Random Notes

To write in fast and furious mode is to leave the world completely. This kind of writing requires the self-involvement that the young do best. ... A novel written in a kind of hypergraphic mania often possesses an excitement and passion that survive the journey from the writer's mind to the reader's mind. These hurried novels have a recognizable urgency about them, while the slower ones tend to possess a careful stateliness. Neither is objectively "better," but personally I often like the fast ones more. They're feverish, eager and rarely bogged down with excess weight. More slowly written novels are bigger, more complicated, less sleek.

A writer starts a novel not knowing exactly what kind it's going to be or how long it will take, but the answers soon become apparent. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a matter of months on much of The Great Gatsby, and nine years on Tender is the Night, a disparity that seems about right to me. They're both beloved books, but Gatsby is the one that's nearly perfect and practically recitable. Flaubert's Madame Bovary is an example of a "medium-slow" book (five years), full of suspended, minute description, but it reads in part as if it might actually have been written fast, so inevitable and whirling is Emma's downward spiral. And you just know that Henry James never wrote -- or did anything -- in a madcap rush. Fast and loose writers, however, sometimes have an impressionistic, intuitive, streamlined vision, as if their observations were made from the window seat of a bullet train. (Ed: Vikram Seth apparently wrote Golden Gate in seven days. i.e. the first draft)

Because what really bummed me out about the Amazon haters (Ed: here)wasn't that they disagreed with my politics, but that they immediately summoned such genuine outrage at me for deigning to express a political opinion at all.

They regarded Candyfreak as entertainment, which meant, basically, that I was supposed to serve as a candy monkey for them: swinging from my zany licorice ropes and making funny gibbering noises. By including my political views, I was in direct violation of The First Law of Social Apathy, which holds a popular culture should exist divorced from any of the moral facts of its current political condition. What folks want from the pop — hell, what we deserve as tax–paying Americans — is a nice soothing mind bath. ... This is the reason, for instance, that so many people can vote for a party that believes gays are sub–human but still watch "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy," (because fags are so darn funny!). It's also the reason liberals can drive around in SUVs, while decrying policies driven by oil–dependency. (Ed: Ouch! Now is the time to claim center-right beliefs - really, almost ...)

But of course it is one of the functions of art (yes, even popular art) to call people on such bullshit, to raise people's consciousness, to awaken their capacities for compassion. William Faulkner probably put this best in his 1951 speech, upon accepting the Nobel Prize: "The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." It seems to me that the time has come answer this call.

RB: Are you suggesting that arts and writers are morally superior?

SA: No. I don’t think so. I wish they were. Because in my idealization of art I view someone like Saul Bellow— who is capable of writing such beautiful, compassionate, deeply empathetic works, so insightful and so merciful—I actually assume that if they are conscious enough to do that then they are good to the people around them. That’s a bunch of crap. It’s a bunch of nonsense. Not just in Bellow’s case, but in many people’s cases. I don’t think they are morally superior, but I think when they are good as writers, in the moment that they are creating, they are exquisitely human and in a way that is Christly. That is, they love their characters unconditionally and not for their nobility and good deeds but for their inequity, their wickedness and they are totally unjudgmental in the best moments.

You're entering the world of personal publishing at a perilous time. While the tools for creating blogs are bountiful, cheap, and increasingly easy to use, there's nothing to stop you from making macramé on your site several times each day. You choose a template, pick a funny name for your blog, and then what? The desire to post often leads new bloggers to shovel loads of jokey memes, personality tests, and popular news links into their entries. While there's nothing wrong with recycling links—everyone does it—the real zest comes from sharing your perspective on what those link or memes mean to you. ... You can choose to use your voice any way you please, but the really talented bloggers are using theirs to share snapshots of their lives or to provide peeks into the things that obsess them. This attracts readers—often because they share those obsessions, but just as frequently because they happen to love the way those bloggers express themselves. ...

This is not to say that you should parse all your post ideas through endless filters. But I do encourage you to bring something unique about yourself to the conversation whenever you can. Even if you and your kitty are the only ones who read your blog, you'd do well to regard each entry as a chance to say something new, entertaining, unusual, or funny about yourself and the world around you. Don't post crap.

The trick, if there is one, is to zero in on the thing that really makes you want to share your stuff with the world, and then go with it."

We want -- nay, insist upon -- specialists, the more credentialed the better. Take the field of literature for example. Americans expect its novelists -- particularly the ones we've lavished numerous awards on -- to remain novelists at the expense of anything else. Our sense is that big award-winning novelists, rather than waste their literary efforts on mere trifles, should be at home writing the great American novel, and nothing else. ...John Updike's another writer who has suffered, I believe from this emphasis on specialization. Updike's built a well-recognized and well-rewarded career as a novelist, though I personally find his fiction unreadable to the point of being amazed that others not only read it, but *enjoy* it. And yet: Updike is one of the most gifted essayists and sensitive critics of his generation, and has moments when he is simply without peer as a formalist poet. But: this is not, for the most part, that American audiences want. Nice, uh, "verse," Mr. Updike, but would you mind going back to writing those novels of yours?

