One of The Euro’s favourite things to say to me is: “So it’s a long story then?” Because it always is. Because I’m always more long winded than short. Because I rarely have less than a million words for anything I think, see, or feel. But I have no words for this. None. So I’ll use someone else’s: Good Lord, that is beautiful. Very, very beautiful.

Days With My Father is Phillip Toledano’s evocative photo essay of his 98-year old dad and their struggle with memory loss. But it’s so much more than that too. Five minutes of your today…and it will move you beyond words.

*Notify me when the book comes out.

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” – Alice

Buffy,

You know what I find exhilarating? Reading something like this:

The light of our cigarettes
Went and came in the gloom.

It is a simile with “like” suppressed: Pound called it an equation, meaning not a redundancy, A equals A, but a generalization of unexpected exactness. So this tiny poem, drawing on Gauguin and on Japan, on ghosts and on Persephone, on the Underworld and on the Underground, the Metro of Mallarm’s capital and a phrase that names a station of the Metro as it might a station of the Cross, concentrates far more than it ever need specify, and indicates the means of delivering post-Symbolist poetry from its pictorialist impasse. “An “Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time“: and that is the elusive Doctrine of the Image. (Hugh Kenner)

…and being overwhelmed by all the potential new information – things to reference in it.

It always reminds me why I love what I love.

Flynn

Every literature or creative writing course I’ve ever taken has addressed this topic: Britishness. What does it mean to be British? Do we do the same thing in The States? I don’t think so. (I never did.) But I’ve never taken a literature/writing course on U.S. soil. So, maybe…

Zadie Smith was the first writer I explored with this particular question in mind: What does it mean to be British? In my view, she answers it fantastically. But I’m a Yank. So what do I know? I’ll tell you what, this – Smith is a brilliant comic novelist (you will especially agree with me if you’ve ever heard her read aloud her work.) And I think Amis does a disservice by not pointing it out. But again, who am I to question the son of Sir Kingsley?

Manchester Centre for New Writing

According to Professor of Creative Writing Martin Amis, he and fellow ‘Literature and Britishness’ panellist Howard Jacobson are the last remaining British comic novelists. If successful humour hinges on implied superiority over other groups we have become a nation terrified of referring to people collectively at all, let alone to any kind of grudge or rivalry based on national identity.

Jacobson claimed to be uncertain whether Britishness actually exists, and certainly not to believe in multiculturalism. In his view, the concept is a device of the English intelligentsia, which would hate its own country’s culture if it couldn’t dismiss the English aspects and embrace those from elsewhere. Yet he spoke of an appealing English quality in the voices of novelists like George Eliot, which he described as simultaneously satirical, tolerant, aloof, and aware of its own absurdity.

He agreed with comments by Amis about the effective tradition of sexual symbolism in British writing, going so far as to say that “…the best sex in an English novel has no mention of sex”. In Amis’s view this is again related to British writing being unusually grounded in sanity, with a median, middle class world its traditional subject matter.

* Listen to the full debate online
* Download the full debate as an mp3 file

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content – lecture notes, exams, videos, etc. It’s not a degree-granting or credit-bearing initiative but it is a publication of the course materials. Which works well for someone like me who has no practical use for things like the Essentials of Geophysics but finds it wonderfully fascinating and know-worthy all the same.

I’ve sat about 30 of these over the past year – working my way through everything from String Theory to Tolstoy. I have absolutely no plans to touch the mathematics modules. At all. (Have always loved physics. Have always hated pure maths.)

Christmas could not excite me more than the content for literature and writing.

Writing and Humanistic Studies

The MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies gives students the opportunity to learn the techniques, forms, and traditions of several kinds of writing, from basic expository prose to more advanced forms of non-fictional prose, fiction and poetry, science writing, scientific and technical communication and digital media.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art. Oscar Wilde said it. I believe it.

I would gladly, and I mean this, wear either of these lovely little crinoline contraptions any day of the week, had I the figure, and my sister to walk alongside me wearing hers. Of course she would have to hold the pose, else it would lose most of its effect. Still…

I’m just gonna say it. I’m not a fan of country music. But folk revival and bluegrass are in my blood.

When we were married in the North of England, The Euro managed to find a bluegrass band for the reception. Dueling banjos, Foggy Mountain Breakdown, a little bit of something from the O’Brother soundtrack. In the middle of the night. In an old Georgian Mansion. In the English countryside. Sigh.

Continuing my love affair with the Awesomeness that is Steve Martin…

The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo is an album published in 2009 by Steve Martin, featuring Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Earl Scruggs, Tim O’Brien, Tony Trischka and Mary Black. Most of the 15 songs were written by Steve Martin. Including this one, “The Crow”.

CNN: Steve Martin and his Passion: The Banjo

“Pranab Chakraborty wasn’t technically my father’s younger brother. He was a fellow Bengali from Calcutta who had washed up on the barren shores of my parents’ social life in the early seventies, when they lived in a rented apartment in Central Square and could number their acquaintances on one hand. But I had no real uncles in America, and so I was taught to call him Pranab Kaku…”

- Jhumpa Lahiri

“Hell-Heaven” is by the beautiful and brilliant Jhumpa Lahiri (best selling authoress who won the Pulitzer for her debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies). It appears in Unaccustomed Earth and is currently being offered for free by DailyLit, a sometimes favourite of mine.

“And in this city where I grew up I get lost if I’m on my own. This isn’t home. It makes me giddy because it feels like home and is not. It makes my heart tremble and my head spin.”

- Saladin Chamcha (Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie)

—

I sat the LSAT ten years ago in London but all memory of the exam is shadowed by memories of the city itself. Being there, after dark, when it was still unknown to me. I left Bishopsgate in the back of a cab and as we drove along the Thames I remember being so overwhelmed by the time and the place and so desperately wanting someone to share it with. I pulled out my ugly vodafone and called Flynn back home in West Virginia. She had been there before me. She would understand.