Tiah Beautement's Blog, page 100

On finding what you love

The government is cutting music programmes in schools and slashing Arts grants as gleefully as a morbidly American kid in Baskin Robbins. So if only to stick it to the man, isn't it worth fighting back in some small way? So write your damn book. Learn a Chopin prelude, get all Jackson Pollock with the kids, spend a few hours writing a Haiku. Do it because it counts even without the fanfare, the money, the fame and Heat photo-shoots that all our children now think they're now entitled to because Harry Styles has done it. - James Rhodes: Find what...

On marraige

Marriage is tricky. It is this thing so many hold strong opinions on: to who should be allowed to take part in this thing, to how this thing should be conducted in the day to day. Marriage isn’t something that can be held or seen yet it manages to be and is capable of being broken. This sightless being impacts others – children, in-laws, friends and even businesses – but remains personal. It is between two people. Based on something, and then runs merry over everyone else. The foundation of our marriage seemed to be hiking. We may have met...

On Dirt Music

Tim Winton, Dirt Music - The town was a personality junkyard - and she was honest enough to count herself onto that roll - where people still washed up to hide or lick their wounds. - - She had never understood the grip that places had over people. That sort of nostalgia made her impatient. It was awful seeing people beholden to their memories, staying on in houses or towns out of some perverted homage. - - How might he have told her that the way he lives is a project of forgetting? - - But no book, not a...

On book snobs

There is something innately snobby about the world of books. There is the snobbery of literary over genre, of adult books over children's, of seriousness over comedy, of reality over fantasy, of Martin Amis over Stephen King. And it is unhealthy. If books ever die, snobbery would be standing over the corpse. - Matt Haig, 30 things to tell a book snob

On Terry Practchett

On the 60s "I couldn't get on with the headmaster, and he couldn't get on with me. He really wanted the 60s not to happen, and of course all us boys were very happy that the 60s were happening." On local journalism "Local journalism is journalism," he says. "If you get it wrong, they know where you live. On readers He also likes the fact he has readers of all ages. "Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death." On death Pratchett supports assisted dying, so that the terminally ill can be...

On Ride the Tortoise

Liesl Jobson, Ride the Tortoise - She sang slowly, in the key of blackness. It sounded like a song for harvesting serpents. - - I want to tell her about the intimacy I disturbed the other mornng, but if I tell her about pelican sex she'll think I'm wierd. - - I ask if he minds that I took his photo. He tells me that in Swaziland, where he comes from, the old men believe that each photograph hastens your death by a day. . . I've just stolen two weeks of his life. I promise to delete the entire...

On life

The big mistake I made was thinking that happiness is the default position. Whereas it's just one of the countless states of mind we endure. I've kind of realised life is meant to be tough and everybody is in psychic and spiritual discomfort of some sort and has a burden to carry. I've realised I'm not special. - Marian Keyes, I thought I'd never be able to write again

On history

The face of the angel of history is turned toward the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward....

On If nobody speaks of remarkable things

Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - If you listen, you can hear it. / The city, it sings. - - All the emails I get these days start with sorry but I've been so busy, and I don't understand how we can be so busy and then have nothing to say to each other. - - Most of the photos I've got were taken in that last week, rushing around, trying to make up for three unrecorded years. - - I said all of this very quietly, and I was amazed to hear the words coming out...

On good and evil

I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil. - Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist