Dickens Is Dead (But Still Prolific)

A quick (and late) shout for Are You Sitting Comfortably, Thursday 23rd Feb, at Jacksons Lane Theatre:

White Rabbit invites you in, away from the swirling London fog and the clutches of Jack Frost’s icy fingers. Cosy down and enjoy original short stories for adults in a magical atmosphere, read aloud by Bernadette Russell, Gareth Brierley and special guest readers.

...including one of my own, inevitably, and I'm told one by Zoe of the Mind and Language blog, which I recommend an excursion to. Also, to a particular friend who is peculiarly allergic to descriptions of fog, I can only say that the fog in my own story is simulated and harmless.

Am I a writer if a tree falls in the forest and...

Are you a writer if you're not actively writing?

Deep, man. A friend posed this a little while back, in the rhetorical fashion. As I remember, all of us readily agreed with sentiment; after all, it's about slogging and grafting, not coasting. But I can't help thinking the question has a telling ring of 'if a tree falls in the forest' about it, and much like that old favourite, I think the answer entirely depends on your terms.

I've had a think about it (it takes me a while) and I've come to the conclusion:

The objective correlative

So once again, I ally myself with the hordes by talking about things I know bobbins about.

Am I a charlatan for not quite getting Hamlet? It seems more celebrated for its contribution to the English language than for whatever it is actually about. T.S. Eliot baldly declared the play an artistic failure, taking apart the play in an essay Hamlet and his Problems. In this essay he argued that the the play failed to show the emotions and ideas expressed by the the character Hamlet:

The art of apple eating to illustrate the passage of time

In the beginning, all action was fast paced. If you could have been in the Garden of Eden, before that unfortunate incident with the apple, you would surely have seen Adam zipping about like a child overdosed on Sunny Delight, hurtling from one screwball caper to the next. I've never quite got past the suspicion that the world is running more slowly now that it has nearly seven billion people on it. No wonder the lunchtime queue in Tescos is so long.
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