I was sad to hear about the death of Cy Tombly today. In my first year at university, when I was doing fine art, one of the staff noticed that I kept writing on my canvases and suggested that I checked out Twombly, who often incorporated scratchy text into his work. I loved his paintings …
I’ve been asked more times than I can count to describe what genre I write in. Sometimes I have a go at answering. ‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘my book’s about a girl who’s turning into glass.’ The truth is, though, as I discovered on Friday when I finished writing my new novel, that it’s …
What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine, & the amazing, infinitely varied & innumerable products of coal tar, those latest & strangest marvels of a marvelous …
Turns out the cavemen didn’t live like this, after all. If you live near a cinema that’s showing it, I recommend getting down there to watch the Werner Herzog documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Herzog has filmed the beautiful cave paintings in the Chauvet Cave and, unless you’re the world’s top paleohistorian, this film is …
Gosh, it’s been a month since I posted anything. March has flown by: a month during which I lost my mobile phone and watched with bewilderment and déjà vu as both my computer and television died. This seems to happen to me every spring. It’s as consistent as the daffodils. All of which is a …