Recent reading has got a wee bit meta. First, Tim Parks in Where I’m Reading From (compiled from his articles in the New York Review of Books) about the effect that publication, or the absence thereof, has on writers, in particular those who inhabit creative writing courses:
Why do we have this uncritical reverence for the published writer? Why does the simple fact of publication suddenly make a person, hitherto almost derided, now a proper object of our admiration, a repository of special and important knowledge about the human condition?
And from Robin Ince’s Bibliomaniac, this snippet about things that fall out of the books of the dead (in this case the departed being Ince’s own father):
Within two days I had collected 74 bookmarks and there will be many more to find, some leather ones with fading cathedrals embossed upon them...
...and I wonder whether, had this been submitted to one of the tutors described by Parks, she or he might have red-penned the ambiguity: is it the cathedrals that are fading, or their embossed representations? But I rather like it.
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