A Couple Of Things
I've been meaning to post a couple of things for a while now, and here they are - first of all, the lesser in importance.
What divides a novel and a book? I ask this because, having recently read High Fidelity, I read in the cover that Fever Pitch was his first book, and after High Fidelity he was working on his second novel (presumably About A Boy). High Fidelity was described as 'a brilliant first novel'.
Why is Fever Pitch not a novel? That confuses me, and it should confuse you too.
Okay. On to more pressing matters. Yesterday (that's Saturday) was September the 8th, the 60-year anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. I know this because the Quaker meeting were doing a vigil in the middle of the street and I stopped to talk to them about it, and they were and personable as ever, even though none of them recognised me properly.
They gave me a little leaflet - I stuck it on the wall at work, actually, because it affected me rather strongly.
It wasn't that they said how strong the bomb was, or the blast radius, or even the fact that people today were still suffering from the after-effect of fallout - nor even the fact that they said hospitals and schools were destroyed. These are words that you see bandied about in the press all the time, and as such we've become somewhat desensitised (which is a discussion for another time). No, none of these statements rattled me particularly - at least, not compared to the following line.
People were vaporised.
Just like that. Vaporised. One minute, walking to work, next, a wail overhead, a screech of falling metal, and then - nothing. Not even a bang to register in your ears before they dissolve into nothingness.
As much as it's been said by much better writers than me - the people who run the world are horrible, horrible people.
What divides a novel and a book? I ask this because, having recently read High Fidelity, I read in the cover that Fever Pitch was his first book, and after High Fidelity he was working on his second novel (presumably About A Boy). High Fidelity was described as 'a brilliant first novel'.
Why is Fever Pitch not a novel? That confuses me, and it should confuse you too.
Okay. On to more pressing matters. Yesterday (that's Saturday) was September the 8th, the 60-year anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. I know this because the Quaker meeting were doing a vigil in the middle of the street and I stopped to talk to them about it, and they were and personable as ever, even though none of them recognised me properly.
They gave me a little leaflet - I stuck it on the wall at work, actually, because it affected me rather strongly.
It wasn't that they said how strong the bomb was, or the blast radius, or even the fact that people today were still suffering from the after-effect of fallout - nor even the fact that they said hospitals and schools were destroyed. These are words that you see bandied about in the press all the time, and as such we've become somewhat desensitised (which is a discussion for another time). No, none of these statements rattled me particularly - at least, not compared to the following line.
People were vaporised.
Just like that. Vaporised. One minute, walking to work, next, a wail overhead, a screech of falling metal, and then - nothing. Not even a bang to register in your ears before they dissolve into nothingness.
As much as it's been said by much better writers than me - the people who run the world are horrible, horrible people.
posted by Will Templeton at 12:10 AM
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