This week:
* I read the excellent Kent Haruf’s Our Souls At Night as well as this profile on the Making Of A Writer. For some reason, I paused and wondered if Haruf might have been more widely known if he’d been a woman. Not that he wasn’t widely known, but his prose style really excels in a way that few others quite match, and for that he should be one of those writers who has been read by everyone who’s serious about writing themselves, and that is far from the case. Is it that his novels have modest and domestic settings, and it’s okay for women to write about those, but not so much for men? Such pigeonholing limits both men and women, and if we are to break out of that perhaps we need to recognise that men can and should write about the domestic just as much as women can and should write beyond it. Never mind, he took me to small towns in Colorado with some haunting images and sharp turns of phrase. Fantastic dialogue too – some of the best.
* Talking of pigeonholes, I read a thought-provoking piece about desegregating literature. It made me think about the lines that writers write across: lines of colour, lines of gender, lines of otherness. Also lines of responsibility in writing.
* Some of these (and other) points were addressed more specifically in this Guardian-hosted conversation about African writing.
* I also read a profile of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
* And took a look at David Foster Wallace.
* I chuckled to read how Twitter taunted EL James. I’ve yet to read a word of any of her books, so what do I know? But I cannot forget the fact that her lawyers got heavy on a parody, while her book is itself just a piece of clit-friggy fan fiction.
* I celebrated Olivia De Havilland’s 99th birthday!
* I was encouraged to read a piece on growing fruits and vegetables in schools. After the teaching of history, I cannot think of anything more valuable for children to learn than gardening. (Except perhaps a foreign language.) Horticulture should be on the national curriculum.
The event I’m sorry I missed: the Classic English Whippet Derby.
Food experiment of the week: I made ice cream for the first time. Lemon and saffron. Jury’s still out – it’s in the freezer, doing its freezing (and apparently without needing a stir, though I have done). And I made one half with Xylitol, to experiment with alternatives to sugar.