Most loathed books

Critics choose their most loathed books.

My list would definitely have to start with The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger and A Sentimental Education by Flaubert.

Angry? (Carlin)

I’m not an angry person, just very disappointed and contemptuous of my fellow humans’ choices.

George Carlin

Cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls, or troublemakers (Musil)

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor had always lived, is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.

Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know-it-alls, or troublemakers.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Books

Entertainment Weekly has put out a rather dubious list of the 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008. I've only read 26 of them.

Consider your support

It is as immoral—and unwise—to support a good person co-opted for evil purposes as it is to support a wicked person.

Writing

Writing = the right words in the right order.
Writing poetry = the right words, with the right sound, in the right order.

Freedom

Freedom, in the future, will be, like today, not a birthright or a perk of good government but a commodity leased in whatever quantity you can afford, only the range of customization will be greater.

Animals (Millet)

Animals were self-contained and people seemed to hold this against them—possibly because most of them had come to believe that animals should be like servants or children. Either they should work for men, suffer under a burden, or they should entertain them. He had strained against the wolf's aloofness himself, resenting the wolf for its insistence on distance. He had felt it almost as an insult, and inwardly he retaliated.

But then he was self-contained too: he had a private purpose, a trajectory, and no one had license to block it. It might be obscure even to him, but that obscurity was his own possession. The old wolf's unwillingness to be near him was fully forgiven by the light of day and in fact the joke was on him. Wariness was simply its way of life, having nothing to do with him. It had not been robbed of this quality, though it was caged and it was solitary: it retained its essence. It did not attempt to ingratiate itself. It did not have diplomacy.

...He had wanted the old wolf to come close to him, head down, softening. As though all wild animals could one day be tamed—as though this was an aspect of all of them, this one-day-tamable quality, and their wildness was nothing more than coyness or a mannerism. As though other animals should not only submit to people but behave like them, comport themselves with civility.

Privately, he thought, at the heart of it, you wanted animals to turn to you in welcome. It was a habit gained from expecting each other to do this, from expecting this of other people and only knowing people, not knowing anything beyond them. That was another kind of solitude, the kind where there was nothing all around but reflections.

And what about the endless differences of the animals, their strange bodies? Many legs, stripes, a fiery orangeness; curved teeth or tentacles, wings or scales or sky-blue eggs... Instead of looking at the wolf as an animal he never knew and never could, as with the sacred and the divine, he had fallen into the trap. He had wanted it to lick his hand and lope along beside him.

Lydia Millet, How The Dead Dream

Poetry cloud

Below is a cloud of the most common words used in my poems:

Broaden the definition (Stross)

I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction—the study of the human condition—needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever. If it was, we'd still be living in caves rather than worrying about global climate change. To the extent that writers of mainstream literary fiction focus on the interior landscape exclusively, they're wilfully ignoring processes and events that have a major impact on our lives. And I think that's an unforgivably short-sighted position to take.

Charlie Stross

Vini
November 1989 - June 12, 2008

A couple of recent meals

Pan-fried flounder with dill:


Spinach-stuffed chicken with balsamic reduction:

How do you know?

One day Zhuangzi, a follower of Laozi, stood on a bridge with a friend. Gazing at the fish below, Zhuangzi spoke of the joy of a fish’s knowledge, which was true union with the Tao, living life as an uncarved block.

His friend said: "How do you know what a fish knows? You are not a fish."

To which Zhuangzi, replied: "How do you know what I know? You are not me."

A flower is not a muse

This is so true...

Nobody can say you are wrong (Gulzar)

My poetry is a part of my sensibility. You cannot plan or compartmentalise life. It is instinctive. Just be yourself. That is the easiest way but also the most difficult. There are so many pressures, demands, lehaz karna padhta hai. But if one is honest to oneself, there is always a way out. If you are yourself, nobody can say you are wrong.

Gulzar

Drought

Exciting news! My poem, "Drought," has been accepted for publication! More details to follow...