Authorial remembrance

When I was writing my Bowie book, as I was writing the final chapters, I went to‎ visit my father in Cheltenham (this turned out to be the last time I saw him before he died). He asked me what I was working on, and I told him that was writing a book about Bowie’s extraordinary performance on TOTP, and how he influenced an entire generation of music and fashion obsessives. When he asked me why I reeled off the various elements of his performance that had been so challenging, so inspiring, and so transgressive. I described the way in which Bowie had toyed sexually with his guitarist Mick Ronson, the way in which he had dressed like a pansexual spaceman, the way in which he looked, the way in which he sashayed across the screen like a 1920s film star, and, saliently, the way in which his flame-red hair, his dayglo jumpsuit and the general glam colour fest had almost colonised the programme. I explained that this was the moment when the 1970s finally outgrew the 1960s, when the monochrome world of boring, boring south-east England had exploded in a fiesta of colour.

My father looked at the floor, took a moment, and then said, very quietly: “You know we had a black and white television, don’t you?”

- Dylan Jones, in The Independent

The lives of other writers

Or - Two friends record their recent experiences in the book 'business'.

William Brown, author of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age



Howard Male, author of Etc Etc Amen

#halfwitslag

Too cryptic?

Try here.

'Shakespeare made little changes'

You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letters. It doesn't matter what it's about. It can be the exact depth in the sea to which a chap's corpse has sunk; hardly a matter of universal interest, but if you say, 'Full fathom five thy father lies', you will be considered the greatest poet who ever lived. Express precisely the same thought any other way - e.g. 'your father's corpse is 9.144 metres below sea level' - and you're just a coastguard with some bad news.

- Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence

[with thanks to Sam Leigh, for the splendid - signed! - gift]  

My father writes...

on apposite stationery.