Maria, how can you come up with such articles?
Another great article. I tried to pick a few points, only to realize that EVERY single statement here, could not be missed.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/03/jorge-luis-borges-on-writing/
Best of which were:
On writing and aging:
The essential advantage I see in it is that the short story can be taken in at a single glance. On the other hand, in the novel the consecutive is more noticeable. And then there’s the fact that a work of three hundred pages depends on padding, on pages which are mere nexuses between one part and another.
Alfonso Reyes said that one published what he had written in order to avoid spending his life correcting it: one publishes a book in order to leave it behind, one publishes a book in order to forget it. (I couldn't agree more. For all the new code I wrote, I would keep revising, adding comments and debugs endlessly. My boss once had to stay, "Enough! Stop it now. We have to release the code!")
I wonder how we came up with popular and bestseller lists for everything!
Just because someone or something is popular, is it guaranteed to be good for all or even guaranteed to be good in the first place? Don't we have tons of examples for that? Popular chocolates, popular serials, popular movies... What does popular then mean? That MANY people used it or saw it or probably even liked it.. I am sure many of these lists are rigged which can easily be seen even with the Oscar selection (given that only a handful of people really make the choice). I don't know how the bestseller thing affects artists. I am sure many of them have seethed in anger about this concept of bestseller. Same for career choices, isn't it? Popular career choices - medicine or engineering. Anything below, is for under achievers. If so, why do they have a Nobel prize for other things?
What great things have these over achievers, joining medicine or engineering done? In India - I can surely claim that 99% of the engineers are not engineers. Then what are you?
I have no clue how all this popular or bestseller thing started, but it has driven people in wrong directions. That's for sure.
I just read the Forbes India Celebrity 100 Nominees List...
http://forbesindia.com/article/special/forbes-india-celebrity-100-nominees-list/34337/1
I think Rajinikanth is not on the list! How many people would agree to that? I guess he does have a national fan following or atleast in the 4 south Indian states :-) It's not that I am his fan, but I am just point out to the things they've missed. I guess most stars start out wanting to be in such lists and later when they become choosy about their work, they despise the same lists which they once wanted to be named in. That's the irony of life. You become famous, only to desire isolation and anonymity in the end.
Also, read the comments... and viewers telling that actor XXX should have been on the list.
Hilarious I should say.
Also, this is a place to mention my frustration with Midnight's children. After all the hype and recommendations by friends, I started to read the book. I had read the first 17 pages, almost 30 times. I could not proceed beyond that. There were as many characters as a yellow pages has. I made a tree diagram for the characters and their relations so that I don't get lost. I had to constantly use the dictionary to understand the vocabulary. After so much hardship, I finished the book and realized that I found no joy in having read it! It did not amuse me. Some small thoughts and phrases amused me but as a whole to me it was a failure! But, this book had won the booker of bookers! Who am I to dispute? What did all this mean? It meant that:
a) I am not ready for Salman Rushdie. Simple. He's way ahead of my league.
b) There COULD be a possibility that people are reading and raving about this book, just because it won the Booker and just to show off that they are well read.
But - I will never say that it's trashy - that it's not a good book. I have no right to say that. I can say, that it did not appeal to me.
Same happened with Jhumpa Lahiri. I had read her - Interpreter of maladies and was blown away by the stories. So, I followed it up with The Namesake and it failed me immsensely.
Same disappointment with Love in the time of cholera and The museum of innocence.
While on books, a few books that I really loved are - Dan Brown's Da Vinci code and angels and demons, Neelam Saran Gour's The song without an end and other stories, Jane Austen's Price and Prejudice, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the wind, Khaled Hosseni's The kite runner.
While on books - please note that when we re-read a book 5 or 10 years down the line, we may get a different feeling from the same book. Why? Simple because the person reading the book has changed. The book has not changed for sure, has it? It's solid print on paper and no one can magically erase and re-write them. Then what changed? We... with time. It's an important point to realize. That explains why some friendships change over time, preferences change, everything changes..
I think I am biased towards short stories because you cannot write without a story in a short story. In a whole blown novel you have a lot of padding like Jorge mentioned and I have to read the padding to get to the story. I don't like padding. I just like the core story, I guess. So, I'm all for powerful stories without the added girth.
There are good times to be a writer and be published. There is self publishing option too.
But, all this leads me to wonder, do we have more writers than readers? Is it like the Indian traffic jam situation where we have smaller roads but increasing vehicles? How do some of the authors sell?
After Chetan Bhagat, Amish Tripathi became a phenomenal success and has inspired many others. Many do not view Salman Rushdie as Indian, also he's not accessible to the masses, so the man who won the booker of bookers, is not an inspiration for many :-)
Another great article. I tried to pick a few points, only to realize that EVERY single statement here, could not be missed.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/03/jorge-luis-borges-on-writing/
Best of which were:
On writing and aging:
To reach the point of writing in a more or less uncluttered manner, a more or less decorous manner, I’ve had to reach the age of seventy.It’s toxic to imagine an ideal reader, defying Michael Lewis’s assertion that the awareness of an audience’s existence exerts “invisible pressures” on the writer:
An absurd statement; how is a person going to write better or worse because he’s thinking about who’s going to read him?
