Too sick to write (just sick enough to blog)
Monday, December 17, 2007 at 11:25PM Sick as a pig this morning.
Puked my ring. Scaldy hole.
You do not want details.
So, as I was unfit for real writing, I hung out on the Guardian Books Blog all day. Very enjoyable. At one point I was asked "Julian, are you on SSRIs?" so I may have been a bit too sick to be posting, but feckit. Mostly I argued about people's right to email poems to their friends without written legal permission from the poet's publishers (Wendy Cope is, bizarrely, against this right. I am for it... OK, it's a bit more complicated than that, but you'll have to read it, I'm not summarizing an all-day argument.) The discussion starts with a fine article by Oliver Burkeman, well worth reading.
And I helped slag off the Guardian's decision to publish their review team's Book of the Year recommendations as a 41-minute podcast instead of a list.
If anyone wants to read all about it, or join in, here's the discussion of Wendy Cope Forbids You To Email That Poem... Put Down The Poem... Move Away From The Poem...
And here's a link to the (slightly less intellectually stimulating) People Slagging Off The 41-Minute Book of the Year Podcast...
And I'm off to bed.




Reader Comments (7)
Hope you are better now. I've been reading bits and pieces of your stuff over the last few months and find it wonderfully radical. Even the bits that are borderline bad taste are not malevolently so: it is rare for a writer to make his point so obviously his own that no one simply has any right to take offense!
I printed out all of Jude 2 for myself one day in the office of the law firm that I work for - in an attempt to help make them feel that they were providing some token compensation for the chains at my wrists and ankles - and have only just indulged myself. What a fabulous immersion! The Hargeisa Goat Bubble (which I had read before, but which was unskippable), "he rehesitated" (one of the funniest phrases I've read all year)... I'm a mere mortal and not linked in any way to the literary scene; this is the first time I've been moved to write to an author to thank him and express my admiration for his cunning wit!
BTW, if you are still interested in good science fiction, may I suggest Peter Watts' 'Rifters' trilogy, avilable as a free download (yes, all of it!) from his website www.rifters.com - Backlist.
Cheers!
Hope you are well now. I just finished the Catch 22, and it was pure awsomeness! I really needed this book, as I'm going to the army in 1 year or so. A little humor about it made me feel a bit better about going there, thanks for that. As I started reading it suddenly I got friends coming over to me saying they have read the book and its great, 6 of them actually, which don't read book at all on their free time, I was amazed of it's popularity.
Well, now I guess I'll have to wait for another recommendation.
Yours,
Ariel
Hmmm... let me think...
Thanks for the Rifters tip... Yeah I'm still looking for advice on good recent SF.
You printed out Jude : Level 2! And on a law firm's tab! I'm delighted. But that reminds me, I've been meaning to blog about Jude: Level 2, and what's been going on there... Must clear that up before the New Year...
Glad you liked "he rehesitated". It's a special pleasure when people pick up on the small stuff. Sometimes when I'm torturing a sentence into its fourteenth shape (or reworking it to contain a reference to a Pogues song, or rewriting a bit of narrative as a haiku), I wonder why I'm bothering, when most readers (understandably, given that most books are not written at that level of detail) will hoof their way past without noticing it, on their way to the next death, explosion or orgasm.
And then you, YOU, Irina, go and make it all worthwhile.
Have a great 2008.
One of the chapters in Level 1 ended "And they walked me to the station in the rain". Is that one such reference to a Pogues song?
By the way, they were brilliant in Manchester in December.
Will the lads play Berlin anytime soon?
Happy New Year to you and yours, too..
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