All 6 entries tagged Writing

The real world

I am not 100% sure I will still be able to log in here after I graduate. This is in about 20 days. 

Therefore, I am going to bid Warwick blogs a sad farewell.

I am going out into the big pond to try and eat all the bigger fish. Or make friends with them. Whichever is easier.

I want to make books happen. I am going to try and be a writer. Scratch that. I am going to be a writer. 

They say the first twelve years are the hardest. I hope in twelve years I can look back and not loudly mock myself. 

Madeleine Beresford : 10 Jun 2010 11:39 |  Tags: English Literature Poetry Publishing Writing |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

I want to live in a world without planes…

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8626000/8626927.stm

Alain de Botton’s piece is evocative and subtle.

As with Ursula le Guin’s website and the way it forces you to contemplate the image of a barn owl before you dive into what you were looking for, anything that forces us to slow down for a minute – or consider what the benefits of slowing down could be – is something I welcome.

There is no real need for everyone to fly all over the world in the next week or during the past two days; life will go on. People think that when they have ‘important’ jobs, like managing money, leading a country or similar, no moment should be wasted. But ‘time wasters’ make better managers and leaders.

I like what Lin Yutang has to say on the matter:

“the true enjoyment of an idle life doesn’t cost money. The capacity for true enjoyment of idleness is lost in the moneyed class and can be found only among people who have a supreme contempt for wealth.”

and that,

“There is always plenty of life to enjoy for a man who is determined to enjoy it. If men fail to enjoy this earthly existence we have, it is because they do not love life sufficiently and allow it to be turned into a humdrum routine existence.”

Now the sun is finally out, the trees bedecked and unfurling, it is plain idiocy not to enjoy a little idleness – even in the form of a long cup of tea.

Madeleine Beresford : 17 Apr 2010 16:34 |  Tags: Alain Botton De News Slow Writing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

As ever, Ursula Le Guin gets it right…

Writing about web page http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Index-Lavinia.html

As ever, Ursula Le Guin is two steps ahead: look what she's done on her website's 'Lavinia' page. That's right - it's a subtly underlit owl against a midnight background that you have to scroll past to get to the info. 

It's a moment of internet beauty. 

Madeleine Beresford : 16 Apr 2010 11:50 |  Tags: Nature Owls Poetry Warwick Writing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

I cheer myself up by reading about authors who went insane…

Writing about web page http://flavorwire.com/72402/the-mantra-of-writing-fiction

This is a very amusing (and possibly useful) collection of author's tips. My favourites are Colm Toibin's "If you have to read, cheer yourself up by reading the biographies of authors who went insane"  and Margaret Atwood's suggestion to take two pencils onto a plane (because pens break and you can't take sharpeners on the plane) and, if needed, use your arms or a pieces of wood.

I am extremely jealous of writers who can make an actual living as writers. I too would gladly endure a fair amount of poverty in order to be a 'professional' writer. Perhaps this is because, as a student, I am used to poverty and upon ejection into the real world, I will become soft and inured to the higher things in life, such as...blackberries, and new clothes, and also one day maybe being able to shop at Marks and Spencer for food. One can only dream.

Although this is a reccuring dream, similar to my dream about the amazing and amazingly expensive goat's cheese sold at Aubrey Allen (a high class butchers/deli in Leam), a goat's cheese which melts alluringly into your mouth in a explosion of fresh, ripe goodness. But also costs about 50p a mouthful. Some people may think my love of cheese is weird, but I consider it one of the four major food groups, along with coffee, salami and cake.

Madeleine Beresford : 25 Feb 2010 17:31 |  Tags: Le Literature Warwick Writing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

I forgot I was a journalist in a past life

I remembered today that I can actually google my name and find things I wrote. OK, so they are quite far down, and often well-hidden and require alternate spellings of "maddie", "maddy" or "madi", but that is definitely not relevant to the self-serving point. I feel more validated in my literary ambitions since I stumbled across my fine article on a man who sailed around the world to raise money for charity http://archive.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/2007/4/12/312408.html

Or how about me as a gap year student on gap year students?

http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/index.php?Itemid=44&id=388&option=com_content&task=view

But I am deeply saddened to discover I can no longer find my article on the importance of dentistry for children in Mongolia, which I felt was genuinely interesting and required independent research. Jokes aside, people do not realise how important dentistry is to the health of impoverished children.

Of course, I am sort of a real journalist for the Sanctuary, if you count writing articles imagining you are a robot!http://www.sanctuarynewspaper.co.uk/warwick/opinion

Madeleine Beresford : 27 Oct 2009 23:20 |  Tags: Journalism Non-Fiction Robots Writers Writing |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Poetry, poetry, young people, gaaah

Writing about web page http://www.agendapoetry.co.uk/general_interest.php

I was reading this essay yesterday. Although I don't think that Nichi is completely right - because I seem to be surrounded by people getting pretty worked up (and loud) on the subject of poetry - I found the essay a good starting point for going out and asking what form poetry from "my" generation should take.

However, about half-way through the essay, I had what I call a "gaaaah" reaction. This is because she wrote this sentence: "True, poetry has and never will have the popular appeal of fiction".

What is true????? Does poetry have the popular appeal of fiction and simultaneously never will??? Does she mean "It is true that poetry does not and never will have the popular appeal of fiction"??? One of my pet hates is sentences that begin with words that are abbreviations of longer phrases.

After that, I calmed down a bit and reminded myself my writing, particularly my grammar, is far from perfect and that I use an inordinate amount of question marks.

And then I read this sentence:

"Granted, the 'Stanza' committee was aided by a smattering of graduate students affiliated with the English school..."

And I went "gaaaaah" again.

I think the reason I am over reacting to this is because at the moment I am reading The Location of Culture by Homi K.Bhabha. I have been reading this for some time (read: since Term 3) but I've only got to Chapter Two because I have to read everything three times over. Why? I'm mentally punctuating Bhabha because I can't read his writing comfortably off the bat.

For example:

"When I talk of negotiation rather than negation, it is to convey a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendent History, and beyond the prescriptive form of symptomatic reading where the nervous tics on the surface of ideology reveal the 'real materialist contradiction' that history embodies."

To read that sentence, I basically need to mentally add in at least one extra full stop.

When I was reading Culture and Imperialism I had a similar problem at first, but I managed to grow accustomed to Said's style so that it was a breeze. I'm finding this very hard with Bhabha.

What I do with both writers when it gets too much is read some T.S. Eliot criticism, because it's so well punctuated.

I have a little musty book of selections that he edited himself.

Look:

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists."

But, best of all for escaping and for good grammar, is Georgette Heyer. I think she is due a feminist reinvention.

Par example:

"Miss Challoner undoubtedly sniffed. Lord Vidal, whom feminine tears would have left unmoved, was touched."

See? Brilliance ;)

Madeleine Beresford : 22 Aug 2008 19:14 |  Tags: Bad Bhabha Eliot Gah Georgette Heyer Poetry Ts Writing |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem