Writing

For a while now, I have observed this disturbing trend of using the words Porn and Masturbation (P&M) as suffixes in hyphen-separated-phrases to convey that the prefix is inferior, waste of time, pathetic, something to aspire against, etc. Cases in question: intellectual-masturbation, achievement-porn, etc. I find two insulting underlying reasoning schools at work were. One: Just because something is perceivably akin to P&M, it sucks. Two: P&M implicitly suck. Well, that’s it. ...

Here’s what Nabokov said at the end of his literature-appreciation course: “In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author — the joys and difficulties of creation. We did not talk around books, about books; we went to the center of this or that masterpiece, to the live heart of the matter.” ...

Ramanand passed me the 55-word-limit-short-story baton and here is an attempt: —begin— Am a ten pointer. Doesn’t mean that it’s been easy. My neighbors (let’s call them ‘R’ and ‘P’ for now), cheap scorers, but so popular still; seen everywhere, unlike me (sigh). Me, gotta wait for you to complete me. Ah, there you are! come now, lets append ourselves to ‘art’ near that double word score. —-end—- My love affair with short stories began with Doordarshan’s Mitti Ke Rang, which used to adapt the best short stores from the likes of Chekhov, O’Henry, Maxim Gorky, Guy de Maupassant, etc. into 30 minute episodes. This was when I first heard that short stories were a different genre altogether. ...