Heartbreaking story of the week

From The Guardian:

One October day I discover I have one mother too many – and no father. I’m five years old. “I want every girl to take a letter home to her parents,” says Reverend Mother after assembly. I don’t like the sound of this. Her French accent makes “parents” rhyme with “ants”, which get everywhere, live in colonies, and pass secret messages. I’m not sure what parents are but I understand there has to be a man in it somewhere. It’s wartime, a time of austerity, when we have just one of everything: one ration book, one gas mask, one identity card, one mother, one father. Many things I have at home – an upright piano and our pregnant cat patriotically misnamed Tommy – but not a man in sight. Already I’ve heard of other girls’ mysterious midnight epiphanies when fathers come home from the war and astonishing baby brothers and sisters appear out of thin air. No such excitements at the house where I live.

The rest here.

More for Dawkins. Like it’s his birthday.

Hilarious comment on a Guardian Unlimited blog under an article about Dawkins and Hitchens and militant atheism:

let’s face it a lot of people with strong atheist beliefs may well be right, but they’re also irredeemably smug, packed-lunch eating, engineering faculty, cleverness in smelly socks, what’s your favourite programming language?, property ladder climbing, in the kitchen talking about cars at parties, materialistic, wet blanketed, cold showered, blinkered, souless, ironic wank mag reading,literalist, pompous, equity-obsessed, wearing loud coloured anoraks on buses, crap bantering, tedious jokes, caring whether they win at trivial pursuit, fact fetish, not half as smart as they think they are, declaiming with absolute certainty passages from the latest Dawkins, unjoyous, status-chasing (shot of baby smiling in back seat), life-planned, married kids and house by 30, quarterly objectives, unpoetic, smarmy, sneering at anything they don’t understand, lifestyle programme enjoying, we could buy some property in Romania, laminate floors and luxury bathroom, still into Indie music (Snow Patrol and Coldplay), urban lifestyle choices, always argue with the winners, self-conceited, unimaginative, reality-is-the-way-they-think-it-is bastards who we shouldn’t believe entirely.

Give me a romantic catholic any day. I like hopeless cases.

For Richard Dawkins

Before Arlo Guthrie was born, his one-year-old sister Kathy was badly injured in a fire. Badly injured as in she was going to die, and indeed she did die within a day or two. But straight after the accident she was rushed to hospital, and her parents Woody and Marjorie summoned from their seperate days. Marjorie arrived first, and had to fill in a number of forms with the nurse before seeing her dying daughter – frustrating, clearly, in the extreme.

“What religion?” said the nurse.

“Put all,” said Marjorie.

The nurse was doubtful. “I can’t put all.”

“Then put none.”

“You aren’t religious?”

“Yes, we are,” said Marjorie. “Put all.”

It was unresolved, but there was no time, and Marjorie ran to her dying daughter.

Moments later a desperate, devastated Woody ran in to the hospital. The nurse, her forms still worryingly unfilled and hoping to solve the conundrum, asked: “What’s your religion?”

He yelled over his shoulder as he sprinted down the hallway. “It’s all or nothing!”

A random anthology of snappy writing

The first paragraph of Jonathan Yardley’s review in the Washington Post of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. I think the best first paragraph of a bad review ever.

Nobody bothered to think about it at the time, but from the moment the first airplane hit the World Trade Center in September 2001, one thing was inevitable: Don DeLillo would write a novel about it. DeLillo, as has been noted before in this space, is the novelist as op-ed pundit, a ’60s recidivist who simply cannot resist the temptation to turn his novels into lectures or, upon occasion, harangues. So, of course, DeLillo simply had to write about Sept. 11, even though – as the results all too clearly demonstrate – he has nothing original or interesting to say about it.

From George Orwell’s essay Decline of the English Murder. One of his wives…

In most of the cases the crime only came to light slowly, as the result of careful investigations which started off with the suspicions of neighbours or relatives; and in nearly every case there was some dramatic coincidence, in which the finger of Providence could be clearly seen, or one of those episodes that no novelist would dare to make up, such as Crippen’s flight across the Atlantic with his mistress dressed as a boy, or Joseph Smith playing “Nearer, my God, to Thee” on the harmonium while one of his wives was drowning in the next room.

Jack Marx on Big Brother’s Emma. How I love “its various renovations and resulting tributaries”.

It’s astonishing that nobody has alerted Emma to the fact that the public has no general curiosity regarding the windmills of her mind, her ‘career’ as a match-flame celebrity, or her outlook regarding any issue but one: the fact that her father died while she was in the Big Brother house. This is the one thing about which Emma can speak and the world will listen. For the same reason that Neil Armstrong is not sought for his opinion on post-war Brazilian postage stamps, Emma Cornell is not required by the wider world if she does not wish to address that for which she is notable.

There are those who might argue that there is significant public interest in her body, its various renovations and resulting tributaries, but magazines like ZOO are the best arenas for such arguments, which are usually fought without words anyhow. When dealing with a newspaper, as a journalist or a subject of interview, it’s always worth remembering – if you can manage to wrap your head around such a bizarre idea – that there are readers besides yourself.

Martin Amis on Tony Blair

Then it was upstairs to the White Room for a podcast with Bob Geldof on Africa – Africa, a quarter-century compulsion of Bob’s and a solid 10-year enthusiasm of Tony’s. Then it was downstairs to the long table and a multinational convocation of bishops. Power has been described as a drug, an aphrodisiac, a “filthy venom” (in the words of Maxim Gorky); it is also, for much of the time, carcinogenically boring. Like all politicians, Tony has seven or eight kinds of smile. Smiles two and three would do for the bishops. When he is making the rounds of a crowded room, his smile, towards the end, is a rictus, and his eyes are as hard as jewels.

All the boredom is what the world doesn’t see – the hidden, humble toil of dosing and humouring, of giving face and jollying along. It is this that keeps politics halfway honest, and impedes the process that Bob Geldof alluded to, up in the White Room: “It’s a bit naff, isn’t it? What happened? The politicisation of celebrity or the celebritisation of politics?” And the question arose: what will Tony be when he quits? An ex-politician?

“No,” he said. “I’ll be a former celebrity.”

The rest here.

what is fickshon?

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I’ve got obsessed with Dave Egger’s approach to writing the Sundanese lost boys story, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. The idea that it sometimes takes a novel to tell a story very truthfully. He describes the process beautifully here.

And here’s an extract, if yer innerested. Oh, and a review/article thing in the Washington Post.