John Baker’s Blog

We grabbed another chance to see Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, presented by the Old Bomb Theatre at York Theatre Royal and directed by Cecily Boys.
Early evening, a country road, a tree.
Nobody comes and nobody goes…
Old friends Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, but who is he? What has he to offer?
Sometimes hilariously funny, sometimes [...]

At the Electronic Book Review Brian McHale has a new essay on postmodernism. He extracts quotations from Raymond Federman’s novel, Aunt Rachel’s Fur, of which the following is one.
So you find my novel too postmodern, wrong again Gaston, you’ve arrived too late, we are already beyond postmodernism, it’s dead, dead and gone, don’t you know, [...]

1. Why do you blog?
It’s useful to have an instant audience for short pieces of writing, and also to have something to motivate you. Although I had no clear intention when I began over three years ago, I soon noticed I was writing pieces in a style geared to the medium and that probably wouldn’t [...]

We were at a reading by JM Coetzee at the University this afternoon.
Coetzee’s early life was in South Africa. In the early sixties he lived in England, working as a computer programmer while doing research for a thesis on the English novelist Ford Madox Ford. Later in that decade he was in Texas studying for [...]