]d be bad men or bad dogs, part of the excellence of a good man is that he is not an angel, and of a good dog that it is not a man. This is the extension of what St. Paul says about the body & the members. A good toe-nail is not an unsuccessful attempt at a hair; and if it were conscious it w[oul]d delight in being simply a good toe-nail."

— C.S Lewis’ response to a boy named Hugh, who asked for a definition of “gaiety”, from C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children.

7:57pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHwfvQzMs71
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: literature quotes CS Lewis 
August 7, 2012
Jack Kerouac’s hand-drawn cover for On The Road, rejected by publishers, along with the book itself. It’s world’s apart from the book’s Ukrainian, Chinese and Croatian covers.   

Jack Kerouac’s hand-drawn cover for On The Road, rejected by publishers, along with the book itself.

It’s world’s apart from the book’s Ukrainian, Chinese and Croatian covers.   

7:25pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHwfvQzE_Ps
(Notes: 6)
  
Filed under: Kerouac literature history drawing publishing PIC 
July 29, 2012
"Flora: “While having tiffin on the veranda of my bungalow I spilled kedgeree on my dungarees and had to go to the gymkhana in my pyjamas looking like a coolie.”
Nirad: “I was buying chutney in the bazaar when a thug who had escaped from the chokey ran amok and killed a box-wallah for his loot, creating a hullabaloo and landing himself in the mulligatawny."

— Hobson-Jobson: The words English owes to India

7:55pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHwfvQMtjAI
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: india travel language linguistics history english lit literature 
July 25, 2012
Vestiges of the Hippie Trail Peter Jump was withered, hunched and riddled with nervous ticks. When lucid, he claimed to have worked at Abbey Road Studios in its heyday and to have produced the finest records of psychedelic rock. In the same era, he had drunk what he called a 4M cocktail, mixing mescaline, MDMA, methylated spirits and milk in a blender before knocking the whole concoction back, to be found days later, naked and in the grip of a psychosis from which he never completely recovered. Jump muttered to himself in spurts, intoning agreement and disagreement in a garble of difficult-to-hear words. His favourite gesture was the shrug, and he used it in conversations with himself as well as other people, extending his right hand out, with palm open and fingers wide apart, while uttering a nasal “Aaaa”. … I knew something of the old Hippie Trail by the time we arrived in Goa, but only as much as I had read in Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar. Theroux had encountered the freaks making their way out east – “like small clans of tribesmen setting out for a baraza or new pastures” – on a train from Istanbul to Tehran. He thought “the majority of them, going for the first time, had that look of frozen apprehension that is the mask on the face of an escapee,” and had “no doubt that the teenaged girls who made up the bulk of these loose tribal groups would eventually appear on the notice boards of American consulates in Asia, in blurred snapshots or retouched high-school graduation pictures: missing person and have you seen this girl?” Theroux, propped up on his first-class berth “like a pasha,” consulting Nagel’s Encyclopaedia-Guide, or lying down in the heat, “like a Hindu widow on a pyre, resigned to suttee,” was too much of a prig to characterise the hippies as anything but wastrels and strays, and it seemed a pity that the Hippie Trail had never had a Kerouac to document it, to tell us as he did that “somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.” Continue reading  Vestiges of the Hippie Trail »

Vestiges of the Hippie Trail

Peter Jump was withered, hunched and riddled with nervous ticks. When lucid, he claimed to have worked at Abbey Road Studios in its heyday and to have produced the finest records of psychedelic rock. In the same era, he had drunk what he called a 4M cocktail, mixing mescaline, MDMA, methylated spirits and milk in a blender before knocking the whole concoction back, to be found days later, naked and in the grip of a psychosis from which he never completely recovered. Jump muttered to himself in spurts, intoning agreement and disagreement in a garble of difficult-to-hear words. His favourite gesture was the shrug, and he used it in conversations with himself as well as other people, extending his right hand out, with palm open and fingers wide apart, while uttering a nasal “Aaaa”.