And we don't just do this to our own writers: we end up "Americanizing" British writers as well. Most Americans think of George Orwell only as the author of Animal Farm and 1984. But without a doubt what he'll be remembered for are his imminently re-readable essays and journalism. Yet try pointing that out to your average undergrad."Orwell? Didn't he write that farm book I read in high school?"

British literary culture, on the other hand, is much different. Not only do they not mind amateur forays into fields that Americans would only allow professionals into, they seem to possess a cultural insistence upon it. .....

We allow men of the Renaissance to be Renaissance men. It is accepted that Michelangelo wrote sonnets; that Leonardo da Vinci invented flying machines on-off days from painting virgins and last suppers; even that Henry VIII was a fair musician as well as an epoch-making monarch. But at some point between the 16th and 19th centuries, being a Renaissance figure stopped being something for a serious artist to crow about. The facts that Blake drew, etched and painted as well as wrote, that Saint-Saens was a gifted amateur mathematician, astronomer, poet and playwright, and that Borodin was a distinguished doctor, are considered signs of eccentricity and possibly waywardness (if they had concentrated more on the matter in hand, they might have made it to the top table).

You could say that modern civilisation is a history of intensifying specialisation; as knowledge increases, any single person's hope of grasping more than a tiny section of the ballooning sphere diminishes. That may be true of science, and is certainly true of factory labour, but I am not at all sure it applies to art, or indeed life lived artfully.

I remember feeling greatly cheered when I read that the English painter Stanley Spencer devoted up to one third of his waking hours to playing Bach on the organ. This makes no sense according to contemporary ideas of time management, and maybe his wife felt he should concentrate a bit more on work that would support the family, but Spencer stuck to his guns, or his preludes and fugues.

The point, I assume, was not that Spencer was a brilliant organist or musician, but that playing Bach was an essential part of what made him tick, as an artist and as a human being. Bach's theological polyphony, his chromaticism, his unerring architecture, in some mysterious way, fed into Spencer's ecstatically textured vision of Cookham, its men and women, animals, birds, trees and river.

Spencer might seem eccentric (anyone who can discern earthly paradise in a Berkshire village must have a special kind of sight), but I don't think his Bach-playing habits are really so unusual. Recently I discovered that Samuel Butler (a splendidly bitter, bracing author I have only just got round to investigating) co-wrote an oratorio called "Narcissus". Anthony Burgess is a more recent example of a writer who spent time composing music.

I believe that Renaissance man or woman is not a peculiarity of that era, but is much more complete and representative - and in a way more normal version - of humanity than modern-day "compartmentalised man". Joseph Beuys gets a lot of stick these days for saying "everyone is an artist". Not everyone is a great artist, to be sure; great artists are few in number; but every human being is born a singer, a dreamer, and at certain moments and in certain states a poet. Language was originally poetry. The Iliad and the Odyssey come before the Peloponnesian war and the dialogues of Plato; whole darkening aeons before Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management.

We should all encourage and develop as much breadth and multi-facetedness as we find within ourselves, and others. This may involve spending time on things that we are not especially good at, whether it be singing, poetry or painting, but which extend our range of thought and feeling and deeply enrich us.

"We build our own engineers," says S.K. Bhagavan, who oversees Wipro's in-house "talent transformation" team of 70 faculty members. In a year, Bhagavan's team conducts 150,000 hours of training, and that includes coaching in "soft skills" needed by a work force that interacts with clients globally.

... At an aggregate level too, India needs to convert more of its generalist scientific talent into software professionals to sustain the industry's competitiveness. Of a total population of 7.7 million science and technology professionals in 2000, about half, or 3.8 million, were science graduates. Only 970,000 were graduate engineers, according to an estimate by the Institute of Applied Manpower Research in New Delhi. While India does need more science doctorates to carry out research, it doesn't need more unemployed physics graduates.

Seven out of 10 employees hired in the last three years by Infosys Technologies, Wipro's slightly bigger competitor by market value, were fresh graduates. In order to raise the quality of the talent it hires, the Bangalore-based company has released some of the course material it uses to train employees to universities under a $2 million "Campus Connect" initiative."

Have you heard of the latest fad, Extreme Programming? Well, without getting into what I think about XP, the reason you've heard of it is because it is being promoted by people who are very gifted writers and speakers.

Even on the small scale, when you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can't do anything about that.

With many BPOs serving two square meals a day, 8.13 lakh meals is a much discounted figure. The delectable dal makhani and palatable paneer can earn you lakhs. Those who smelled this inviting opportunity early on are now earning big money.