Mohit Parikh > Recent Status Updates

This is a course in miracles. It is a required course.

"Some narrators offend, some narrators appeal, but all narrators are present, the author but not the author,the protagonist but not the protagonist, an intermediary that the author and reader must deal with."

"The protagonist is the fulcrum of the author's relationship to the narrator, and the prose, or style, of the novel continuously presents the shifting balances among the three."
What an insight! A != P != N

The movie ruined the book. Simple, very accessible work on the surface... cerebral if you are familiar with the themes Kosinski likes to touch.

Ever read anything more beautiful? "To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgement. A bath in the sea, a fuck with a soldier who never knew your name. Tenderness towards the unknown and the anonymous, which was a tenderness to the self.
Her legs moved under the burden of the military blankets. She swims in their wool as the English Patient moved in his cloth placenta."

In the last months of writing a book, as the end comes in sight, she becomes possessed. She doesn’t go anywhere, or talk about anything other than the book. She stops only to eat. Her sleep and work hours become erratic: often she will wake up at three in the morning, write for several hours, and then go back to bed. She becomes more and more anxious: it feels to her like stage fright... (on Hilary Mantel)

“I don’t think one ever quite learns to trust the process,” Mantel says. “I feel, What if I wake up tomorrow and I can’t do it anymore? I know I’ll always be able to write, in the sense of having a robust style that’s sufficient to the occasion, and I know that books can be got onto the page by craft, but the thing that makes a phrase that fizzes on the paper—you always fear that may not be there any longer"

Poetry and restrain. Stories remembered, buried. All with a delicacy.
I am smelling the words as I read them.

A scathing early review of Lolita here:
http://www.flavorwire.com/335428/15-s...

15 scathing early review of Lolita:
http://www.flavorwire.com/335428/15-s...

Completely blown over!

Oh, so this is where South Park Chili Carnval took inspiration from

Oh, so this is where South Park Chili Carnval took inspiration from

Losing some of its steam. It's short, but could have been still shorter to be smarter.

'we made a long and slow love. A wind came up and the windows
trembled slightly, the sugar set fragilely ajar by the wind.
I liked Pauline's body and she said that she liked mine, too,
and we couldn't think of anything to say.
The wind suddenly stopped and Pauline said, "What's that?"
"It's the wind."'

My name depends on
you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.
If you are thinking about something that happened a long
time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know
the answer.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was raining very hard.
That is my name.

Two different conversations simultaneously. Mantel experiments this on pg368, half way through the book, and wraps it in less than 500 words. It couldn't have gone any longer, and I will be amazed if it occurs again in this book, and does not in the sequel.

Manufactured.

Typical Russian Realism. If we compare dialogues in Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Tolstoy's works, will we be able to spot difference in style?
I think so, yes, perhaps.

Listening to excellent narration by Tom Stechschulte. Voice as *macho* as of Johnny Cash.

The art of selecting the fitting
symbols, and of so arranging them as to be intelligible and
kindling, distinguishes the great writer from the great
thinker ; it is an art which also relies on clear insight.

Books minister to our knowledge, to our guidance,
and to our delight, by their truth, their uprightness, and
their art. Truth is the aim of Literature. Sincerity is
moral truth. Beauty is aesthetic truth.

We need not insist on the obvious fact of there being
more irritability than mastery, more imitation than creation,
more echoes than voices in the world of Literature.
Good writers are of necessity rare.