NOBEL PRIZE FOR LISTENING (# 74,933)
Prize-winning authors are two a penny.
Prize-giving authors are a rarer breed. Imagine, for a second, Salman Rushdie handing out awards to everyone who made it through Midnight’s Children. Or Madonna presenting rosettes to every child who didn’t demand their money back. These are two over-documented easy targets and for that I apologize. In fact, I just punched myself in the face. Criticism is the cancer of literature. It eats away at the bone marrow of storytelling. Yet when it’s favourable, us readers lap it up like crystal meth, or Nesquik, depending on your palate.
Prize-winning listeners are the ones that hold the world, and all its composite little worlds, together. To listen and be able to edit out the diamond from the quartz is a skill that isn’t taught as all the teachers are too busy yakking.
Like me.
I stop and listen.
Birds are going bananas outside.
Bloody hell, they sound lovely.
Filed Under Writing on writing
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14 Responses to “NOBEL PRIZE FOR LISTENING (# 74,933)”
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Is this some kind of statement against deaf novelists & poets?
I mean, are you saying listening in the hearing sense or listening in the auditory sense. There is a difference you know. Or did someone tell you and you weren’t listening? Think before you write sunshine or you might get a crazy old bear with a shotgun hunting you down to blow your little ears out!
Easy goes it Dicky-boy. Don’t get your pedantics in a twist. I very much enjoyed this piece and were I alive, I’d be giving out gongs like no tomorrow. What did you ever win anyway?
Do you want some Joycey?
I have some. Plenty as it happens. It seems you are the one in need my child.
I am your child.
Jimmy…Daddy?
That makes me mum…and sister.
What is this shit? Chinatown. Let us return to the point in question – that of the deficiencies of this writer – what’s he called…
Peter Kirby.
Right Kirby. You need a lesson in purpose my laddie. For a start, what’s with the numbering system at the end of this post?
75,000 ways to delay a novel – it’s a subhead on the category under ‘writing on writing’. It’s a public form of cowardice that clings to the hope that if I write enough of these posts, they will string together a novel, albeit one without characters and a plot.
So now I’m an accomplice, yes?
You put the gun to your own head. I just move the backdrop.
Let’s shoot each other.
Bang bang. x