From May 19 to 22, last week, Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2005 was held. Various reading, talks, dinners, lunches, and even breakfasts with various authors took place. Aimee Bender's friend Alice Sebold came, Caryl Philips whom I had heard in Seattle and Tokyo came, the funny ex-alcoholic Augusten Burroughs, the hyper-prolific Mark Kurlansky, the Beckett-Jung biographer Deidre Bair came. I could have gone to some of the sessions, but didn't. After all, I am much more interested in the authors as paper-persons and their silent choreography on the surface of the pages than oridinary living humans, eating, laughing, chatting.
But this gives me an incentive to read Kurlansky's non-fiction works, among others. I have been aware of his name for some time, as someone who writes about salt, the cod, the Basque, and 1968. His choice of subjects is insondable. But his books are all too thick! I'm hoping to check them out at the local library one day.
I read Alan Hollinghurst's interview by Michele Hewitson in the paper yesterday.
"He thought about the prize-winning THE LINE OF BEAUTY for two years before he wrote the first chapter. He has no date set to start the thinking again: 'It's kind of like giving up smoking on a fixed date in the future. A formalisation of the whole thing.' / When he does begin, he takes the phone off the hook at 8am, and allows himself one outing a week, usually to the cinema."
Allowing himself one outing a week. It is this bit at the end that interests me.
