The Black Isle

Houellebecq vs. BHL, in a book. Via The Independent.

From p. 673 of Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra:

I praised all his movies, and told him that the last one had made me cry, and that too for hijras, which was a far greater compliment to him than any blenchod National Award. He settled down a bit then, and took a sip of Scotch, and began to grin a little. Writers are pathetically susceptible to praise. I have worked with politicians, and gangsters, and holy men, and let me tell you, none of these can compete with a writer for mountainous inflations of ego and mouse-like insecurities of the soul. I anointed Manu with large helpings of his own glory, and he relaxed.

Fierce Denizen and Excellent Fossil on auction at Chait.com.

Plus:
Almost-Dinosaur
Stingray Fossil
Living Trilobites
Sawfish Rostrum

Rat in a box. Man unpacking in Yokohama, 19th C.
Unsigned.

From Newsweek.

Interviewer: One idea of bohemia is that you have to be secluded for a certain time and form your own social universe, which develops its own language. So what is fascinating today is that, on the one hand, the cyberleft is fighting against the fast reduction of privacy, but on the other hand, the younger generation has no problems with revealing masses of intimate information about their own lives online. How much and how radically do you think this movement is changing our societies?

William Gibson: I don’t know. I think I am too old to get it. It is like a kind of hypothetical construct for me. I think that is the fate of being a Science Fiction writer; if you keep doing it long enough, the world around you will become something you don’t understand. But that’s also the fate of all humans really. If you persist long enough, you’ll be living in a completely incomprehensible construct of reality.

From an interview in Mute, via bookforum.

1942

“Clover”
by Tateishi Harumi
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Description: The bittersweet mood of Japanese society in its transition between the expansive, optimistic 1920s and the increasingly militaristic, authoritarian 1930s.

Hermione Lee, 1981 Booker Prize judge:

Salman Rushdie has won the Booker of Bookers and the Best of all Bookers, with his lastingly dazzling, deep and splendid novel, now a classic of world literature, Midnight’s Children. But over a quarter of a century ago, when I was one of the judges who gave him the prize, his book was by no means an easy winner. Not many people had heard of Rushdie, unless they’d read a weird piece of science fiction called Grimus or seen the stunning extracts from the new novel in Granta. Our panel of judges (Samuel Hynes, Joan Bakewell, Brian Aldiss and me, with Malcolm Bradbury as chair) were pulling in different ways. We were reading many writers with more established reputations, and much more experience, than Rushdie - such as Muriel Spark. (To my lasting regret, we overlooked one of Nadine Gordimer’s best novels, July’s People.) Brian Aldiss was especially keen on Doris Lessing’s “space fiction” The Sirian Experiments, Malcolm on Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers.”

Past judges spill: Forty years of the Booker prize in the Guardian.

A drawing of a lantern turning into a face (or vice versa) by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), AKA the guy who did all those giant wave paintings.

Here’s the story of “Oiwa” (Oiwa-san):
Oiwa suffers facial disfigurement after being poisoned by her husband. She dies after going insane, and returns in various forms–particularly that of a paper lantern–to haunt him.