The Kowloon Diaries

The lost art of reading

An article from the LA Times in which the author is moaning about not being able to read with the distractions of technology. It gets more interesting when he talks about reading as an act of engagement with the world and other people. Reading is so often described as an escape, but it’s the opposite. He writes: ‘Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being.’

TV is the new literature

Brilliant though it was, The Sopranos moved into a place in US culture that used to belong to prose fiction, says John Freeman, in the Guardian.

Mark Morford: Notes and errata

Here's a guy with a great blog on SFgate. He's brilliant with words and I've been enjoying his rants about crappy tattoos, fake vaginas, swearing, and public drunkeness. Plus he's got the secret of world peace. The Christian Resource Network describes him as: '[A] misguided, lost and carnal individual... filled with vexation and ignorance of God [who will] gladly cheer the anti-christ.' That pretty much sums it up.

Boring & miserable: the current state of the novel

Two good articles today:

Divine Comedy from Julian Gough in Prospect Magazine, which asks: "What is wrong with the modern literary novel? Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?" And, Literary Porn by Frank Furedi in Spiked who says: "Ignore those publishers who claim ‘misery memoirs’ are popular because they tell life-affirming stories of survival. In truth, these books are a voyeur’s wet dream."

On originality

[For Borges] no one has claim to originality in literature; all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing archetypes.
—James E. Irby, from the Introduction to Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Borges

This is from an interesting, if somewhat depressing, article in the Virginia Quarterly Review, on influences and plagiarism and how do you decide where one ends and the other begins.

The author Erik Campbell says that nothing is truly original, it all comes from somewhere else. I think this is basically true. Originality is just a kind of fantasy that we have put on a pedestal. If you wrote something really original it probably wouldn't make any sense.