…

I knew something of the old Hippie Trail by the time we arrived in Goa, but only as much as I had read in Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar. Theroux had encountered the freaks making their way out east – “like small clans of tribesmen setting out for a baraza or new pastures” – on a train from Istanbul to Tehran. He thought “the majority of them, going for the first time, had that look of frozen apprehension that is the mask on the face of an escapee,” and had “no doubt that the teenaged girls who made up the bulk of these loose tribal groups would eventually appear on the notice boards of American consulates in Asia, in blurred snapshots or retouched high-school graduation pictures: missing person and have you seen this girl?” Theroux, propped up on his first-class berth “like a pasha,” consulting Nagel’s Encyclopaedia-Guide, or lying down in the heat, “like a Hindu widow on a pyre, resigned to suttee,” was too much of a prig to characterise the hippies as anything but wastrels and strays, and it seemed a pity that the Hippie Trail had never had a Kerouac to document it, to tell us as he did that “somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”

Continue reading  Vestiges of the Hippie Trail »

8:02pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHwfvQ65hzT
(Notes: 6)
  
Filed under: 1960s hippie hippie trail hippy hippy trail history lit literature longform longread longreads sixties travel history travel writing travelreads 
July 24, 2012
"Far from making reader response invisible, then, the digital age may be taking us back to the Renaissance tradition of readers commenting in the margins of their friends’ or employers’ books and contributing homemade indexes to the flyleaves. Only after the rise of the nineteenth- century public library did such acts come to be seen as defacing, rather than enriching, the book."

— Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, Leah Price 

7:30pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHwfvQ1ex_j
(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: writing reading writers books libraries literature ebooks 
July 22, 2012
"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it."

— Ernest Hemingway

7:59pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHwfvPuxTnk
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: lit literature quote hemingway writing 
July 20, 2012
"INTERVIEWER: What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?
HEMINGWAY: Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with."

— Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21

8:00pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHwfvPmv89S
(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: lit literature writing hemingway 
July 18, 2012
The Curse of Gokarna Part III: The Memory Vault The idea of a conscious rock – a rock with an atma, or soul – became a way for me to think about Gokarna’s past and future. It was a kind of memory vault, which emerged every sixty years to assess a disorienting present, and a way of taking a long view of the village and, by extension, India’s progress though time. The Atmalinga was last unearthed when Dr Shastri was a boy, in the late seventies or early eighties. Isolated by its lack of infrastructure, Gokarna was parochial and poor. Sixty years before that, in the 1920s, India was a British colony, experiencing the first stirrings of an independence movement that would mark it as a place apart, a place where a great soul – a Mahatma – was a better leader than a great general. The Atmalinga was unearthed during or just after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, and several times while Gokarna, like most of India, was ruled by Muslim sultans and the great Mughals in Delhi. The period both enriched Indian culture and destroyed a great deal. The Atmalinga played witness to the worst of the destruction. It was dug up within a few years of 1565, when a Muslim army reduced the sophisticated capital of the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire to ruins, destroying a political entity with borders that encompassed Gokarna. And so the backwards progression went on, until history was conflated by myth. The Atmalinga was never dug up by the same people and has never emerged into a completely familiar world. Viewed like this, in a series of snapshots taken every sixty years, India looked a dynamic but unpredictable place. Continue reading The Curse of Gokarna»

The Curse of Gokarna

Part III: The Memory Vault

The idea of a conscious rock – a rock with an atma, or soul – became a way for me to think about Gokarna’s past and future. It was a kind of memory vault, which emerged every sixty years to assess a disorienting present, and a way of taking a long view of the village and, by extension, India’s progress though time. The Atmalinga was last unearthed when Dr Shastri was a boy, in the late seventies or early eighties. Isolated by its lack of infrastructure, Gokarna was parochial and poor. Sixty years before that, in the 1920s, India was a British colony, experiencing the first stirrings of an independence movement that would mark it as a place apart, a place where a great soul – a Mahatma – was a better leader than a great general. The Atmalinga was unearthed during or just after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, and several times while Gokarna, like most of India, was ruled by Muslim sultans and the great Mughals in Delhi. The period both enriched Indian culture and destroyed a great deal. The Atmalinga played witness to the worst of the destruction. It was dug up within a few years of 1565, when a Muslim army reduced the sophisticated capital of the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire to ruins, destroying a political entity with borders that encompassed Gokarna. And so the backwards progression went on, until history was conflated by myth. The Atmalinga was never dug up by the same people and has never emerged into a completely familiar world. Viewed like this, in a series of snapshots taken every sixty years, India looked a dynamic but unpredictable place.

Continue reading The Curse of Gokarna»

7:58pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHwfvPeNYrw
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: longreads Long Reads travel travelreads Gokarna India history lit literature travel writing travel story longform 
Liked posts on Tumblr: More liked posts »