I’m sorry, a small post today, which should in fact have been put up on Sunday. Anyway, as regular readers of this blog will recall (ah, one of those posts that speaks to the three pornography robots who are the only people to comment on this site):
I gave a reading in Paris last December. I only found out recently that the podcast of the reading is available here: I’m not very keen on my voice, but it’s listenable for those who want to listen.
I think that I talk slowly, because my wife says that I do and my father definitely does talk slowly, but I hadn’t realised that I talked so hesitantly. I am Um-Mensch, Er-Mensch. I try to finesse it away by thinking that all I’m doing is looking for the right words, but I need to get the gap between my brain and my tongue a little shorter. The sliding scale that Nabokov suggests (‘I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child’) is applicable in my case, although obviously I start my descent from far lower down the scale.
James Womack 