1. W.H. Auden:

"Bound to ourselves for life

We must learn to put up with each other."

2. K.F. Burdach via Freud:

"Dream is a bulwark against the regularity and ordinariness of life, a period of free rest and recreation for the chained imagination in which it tosses all the images of life into confusion and interrupts the steady seriousness of the waking person with a joyous childhood game; without dreams we should certainly age faster, so dream, even if not directly bestowed from above, may still be seen as a precious duty, a congenial companion on our pilgrimage to the grave."

3. Then Auden on Freud (not the simpering eulogy I was hoping for):

"...but he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
us dumbly to ask them to follow:
they are exiles who long for the future..."

"Stories" 2010

A short story by Michael Moorcock.

"We didn't want to write what we called Englit-fic: the styles and themes of which came out of universities in sad imitation of the great modernists. We wanted to write something that had the vitality of good commercial fiction and the subtle ambition of good literary fiction, reflecting the sensibilities and events of our times: stuff that would get us high with the sense of engagement of Proust or Faulkner but with the disciplined vitality of genre fiction pulsing from every page.

A few of us talked about a 'two-way street' to reunite junk, middlebrow and highbrow fiction. Some people out there had to be as frustrated as us, dissatisfied by pretty much everything on offer, literary or commercial. For ages people had discussed the 'two cultures'. We might just be the guys to unite them: writing for a reader who knew a bit about poetry, painting and physics, enjoyed Gerald Kersh, Elizabeth Bowen and Mervyn Peake, merging realism with grotesquerie and doing it elegantly, eloquently."

There's a repeat of the old maxim in here - something once relayed from Kubrick to Stephen King during their only pre-production phone call regarding "The Shining" - about the essential optimism of ghost stories.

I pitched and wrote a nice piece for our Saturday magazine about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Finished "Labyrinths", and Michael Swanwick's "The Dragons of Babel" (on the evidence of this he's the Armistead Maupin of the fantasy genre) reading "The Interpretation of Dreams."

"On becoming a novelist" (1983)

Came home from work and read this book, considered a classic, by novelist John Gardner, who once taught Carver. A couple of passages really stood out for me. If I were to choose one of them, it would be this (the other one was about choosing to study science over literature, which he had some interesting thoughts on).

"Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency towards churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know to be true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness; impulsiveness and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident."

"Boxer, Beetle"

Just finished this excellent book; reminiscent of Michael Chabon, I think, as well as Twelve Bar Blues (here's my review). I didn't much like any of the characters though their psychology was brilliantly rendered; eugenicist as repressed homosexual; bruiser who doesn't pay much attention to such things; free will versus determinism and all that jazz. Two digressions (language and architecture) as well as flitting between two times. I want to trace what came from where; the ideas are dazzling, and inspiring. Also completed Stephen King's On Writing, working my way through SF periodicals (or trying to, I'm guessing a lot of them are well past their golden age). Completed a couple of half ideas, Guardian Angela and Bobby Rodriguez which I guess are "flash fiction"; I don't have the heart to go back and fill them out. Wrote another quick story called "Carver beats the devil".

To read....

So I've been on a bit of an Amazon spree recently and I thought I'd upload this photo because I'm feeling slightly smug about it. I've got two weeks off coming up and I want to plough through this lot; have three pre-orders waiting in the wings and three more I'd like to read (including something by Jon Stone who I saw recently, but anyway). I think I should make headway with this lot first.

Oceans, The Deep, Coolth

A random week, but interesting. Had pieces published on Gwyn Prins' piece on A/C from the 1990s, one of the best papers I've read in ages; something on oceanography, again based on a scientific work which was as good as anything I've read, and a nice TV review.

Read The Big Sleep, some literature for something else I'm working on, finally London Orbital, (he loves the words "liminal", "plash", and "Italianate"); an ex-girlfriend's name cropped up in the acknowledgments, which was scary) and have started Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio's "Stories", within which the Joyce Carol Oates vignette blew my mind. A really tight, imaginative, visually clever narrative which was over in 15 pages. Not sure what I think of the Sinclair book, really, there's no real depth to it which is fair enough considering the ground he covers, but it's a very dense proposition. I guess it'll grow.