slightly batty

Muriel Spark’s advice for writing (Get a cat!)

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work, I explained, the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp. The light from a lamp, I explained, gives a cat great satisfaction. The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.

–The Atlantic on writing advice 

Julian Barnes wins the Booker

Just saw this old Paris Review interview. Seriously jealous of his library.

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“Julian Barnes lives with his wife Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent, in an elegant house with a beautiful garden in north London. The long library where the interview was conducted is spacious and quiet. Overlooking the garden, it has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a comfortable sofa and chairs, an exercise bike in a corner (“for the winter”), and a huge billiard table. On the walls are a series of cartoon portraits of writers by Mark Boxer—Philip Larkin, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, V. S. Pritchett, among others— “some because they are very good cartoons, others because I admire the writers.” There is a superb photograph of George Sand in middle age, taken by Nadar in 1862, and a short original letter by Flaubert, a present from Barnes’s publishers when they had sold one million copies of his books in paperback. Barnes works down the corridor in a yellow-painted study with an enormous three-sided desk, which holds his typewriter, word processor, books, files, and other necessities, all of which he can reach with a swivel of his chair.”

(Source: theparisreview.org)

The Franzen Paradox

The first thing I’ve read about Franzen that addresses my primary complaint about him: I read his descriptions of his characters’ foibles as condescension, it never seems to me that it has any affection on his part.

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That is a shining example of the Franzen paradox: even as he’s making what many others—and, by his own account, he himself—would consider a very serious charge against his friend’s work, he seems to believe himself to be doing so in a spirit of affection. The gap between his self-perception and ours is his trademark, one reason why so many find it tempting to, well, you know, dislike him.

—Michelle Dean, The Awl

(Source: The Awl)