Carrie Ryan, author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth, is sort of a big deal. And when I say ‘sort of’ I’m being sarcastic. She’s a huge deal.

I met Carrie two years ago -ish- when she was still a litigator for a city centre law firm. John Hart, another lawyer-turned-writer, had come to chat about writing. At the end of the discussion Carrie mentioned that she had recently sold her YA novel to Delacorte and…well…she had me at ‘Delacorte’.

Fast forward to present and Carrie’s no longer measuring her days in six minute increments. She’s showing up in Manhattan for Random House, making “Best Zombies Ever” lists for MTV and, my personal favourite, having her prose called ‘beautiful’ by The Guardian.

And did I mention the film?? Yeah. So, there’s that.

But back to The Forest…

It’s an on-the-edge-of-your-seat read, poetically put together, and reminiscent of both Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go) and Simon Pegg (he did lose his bestie in Shaun). The only thing to give pause – it might annoy you a little because it ends before you want it to. But that’s what sequels are for. The Dead-Tossed Waves is out in March and, from what I hear, the final book in what has now become a trilogy…is expected in 2011.

Now. Off to watch the aforementioned Shaun of the Dead. And Up. Because I’m nothing if not balanced.

You may have heard of a place in London called Seven Dials, a well-known junction near Covent Garden where seven streets converge. At the centre of the roughly-circular space is a pillar bearing six (yes, six) sundials. By the eighteenth century Seven Dials had become one of the most notorious slums in London and when Agatha Christie penned those mysteries the name was a euphemism for urban poverty.

Author Craig Taylor points out that you’ve probably never heard of a place called Five Dials because it never got to grow up to become respectable.

‘Five Dials was a den of iniquity, a haven for criminals, a slummy, ragged bit of the city cleaved away to make room for the broadening of Charing Cross Road.’

One street had the poorest, the dirtiest, and the lowest houses that part of London could boast of. There was gambling, cards, loose talk, and it was all very close to where Hamish Hamilton now sits on the Strand.

Which is why they chose the name for their new-ish literary magazine.

The introductory issue of Five Dials (featuring Iain Sinclair, Alain de Botton, Rachel Lichtenstein and Gustave Flaubert) is quick to let us know it doesn’t have a real staff. Or proper photographers (doesn’t really need ‘em…has Nick Dewar). Or even stationery. Instead, they make due with a few editors and writers and a large bit of cork they tack interesting writing and illustrations to.

It is, in a word, Divine.

It’s also free.

There’s really no way to take a photo with Flynn and not look like a squat little frog with Hitler-Hair (I’m not doing it on purpose, I swear.)

So here’s the thing: When feeling frog-like I’ve found it best to channel the Monty Python troupe and just act FaR TOo SilLY.

With that in mind, observe, fair readers, My Walk in Progress, through which I apply for funding from the Ministry itself. Please note: I can log eleven miles on my left leg alone.

Okay, not really. I just like alliteration.

And crossing my eyes.

Oh, and P.S.
Cleese will never die.

Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp’d be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too…

- John Donne, Air and Angels

I remember the moment I discovered Donne. Death Be Not Proud. I was twelve years old. Sitting in the garden. He was my first metaphysical poet. I came upon Chapman when I came upon Keats, but I was never jealous over George.

You know that feeling you get when you’re young and impossibly naive…when you think you’ve come upon something few have ever come upon before?

That’s how I felt about John Donne. Possessive. Everyone knew Shakespeare. But Donne was mine.

Flynn said something recently about a criticism piece and how it always reminds her why she loves what she loves.

I think that’s what Donne did for me. He made me realize how much I love what I love.

I’ve loved others more. But never quite the same.

Virgil asked that Aeneid be destroyed upon his death. Augustus decided to save it for posterity. Kafka wanted a friend to burn a collection of manuscripts on his decease. The friend ignored the request. The Trial and The Castle resulted.

Now to Nabokov.

On his deathbed, Vladamir Nabokov asked his wife, Vera, to destroy a partial manuscript, written on 138 index cards. She didn’t. This week Penguin Classics will publish a facsimile edition of that manuscript – Vladamir Nabokov’s unfinished 18th novel, The Original of Laura. (Otherwise embargoed until 17th November.)

As executor of the Nabokov estate, Dimitri Nabokov defends his decision to hold on to his father’s work. In his introduction to The Original of Laura he writes: “When the task passed to me [on his mother' death] I did a great deal of thinking…I decided that, in putative retrospect, Nabokov would not have wanted to allow [the manuscript] to burn like a latter-day Jeanne d’Arc.”

So here it is. Nabokov’s finale. The Original of Laura. Wherein a wonderfully large man called Philip Wild marries a very promiscuous woman and meditates on the nature of death.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” – Virginia Woolf

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done.

But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion.

- Virginia Woolf

The Chekhov mood is that cave in which are kept all the unseen and hardly palpable treasures of Chekhov’s soul, so often beyond the reach of mere consciousness.

— Constantin Stanislavski

I’ve talked before about The Sister and how we’re really crushin on our Russians right now. She’s heavy on her Tolstoy and keeps reminding me why I should reread Anna and ‘wow, he writes women well.”

But Anton’s way prettier and his short stories suit my in-between-other-things. One of those things is Nabokov. Earlier tonight I was reading some of his notes…

…in them he called Chekhov an “amateur”. But he went on to say that “Lady with the Dog” was the best short story every written. And it makes sense that he would. Because it is.

I also found this little beauty…Nabokov’s edits of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. If you know me you know I’ve never managed that one. I just can’t get beyond the insect thing long enough to do anything with it. I mean, hell.

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper
sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes,
new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind,
and the old things go, not one lasts.

-Carl Sandburg

Listening to The Temper Trap. Sweet Disposition. Beautiful.

Apropos to nothing, I love that my sister loves Tolstoy. That we can talk about things that get lost in translation. And that we don’t have to explain why we are the way we are. Because we know. Even when we don’t.

And I love her too. Even if she is way more trendy and bendy.

It’s all in the potatoes.