When work is play

That false adage about finding something you love to do so it never feels like work...

No matter how much I love what I do, there are days when it does feel like work, especially when the bitch [that is, my professed art and craft and cloak of self-definition] don't give me no lovin' right back. These have been just such days.

In case you are in Kathmandu on the 21st, come to QC in Jawlakhel for the Tavern Tales... or, it might be at the Indian Embassy Library, at Sundhara. Best thing to do while there--wander out and keep a sharp eye out for second-hand fiction books...

I picked up The Friendly Brook and Other Stories by R. Kipling from there for Rs 60. By far the most rewarding collection of short fiction I have read in years. He proves to me the utility behind the longevity of a writer's career, the importance of speech and sound in enfolding a multitude of ideas into one expression, and the need for a mind that is expansive but acute, as a preparation for a career writing fiction.

Maia R. Lee is an painter/poet preparing for a solo exhibition in about two months. She gave me A Clockwork Orange to read. I had always only browsed through the book, reading no more than a few pages at a time, loving instead the Kubrick movie, never feeling anything on the page really tug at the mind. I have to say the most interesting bit about this edition of the novel was not the novel itself, but the introduction by Anthony Burgess where he details his choices. Sometimes--with Kipling, for instance--the work is much larger than the writer, the mind is the basis and not the flourish. Other times, the mind is the flourish and the work is subservient to it. That is what it felt like, reading the novel. A very good read, no doubt, but nothing like reading Kipling.

Many readers of the book seem to think that Burgess achieves something quite grand by the way of a linguistic experiment in the book. I would invite these readers to search the stories by Kipling for real writerly work done with language--the living, actual, spoken language, what we call dialects, and see how much more can be achieved with a just pair of ears and some affection for the vessel and table called language.