Mark Haddon's Blog, page 21

5x15 rerewind

my co-speakers from two weeks ago have finally appeared online. lemn sissay, kate daudy, andrew parker, ruby wax, louise doughty. now i can enjoy their performances. i was the final speaker on the night i was far too busy pacing, panicking and practising while they were doing their stuff. on the page there are some other fine speakers for your browsing pleasure. brian eno, andfrew o'hagan, yotam ottolenghi...

5x15 rewind

this was the 5x15 talk. i'd include links to the other four speakers but i haven't been able to track them down yet.

office chart 4

   

  

1) i'm cycling instead of running on account of dodgy back and had forgotten how glorious it is to be cranking up a big hill in the middle of nowhere. 2) the old arcadia byphilip sidney. an acquired taste perhaps. all readers, however, are allowed to skip the poetic eclogues. this book is not to be confused with the 'new' (longer, more complex, more 'moral') arcadia which has only ever been read in its entirety by 6 people. 3) woodstock road deli, home of the quality salad box to power the working novelist through the early afternoon. 4) quaristice by autechre. another acquired taste, perhaps, but i'm beginning to think this is a bit of a masterpiece. beep,squelch, boom, boom, squelch, beep etc. fantastic.

5x15

 

next monday (that's 27 september) i'm doing a 5x15 event at union chapel in islington along with louise doughty, andrew parker, ruby wax and kate daudy, each of us will be talking for 15 minutes each, some using music and pictures, though i'll be flying by means of the human voice along. the lucinda belle orchestra will be providing halftime entertainment, rather, i hope, like val doonican used to do in the middle of the two ronnies. doors open at 6:30. more info via links below.

i'll be...

some red house

he’d been looking forward to it for the last couple of weeks. a town of books. all this learning gathered in and offered up. trawling, browsing, leafing. but now that he was standing in the bowels of the cinema bookshop… that smell. what was it, precisely? glue? paper? the spores of some bibliophile lichen? catacombs of yellowing paper. every book unwanted, sold for pennies or carted from the houses of the dead. battersea books home. the authors earned nothing from the transaction...

c + spooner

this is wonderful, intelligent, hugely readable and containing some long bravura passages (the protagonist serge carrefax's time as an aerial observer in the first world was unputdownable). but mccarthy has always professed himself to be, and always professed his work to be, deliberately avant-garde and (post)modernist, against lyrical realism, against liberal humanism, against mcewan/amis/barnes and against depth-psychology ([the illusion:] that there is a self prior to anything that exists p...

diggy takes his pick

i stumbled on this the other day and i can think of no good reason for sticking it here except that  i read it when i was a child, that i read very few picture books as a child which gives it a particular resonance, because it's still rather wonderful and therefore seemed to demand some small celebration. you're supposed to say that this kind of thing brings back all kinds of memories. but this doesn't bring back any memories at all. it just resurfaces, still shining, still gloriously...

reading / watching

i started reading two books on holiday and failed to finished them, which isn’t unusual, except that they were two self-evidently good books (the testament of gideon mack by james robertson and wildwood by roger deakin, whose waterlog went some considerable way to changing my life). back home i picked up the methuen book of royal court plays 2000-2010 and i was gripped, partly because  of the quality of the writing and partly because i was learning something. 

being a writer i spend way way...

the mill on the floss

to my shame i'd never actually read it before, despite my love of middlemarch. i don't think any other writer manages a tone which achieves this effortless balance of mockery, empathy, humour, seriousness, insight and sheer delight in language. and i really don't think it's worth writing fiction unless you make some small attempt to write prose with this density and this grace: 

Mrs. Glegg had both a front and a back parlor in her excellent house at St. Ogg's, so that she had two points...

2 prints

stay tuned, 2010

super 16, 2010