reading and writing | Wait until next year

February 20, 2012

You aren’t what you eat

Amongst all the goodness in the first issue of the New Inquiry magazine, one article in particular stood out – The Resentment Machine, by Freddy De Boer. It is available in full in that link back there, so you should probably read that rather than this, but anyway, it challenged me in all number of ways (I should probably offer some sort of summary here, but even after multiple readings I won’t do it justice and you’d be better off just reading the real thing, or failing that reading what follows in the next paragraph…), but one quote near the end particularly got to me. Read the rest of this entry »

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February 8, 2012

The New Inquiry Magazine

So, a follow-up to my Longreads love. After mulling over how publishing long essays/articles online could possibly be a sustainable business model/long-term enterprise, one of the best purveyors of said essayage (that’s a word, right?), The New Inquiry, have published the first issue of their new monthly online magazine. At $2/£1.25 an issue I subscribed as I was curious to see how it would look and read, and the Amazon payments mechanism was frighteningly easy. Oh, and it turns out it is excellent. Read the rest of this entry »

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February 3, 2012

Don’t read this, read these

Rather than reading my floundering attempts at bloggery, you should really check out The Electric Typewriter‘s newly collated list of 111 Essential Articles and Essays. They seem to have covered a lot of the better-known essays that are free to access on the world-wide, but there are plenty I haven’t read yet. Read the rest of this entry »

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January 25, 2012

Fiction and tackling the British sporting experience

I read today an interesting article in the Financial Times on the portrayal of sport in fiction. The main argument of the piece is that American authors have never been afraid to tackle the subject and have covered sport extensively, and well. Meanwhile, British authors have been far less inclined to cover sport in fiction, and have been far less convincing when they’ve tried. Reading this piece alongside an article from the Observer covering similar ground a couple of years ago, has left me wondering about sport in fiction, and how sport could work in British fiction. Read the rest of this entry »

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January 17, 2012

Pay The Writer? Don’t Pay The Writer?

What with being around five years behind the rest of the internet, I only recently watched this video from the writer Harlan Ellison, ranting at expectations that writers need not be paid for their work. It is a pretty funny rant, but pretty flawed. I found it kind of funny that the keeps using the word “essay” rather than the correct phrase “filmed interview about a TV programme” to make a point about being paid for his work, as if his every utterance is on a par with a carefully constructed and argued piece of writing. I have no problem with him wanting paying for everything and anything he does, that’s up to him, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves – talking about Babylon Five is hardly on a par with the finest literature. Read the rest of this entry »

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