Here's an interesting excerpt from Hemingway's posthumously published memoir of his life in Paris in the 1920s, A Moveable Feast; as gleaned from an article in the WaPo by Jonathan Yardley, who finds the book to retain a "certain irresistible charm" even on its fourth re-read -- although, in general he regards Hemingway's venerated style of writing "as more self-conscious and mannered than pure, declarative and spare; I realized that in almost all of his writing, he had little of interest to say; and I came to loathe his worst traits of personality and character -- meanness that often turned into cruelty; self-centeredness; bluster and braggadocio; exaggerated, showy machismo."

"It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. . . . If I started to write elaborately . . . I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline."

I'm just waiting for that first true simple declarative sentence to sneak up on me. (Tsk tsk.. not going to happen, Sanjeev. Writing is hard work. Much against what I have long thought, like all other arts and talents, this one will not come naturally either and needs much practice, honing, and is sheer hard-work, laden with anxiety, frustration, and when successful is rewarded with endless joy!)

Excerpt from the introduction to Rules of Thumb (73 authors reveal their fiction writing fixations); edited by Michael Martone and Susan Neville.

Writers write. But writers more often than not are not writing. They are waiting to write, preparing to write, rehearsing, practicing, taking notes, outlining, reading. On top of the anxiety of writing (or not writing) is this other anxiety - that all the activities of the prelude, in reality, are not prelude at all, but a symphony of fiddling around, a divertimento of tuning up.

Oh...so that's what I've been doing when I'm fiddling around: tuning up! :)

Now I know why I have been forgetting things lately! :)

Common Sleep Problem Linked With Memory Loss

The part of the brain that stores memory appears to shrink in people with sleep apnea, adding further evidence that the sleep and breathing disorder is a serious health threat. The findings, from brain scan studies conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, show for the first time that sleep apnea is associated with tissue loss in brain regions that store memory. And while the thinking and focus problems of sleep apnea patients often are attributed to sleep deprivation, the scans show something far more insidious is occurring.

Heaven's having fun rocking with Ali Farka Toure. This video's from last.fm and is a live peformance of the track 'Amandrai' (from Talking Timbuktu) from the Segou Festival in Mali and features Bassekou Kouyate on ngoni along with Farka Toure.



Previous posts on Ali Farka Toure: 1, 2. Also two posts on his son, Vieux: 1, 2.

Some of my earlier posts about music from West Africa, in particular Mali: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

via http://blog.prathambooks.org/2008/06/is-google-making-us-stupid.html

via http://blog.prathambooks.org/2008/06/is-google-making-us-stupid.html

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

So asks Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic.

“For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

I should have gone to see her when she performed in Boston last year at the Berkeley Performance Center.

Cesaria Evora, the singer from Cape Verde, in a haunting performance of a morna, Besame Mucho.



Also: An interview with the singer on NPR's All Things Considered from June 2007.

Presenting three videos featuring a Malian singer, Rokia Traore, whose voice I have loved second only to the incomparable Salif Keïta (illustrative songs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), ever since I first heard her in early 2007.







P.S. Another very capable Malian singer is Oumou Sangare (songs: 1, 2) but more about her some other time.

Brilliant performance by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan from 1985, thanks to youtube. A shorter excerpt of the same is here. "A Voice from Heaven" indeed [1]!

A more recent performance is here. (Many other shorter clips also on youtube, available through "Related videos" at the above links. I've spent a good hour or two listening to the Ustaad this morning.)

Sometimes, you become famous 10+ years after your (premature) death, thanks to a TV show watched by millions.

Jeffrey Scott Buckley (November 17, 1966 – May 29, 1997), raised as Scotty Moorhead, was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. (In 1997), while awaiting the arrival of his band from New York, he drowned during an evening swim in the Wolf River. His body was found on June 4, 1997

Buckley's first #1 came posthumously in March 2008 when "Hallelujah" topped Billboard's Hot Digital Songs following a performance of the song on American Idol.