The essential advantage I see in it is that the short story can be taken in at a single glance. On the other hand, in the novel the consecutive is more noticeable. And then there’s the fact that a work of three hundred pages depends on padding, on pages which are mere nexuses between one part and another.
Alfonso Reyes said that one published what he had written in order to avoid spending his life correcting it: one publishes a book in order to leave it behind, one publishes a book in order to forget it. (I couldn't agree more. For all the new code I wrote, I would keep revising, adding comments and debugs endlessly. My boss once had to stay, "Enough! Stop it now. We have to release the code!")
I wonder how we came up with popular and bestseller lists for everything!
Just because someone or something is popular, is it guaranteed to be good for all or even guaranteed to be good in the first place? Don't we have tons of examples for that? Popular chocolates, popular serials, popular movies... What does popular then mean? That MANY people used it or saw it or probably even liked it.. I am sure many of these lists are rigged which can easily be seen even with the Oscar selection (given that only a handful of people really make the choice). I don't know how the bestseller thing affects artists. I am sure many of them have seethed in anger about this concept of bestseller. Same for career choices, isn't it? Popular career choices - medicine or engineering. Anything below, is for under achievers. If so, why do they have a Nobel prize for other things?
What great things have these over achievers, joining medicine or engineering done? In India - I can surely claim that 99% of the engineers are not engineers. Then what are you?
I have no clue how all this popular or bestseller thing started, but it has driven people in wrong directions. That's for sure.
I just read the Forbes India Celebrity 100 Nominees List...
http://forbesindia.com/article/special/forbes-india-celebrity-100-nominees-list/34337/1
I think Rajinikanth is not on the list! How many people would agree to that? I guess he does have a national fan following or atleast in the 4 south Indian states :-) It's not that I am his fan, but I am just point out to the things they've missed. I guess most stars start out wanting to be in such lists and later when they become choosy about their work, they despise the same lists which they once wanted to be named in. That's the irony of life. You become famous, only to desire isolation and anonymity in the end.
Also, read the comments... and viewers telling that actor XXX should have been on the list.
Hilarious I should say.
Also, this is a place to mention my frustration with Midnight's children. After all the hype and recommendations by friends, I started to read the book. I had read the first 17 pages, almost 30 times. I could not proceed beyond that. There were as many characters as a yellow pages has. I made a tree diagram for the characters and their relations so that I don't get lost. I had to constantly use the dictionary to understand the vocabulary. After so much hardship, I finished the book and realized that I found no joy in having read it! It did not amuse me. Some small thoughts and phrases amused me but as a whole to me it was a failure! But, this book had won the booker of bookers! Who am I to dispute? What did all this mean? It meant that:
a) I am not ready for Salman Rushdie. Simple. He's way ahead of my league.
b) There COULD be a possibility that people are reading and raving about this book, just because it won the Booker and just to show off that they are well read.
But - I will never say that it's trashy - that it's not a good book. I have no right to say that. I can say, that it did not appeal to me.
Same happened with Jhumpa Lahiri. I had read her - Interpreter of maladies and was blown away by the stories. So, I followed it up with The Namesake and it failed me immsensely.
Same disappointment with Love in the time of cholera and The museum of innocence.
While on books, a few books that I really loved are - Dan Brown's Da Vinci code and angels and demons, Neelam Saran Gour's The song without an end and other stories, Jane Austen's Price and Prejudice, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the wind, Khaled Hosseni's The kite runner.
While on books - please note that when we re-read a book 5 or 10 years down the line, we may get a different feeling from the same book. Why? Simple because the person reading the book has changed. The book has not changed for sure, has it? It's solid print on paper and no one can magically erase and re-write them. Then what changed? We... with time. It's an important point to realize. That explains why some friendships change over time, preferences change, everything changes..
I think I am biased towards short stories because you cannot write without a story in a short story. In a whole blown novel you have a lot of padding like Jorge mentioned and I have to read the padding to get to the story. I don't like padding. I just like the core story, I guess. So, I'm all for powerful stories without the added girth.
There are good times to be a writer and be published. There is self publishing option too.
But, all this leads me to wonder, do we have more writers than readers? Is it like the Indian traffic jam situation where we have smaller roads but increasing vehicles? How do some of the authors sell?
After Chetan Bhagat, Amish Tripathi became a phenomenal success and has inspired many others. Many do not view Salman Rushdie as Indian, also he's not accessible to the masses, so the man who won the booker of bookers, is not an inspiration for many :-)
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