Nasim Marie Jafry's Blog, page 20

Mona Siddiqui on Desert Island Discs

Very listenable, academic Mona Siddiqui on Desert Island Discs yesterday. I love that her luxury item would be tea. And I had not heard of Jagjit Singh.

Mona Siddiqui on Desert Island Discs

Very listenable, academic Mona Siddiqui on Desert Island Discs today. I love that her luxury item would be tea.

Lovely jubbly, real science not pretend

From Invest in ME Journal,  volume 6, issue 1, June 2012, pg 28:
A compilation of documented immune system abnormalities in ME/CFS from 1983-2011
A lovely list of findings, this the first:
 1983“Our research and that of others working in collaboration with us has shown conclusively that post-viral fatigue state, i.e. myalgic encephalomyelitis, has an undisputed organic basis….We were also able to show by looking at receptors on lymphocytes i.e. markers on white blood cells, that there...

A wee thrill

Congratulations to the winners of Bridport Prize(s) 2012, the results were officially announced this weekend! I was delighted to be on the Flash Fiction shortlist and just saw my name is first on the list - which denotes nothing, purely random! -  but it gives a wee childlike thrill. The Bridport website was revamped earlier in the year and it looks fantastic.

Memory & writing & too many selves

Many years ago I got a copy of Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography in Creative Writing by Celia Hunt. I only ever dipped in but highlighted some paragraphs here and there. The other day I came across this: 'As Ulric Neisser says, autobiographical remembering is a complex, many-layered procedure that involves:
1.    actual past events and the historical self who participated in them;
2.   those events as they were then experienced, including the individual’s own perc...

When

When someone who knows little about the illness reads my novel and enjoys the story *and* learns - and gives 5 stars - I am very happy. A lovely wee Goodreads review. Thank you, Björn.

Always too many on the shelves

There are always books you can give to charity, always too many on your shelves, even when you have given away as many as you can bear. I almost donated George Simenon's La Verité sur Bébé Donge a few weeks ago but when I opened it I realised it was my French prize in fifth year at school so, of course,  I can't release it. Why we keep these things I do not know. I doubt I'll read it again and it will  continue to gather dust.  I can't release The Lord of the Rings either, that...

A sight for sore eyes

Am boring myself rigid with all this ME talk last few days, I'd much rather talk about books and writing, and not be in tears, but the quackery and fuckery MUST be challenged, so that we can have peace to live our lives. Really. And this is just too gorgeous not to post: 
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis: International Consensus Primer for Medical Practitioners 2012
A wee snippet:

Problem
The label ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’ (CFS), coined in the 1980s, has persisted due to lack of knowledge of its...

Sticks and stones

It is, naturally, best to ignore this kind of thing: manipulative half-truths - the second instalment - from media psychiatrist Max Pemberton (Max claims to have followed the medical literature on ME for years -  maybe he means those papers authored by Simon Wessely, for he certainly hasn't learned much); and this - a deliberately inflammatory - piece from Max's friend, a Telegraph journalist I'd never heard of. Wessely's influence is, of course, waning drastically, so Max has to come up...

Literary criticism, Karachi Lit Festival 2012

Interesting discussion here on literary criticism from Karachi Literary Festival 2012. This is the third year of KLF. Speakers are Hanif Kureishi, Muneeza Shamsie (mother of Kamila Shamsie), Stefan Weidner - a German critic - and Alok Bhalla, whom I just love, I could listen to him forever. Hanif seems a bit grumpy, but he's always interesting and I like his comment, around 10 mins in,  that 'a book, in a sense is a collection of instructions for an experience that takes place in your he...