Though not strictly a weekend literary supplement, the Flavorwire has 19 pictures of achingly sharp authors working at their typewriters. They include Tennessee Williams, John Cheevor, Slyvia Plath, Francoise Sagan and William Faulkner.
A.C. Grayling was on the Today programme this morning, debating his secular Bible, The Good Book, with the Canon Chancellor of St. Pauls. Grayling has also given an interview to Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian, where, among other things, he expands on secular morality, spiritual understanding and the importance of language.
‘He insists that his new book does not belong in the same canon as Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Hitchens’s God Is Not Great. “No, because it’s not against religion. There’s not one occurrence of the word God, or afterlife, or anything like that. It doesn’t attack religion, it’s a positive book, there’s nothing negative in it. People may think it’s against religion – but it isn’t.” But then he says, with a mischievous twinkle: “Of course, what would really help the book a lot in America is if somebody tries to shoot me.”
With any luck it shouldn’t come to that, but Grayling is almost certainly going to upset a lot of Christians, for what he has written is a secular bible. The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, “ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who’ve really experienced life, and thought about it”. Drawing on classical secular texts from east and west, Grayling has “done just what the Bible makers did with the sacred texts”, reworking them into a “great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world”. He has been working on his opus for several decades, and the result is an extravagantly erudite manifesto for rational thought.’
Edmund de Waal, author of the widely loved The Hare with Amber Eyes, explains to readers of the Telegraph why Proust has always been his essential reading:
‘I have just come back from Paris. The Hare with Amber Eyes, my attempted retracing of the history of my Jewish family over 200 years through a very large collection of very small objects, was being launched in France. I had a round of interviews and lectures to survive. The book’s new name, La Mémoire Retrouvée, could not be more Proustian and I was convinced this was a hostage to fortune. My very first radio interview was short. The interviewer was svelte and cross. You are an Englishman, she told me, and I believe you are actually a potter. Your book seems to concern Proust. How has this come about?
So I start to tell her that my great-uncle Iggie in old age, sitting in his armchair in his Tokyo apartment after an autumnal lunch with plums from the orchard of his country cottage in Izu,
began talking of the plum dumplings mit schlag made by their cook in Vienna. That when my grandmother Elisabeth died and I inherited her 14 black-bound volumes of Proust, printed on cheap thin
paper by Gallimard, the ink smudged, I found that they were interleaved with postcards and photographs and scraps of pocketbook jottings marking — what? I start to say that I simply
didn’t know that when this journey started six years ago, airy with ambition and purpose, I would be charting a journey into memory. I start and she has packed up her
microphone.’
The Times’ Ginny Dougary talks (£) to Monica Ali about the latter’s controversial new book,
which imagines what might have happened had Diana Princess of Wales lived.
‘A writer in The New York Times had commented on Diana being a “curious” subject for Ali to write about, which I had interpreted as meaning that to write about her you had to be a Sloane (or Tina Brown), which Ali is amused by. Her reading of it was that the subject might not be considered serious enough for her (an opinion one of her friends has expressed).
“In which case, I would say, ‘Anything can be a serious subject’. And to suggest that Diana, who was a major public figure, is de facto not a serious subject seems odd to me. And let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it is totally unserious — I don’t think it is — but say it was, well, that would be OK, too. Part of the role of the writer is to entertain. If, one day of the week, I go off and stuff envelopes for PEN and the next day I go off and have my nails done, well, I think the suggestion that one thing cancels out the other is bizarre. I mean they’re all parts of your identity. I don’t read The Gulag Archipelago every night. Sometimes I read a thriller.’
Poet Garrison Keillor tells Erica Wagner (£) how to write a sonnet. Just do it, seems to be his advice:
“If you can do a crossword puzzle, you can write a sonnet. If you love somebody, if you are inflamed by passion for somebody — we think of that as transitory, but you don’t when you are in the midst of it. You think of it as enormous and permanent and set in stone. And you should record it at a time when it feels permanent to you. And if you simply write it down on a piece of paper with a pencil it will last longer than e-mail.”
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