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What Decides Literary Genre?
This week, I heard someone reading a poem that sounded to me exactly like prose. Now, I’ve always been bad at understanding or passing any meaningful comment on poetry (it’s my blind spot) but the more I listened the more I realised I was responding to the poem exactly as if it were a short… Read more
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Science? Pah!!
This week, one of the offspring comes home with the classical IQ test question: “What was the largest island in the world before the discovery of Australia?” The answer the expected is, of course, ‘Australia’ or if you want to get really technical about it, ‘Australia but it didn’t have a name before its discovery… Read more
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Thinking About The Identity Plot
On a long journey yesterday, I finished listening to Amy Hungerford’s Lectures on the American Novel Since 1945, which – by the way – I thoroughly recommend to any one interested in modern literature. Central to her argument is that old patterns in literary novels, such as the ‘Marriage Plot’ of Victorian novels, have more recently… Read more
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Three Months Cometh
This morning, facing up to a three-month cancer check, found myself sitting at the keyboard at 4 a.m., trying to explain to my on-line diary why I was sitting at the keyboard at 4 a.m. Failed miserably. Failed inevitably. Waving my hands in the air as if I might conjure unknown words that everyone could… Read more
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The ‘Rules’ of Writing
I’m beginning to doubt more and more of the ‘rules’ of creating writing. Maybe this is a good thing. Take, for example, the shock and horror that goes around writers’ workshops when someone dares to ‘tell’ some piece of back story instead of ‘showing’ it. It has become more and more apparent to me in… Read more
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Three Hits For Science
The most interesting week in a long time for science, I think. First, the Austrian Academy of Sciences grow themselves a brain. Not in a jar as sci-fi would have it, but in a spinning bioreactor. The scientists say that this matches ‘closely but not perfectly’ brain development in the first nine weeks of foetal… Read more
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