Been a busy first month or two as arts correspondent. I guess highlights would be:

*Jack Thorne's play at the National;

*An interview with Mat Collishaw;

*Nigerian protests forcing cancellation of a Sotheby's auction (followed by The New York Times and the BBC);

*An interview with James Rhodes;

*Coverage of protests at the Turner Prize;

*Patrick Stewart's complaints about Broadway (followed by The Daily Express)

*Behind the scenes on Peter and the Wolf at the ROH, whose director, Tony Hall, I also interviewed;

*The suspension of the Royal Opera House's move North;

*A page three on Bob Marley;

*A splash on Joanna Yeates.

So I spent last week at Arvon centre the Hurst, in Shropshire, on a short story course. I'd really recommend going on something like this if you're interested in writing; the access you get to the tutors is excellent.

You're essentially there for four days. We had four three-hour workshops, two one-on-one tutorials (with Adam Thorpe and Olive Senior) and then readings in the evenings. Di Speirs, one of Radio 4's senior fiction producers, and the person instrumental in founding the BBC's famous short story award, also came down to answer questions.

I've also just been appointed The Independent's arts reporter/correspondent (not sure on the title as yet), so I'm going to be the point of contact for arts news at the newspaper for the forseeable. It's exciting, because we're also launching a new title aimed at young/lapsed newspaper readers imminently.

Here's my review of Geoff Dyer's essays, a book I couldn't recommend highly enough.

Finished "The Interpretation of Dreams" and this book on Riker's Island which was more interesting than I had initially reckoned, as well as picking through Adam Thorpe's short stories, Ballard's short stories, and Raymond Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" mainly because he was name-dropped by Yannis Philippakis in this month's Q. Also enjoying Geoff Dyer's essays. The following, a Jung quotation, stood out, among others, in Dyer's piece on "Tender is the Night".

"The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing...He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths...The only meaningful life...is...a life that strives for the individual realisation - absolute and unconditional - of its own peculiar law...To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his own being...he has failed to realise his life's meaning."

Wrote some things on Nick Cave, animal pyschology and a couple of historical documentaries.

Wrote a piece on some photographs accompanying "Restrepo", a forthcoming war film directed by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger. Also pitched and wrote page three of the paper on Alasdhair Willis.

Had a couple of weeks off. Read Gary Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story"; "Portnoy's Complaint", "Cloud Atlas" (jaw-dropping); a book of Iain M Banks short stories, "City and the City", Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" and Michael Kahn's "Basic Freud" (the excerpts below are from elsewhere). Wandered to Fulham library and now very much want to read this.

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."