The song was originally written and sung by Leonard Cohen. You can see Buckley performing the song live here and here. There are quite a few other singers who have attempted this song, as seen unde related videos at the above youtube links.

A well-written biography of Buckley can be read here. It seems that, sadly, like Jeffrey, who drowned and died at age 30, his father, Tim Buckley (also a musician), died from an accidental drug overdose in 1975 at age 28!

On June 25, 1975, at the age of 28, Tim Buckley was dead from an accidental drug overdose.

Another interesting tidbit gleaned at the above link:

An ardent enthusiast for a myriad of musical forms, Jeff Buckley was an early champion among young American musicians for the work of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the world's foremost Qawwali (the music of the Sufis) singer. Buckley conducted an extensive interview with Nusrat in Interview magazine (January 1996) and wrote the liner notes for the singer's The Supreme Collection album which was released on Mercator/Caroline Records in August 1997.

Hmm.. I thought it was the soundtrack in the movie, Dead Man Walking, that introduced Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to the western world. Maybe the music connoisseurs knew him - the movie just made him more popular; just as American Idol has popularized Buckley.

Note: Found out about Buckley and this song via this question in India Uncut's Workoutable section.

Literary feuds are fun. Naipaul is in the news again, this time not for throwing pointed barbs at others but for a pointed vitriolic attack on him by a fellow Caribbean Nobel laureate.

The distraction of Walcott vs Naipaul: With his poem, The Mongoose, Derek Walcott attacked his literary contemporary and nemesis - and overshadowed some great new work.

Rhyme and punishment for Naipaul: A wickedly humorous poem by a Nobel prize winner has drawn more blood in a vitriolic feud between literary lions.

And here's an excerpt from Walcott's poem, The Mongoose':

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection
Or else I'll be as dead as
Naipaul's fiction
Read his last novels, you'll see just
what I mean
A
lethargy, approaching the obscene
The model is more ho-hum than
Dickens
The essays have more bite
They scatter chickens like critics,
but
each stabbing phrase is poison
Since he has made that snaring
style
a prison
The plots are forced, the prose
sedate and silly
The
anti-hero is a prick named Willie
Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or
Lawrence
And whines with his creator's
self-abhorrence

Sam Jordison at the Guardian wonders who amongst fthe amous writers today will be 'lost' and unknown in the near future. The comments from readers below Sam's post provide some exciting food for thought. (Strangely, he lists authors that I have read and loved: Auster, McEwan, and Rushdie (only pre-2000 though). I have read a little bit of Bellow (who I often confuse him with Salinger) but have not read anything from Pynchon yet.)

Plenty of the authors who seem terribly important today will soon be stuck on the shelves gathering dust just as fast Delderfield and co. Paul Auster, Thomas Pynchon, Saul Bellow, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie ... It's hard to say who will stay and who will go - but fun to guess. So now it's over to you. Who will disappear, and why? And if I do decide to make that link and read a book by Delderfield, can anyone tell me a good place to start?

RIP, Bob Diddley, the undisputed heavyweight champion of rock.

Diddley's gonna play on in heaven (if there is one), and he'll live on in our memories through his music.




And here's Bo in 1955 on the Ed Sullivan Show, where, as wikipedia enlightens:

...he infuriated the host. "I did two songs and he got mad," Bo Diddley later recalled. "Ed Sullivan said that I was one of the first colored boys to ever double-cross him. Said that I wouldn't last six months". The show had requested that he sing Tennessee Ernie Ford's hit "Sixteen Tons", but, when he appeared on stage, he sang "Bo Diddley" instead. This substitution resulted in his being banned from further appearances.

and here's Bo Diddley in 1966.



Thanks to the Guardian, they've compiled some YouTube clips of Bo Diddley here.

“Football combines the two worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” —George F. Will

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. - Michael Pollan in his NYT Magazine article Why Bother?