John Baker’s Blog

Poets, by tradition, imagine themselves likely to die young. But that’s not a matter of imagination alone. Marc Abrahams in The Education Guardian reports on the research of Associate Professor James C Kaufman, of California State University at San Bernardino:
Kaufman looked at the lives and deaths of 1,987 deceased writers from four different cultures: American, [...]

Rushdie’s parting advice to aspiring writers was simple: “You have to sit down and not get up until you’ve written some stuff.”
“I guess there are people who can walk around and write,” he said. “But they’re called poets.”
PhillyCom reports on Rushdie’s visit to Widener University
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Michele Neubert, NBC News Producer, has a nice article about the re-awakening of the al-Mutanabi book market in the centre of Baghdad.
“It’s an old disease in Iraq – people spend their money on books, not on food. Iraqi intellectuals are very poor because of it.”
The district was attacked by a suicide car-bomber last March, [...]

Hari Kunzru and others join the debate over Monica Ali’s Brick Road:
Art isn’t about promoting social cohesion, or cementing community relations. It’s about telling the truth as you see it, even if it annoys or offends some people. That’s called freedom of expression, and last time I checked we all thought it was quite a [...]