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John Baker's Blog

Reflections of a working writer and reader

There is a joke among novelists that in order to initiate strong action or to revive a wilting narrative it is only necessary to say: And so a stranger came to town. Carol Shields

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Presque vu XV

I’m not the biggest fan of Elvis Presley. He’s all right . . . he gets the job done. But he’s not quite 50 Cent or Eminem. British Tennis number one Andy Murray before he played a tournament in Memphis.
And, it is rumoured that the nineteen-year-old Scot has collected £1million from Random House for his autobiography . . .

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A nice joke for the old/new year on Kelly Bell’s site. A guy is seated next to a woman on a plane . . .

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Smitten by the turn of the year I had a look through my archives and found this post from 24th September 2002, musing about ideas for a novel:

A further interest, to thicken the broth, is the idea of seduction. Sexual seduction, of course, but also literary seduction. Who has not been seduced by a book? I believe that the most powerful story of seduction in recent times is contained in the novella, Il Postino by Antonio Skarmeta. ‘All men who touch first with words go much further afterwards with their hands,’ Beatriz’s mother warns her. But Beatriz has already been seduced by Neruda’s metaphors.
The extension of seduction is contained in the world of PR and advertising, where deception, half-truths and downright lies usually carry the day. Manuel Puig quotes the text of a radio commercial for lipstick: ‘For today’s modern woman, personality comes before beauty.’

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