Some linky stuff
I really liked this: Anne Enright on the cliché of writer as rebel and the idea that children curb one's creative flow:
The writer as rebel is one of those clichés that was possibly never that true in the first place. Many of us, over the centuries, have agreed with Flaubert's dictum that "You must live like a bourgeois and save all your violence for your art."....
But though I am a happy pram-pusher of a writer, something in me balks at the idea that the writer is somehow tame - or even, indeed, that pram-pushers are tame - something in me wants the writer to disrupt, to destabilise, to strip things down and rebuild. I want the writer to tell the truth about the thoughts we have in our heads, how large they are and astonishing, not to mention devious and - if I were a certain kind of writer I would add - violent. (I am not that kind of writer. I think violence is shorthand for everything and ends up meaning very little. The world is full of nice men who write about strangling prostitutes while their wives make them tea.)
This is interesting, but I'm really, really not sure how new it is as a phenomenon. And suggest a reading of Doris Lessing's In Pursuit of the English for a useful sense of how circumscribed the personal maps of individuals could be in the midst of a huge city.
Misuse, yet again, of term 'secret' in the place of private or inaccessible, but still interesting: There is nothing hidden any longer about the mile of tunnels 100 feet below High Holborn and Chancery Lane, which BT, the most recent owner has just put up for sale.
Review of Cheeta's tell-all autobiography, Me Cheeta.
The world of yuck: Killer chef cooked dead lover - and was it totally coincidental that the Guardian Review's Ten of the Best [in fiction] was Acts of Cannibalism.
Amina Wadud, an American academic, yesterday became the first woman to lead British Muslims in mixed congregational prayers and deliver the Friday sermon.
Letters on Black History.