Authors Electric

  As I understand it, the point of any art is that it's based on, and grew from, real human experience. What happened to you, and how you felt about it-- whether it was good or bad. What you learned from it. Or failed to learn, as failing to learn is a very common human experience. These experiences involve an immense laboratory of bio-chemicals and hormones, acting on actual 'vital' organs -- that is, living organs vital for living. The ones that hurt when you're disappointed, or embarrassed. It involves organic memory, which is bio-chemical, and involves vision, forgetfulness, imagination... Human experience involves dreams, both in the sense of ambitions and day-dreams, and the mysterious, little-understood visions created by our brains while we sleep -- and these visions can involve all our sleeping senses, and be as vivid -- that is, alive -- as anything we experience while awake. So much so that some cultures have maintained that we actually enter another world wh...

  In Isfahan                                                                                Chehel Sotoun Palace, Isfahan In Isfahan is the title of a short story by William Trevor and I turned to it after watching TV pictures of the war raging across Iran and tried to make some sense of the destruction that I was witnessing.   Isfahan is a beautiful city. In the words of its governor Mehdi Jamalinejad:   “Isfahan is not an ordinary city. It’s a museum without a roof…In none of the previous eras, not in the Afghan wars, not in the Moghul conflict, not even during the ‘sacred defence’ [the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war] was this ever done.   “This is a declaration of war on a civilisation. An enemy that has no culture pays no heed to symbols of culture. A country that has no hist...

Wikimedia: Daniel Schwen My Dad was always drawing. I remember, when I was around fifteen, sighing heavily as I lowered the newspaper and saying to him, "I don't mind when you draw aeroplanes or herds of horses in the margins or over the adverts. In fact, I like it. But I wish you wouldn't draw, in thick biro, dog-fights and jousts over the articles. " He promised to try and do better. I drew too, all the time. I drew things I saw and things I imagined. I illustrated scenes from favourite books. (When I first collided with the Greek Myths, at the age of about nine, I spent a year drawing scenes from them.) Both my brothers drew. The house was littered with opened-out envelopes, pages from sketch pads, paper bags, pieces of old wallpaper, all drawn or painted on. My mother didn't draw but she was a cause of drawing in others. As soon as we could sit up, literally, she put a crayon in our hands and a sheet of paper in front of us. She did everything she could t...