Category: words

“It doesn’t matter how you publish. It matters, though, that we’re all together in this, and not shitty toward each other, and not hunkering down into our little cults and camps, our factions and followings. It matters that we can all do better and that we strive for that with every day, every word, every story.”

“We’ve had histories of conversation, boredom, shit, death, breasts, penises, tasting, happiness, smiling, laughing, celibacy, masturbation, taking out the trash, obsession, collective joy, and sadness” – and now sleep.

“‘I am so sorry that I wasn’t clear,’ she said. ‘I take my writing very seriously and I have tried many genres and I’ve always done it in a very serious way.'”

It points out excessive adjectives, tiresome uses of the passive voice and so on. What it doesn’t do, sadly, obviously, is get you any closer to Papa’s prose.

George Packer: “Recently, Amazon even started creating its own ‘content’ … In the book business the prospect of a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution is especially worrisome: it would give Amazon more control over the exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history.”

George Packer: “Perhaps a sector that monetizes information is more likely to become obsessed with protecting it than if the product were oil or cars. But even in this atmosphere, Amazon is reflexively, absurdly secretive … From Amazon’s point of view, there might be nothing to be gained from greater openness … But I would argue that a culture of secrecy is bound to end up harming the institution itself.”

“Penguin India has agreed to recall and destroy all remaining copies of a book on Hinduism by a leading American academic … Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History had been the subject of a legal challenge claiming the text was offensive to Hindus.

“Dinanath Batra has arm-twisted … Penguin India into recalling and destroying American scholar Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History. Here’s why he has a problem with it.”

“If you maintained this reading speed, you could read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy in 11 hours and 1 minute,” I am told. Well, I think if I maintained that speed, my brain would combust, and I was cheating a bit…

“The Hatchet Job – as all self-styled rebellions and expressions of naughtiness do – relies on the idea of a flourishing literary culture, peopled with literary colossi wielding influence with every metaphor they scrutinise, pontificating weekly in seemingly endless literary sections, dominating the stage on television arts shows, venerated across the land. Oh. Right.”