Some posts on happiness

A little bit of a round-up from my reading morning from book blogs and most things I’ve come across, happily, have been on, well, happiness…

Without Bounds on the dificulty of capturing happiness in literature.
Lizzie Siddal on two novellas about happiness, and her own take on what constitutes happiness (a blue sky – looking out of [...]

Writing and the flowering of imagination

How do we imagine feeling? There are two questions there: first, how do we imagine? And then, how do we imagine concepts that are not in themselves tangible objects in the world out there—a flower, a horse, another person–but in here, inside the space behind our foreheads? And a third question: if we imagine feelings, [...]

Interregnum: Lessing, emotion and cats

The cats that crowded around our dining table in Istanbul were not as under-fed as you might expect from feral animals. (In Spain, for example, they are much less like house cats out for the night, as they are here, and more properly wild, desperate and subaltern in their emaciation.) A white, mangy, dirty looking [...]

Empathy and our homeless project

I never warmed to Alain de Botton. For a number of reasons: 1) his Essays on Love were, I felt, dressed up as more than they actually were, and I felt I could have done better; and 2) but then he actually did it—wrote the thing—and I had not; 3) everything else that followed was [...]

Do negative emotions make for better creative decisions?

Do negative emotions during the creative practice make for better decisions as a writer?
That’s one suggestion that comes from the recent article by Jonah Lehrer on the ‘upside’ of sadness. Lehrer examines research, published in Psychological Review by Andy Thompson and Paul Andrews, psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist, which offers the idea that sadness and depression [...]

Writing balance between ‘doing’ and ‘being’

This week I began a set of sessions focused on personal development and coaching, courtesy of the prize money attached to a Teaching Innovation award I won from my employer (a UK-based university). I only half-joke that my employer is paying for me to find a way to a new career.
Gut Feeling
It wasn’t too far [...]

Ellroy and emotion

“So that women with love me. That’s why I do everything I do.”
I missed it on Sunday but fortunately caught the repeat driving to work this morning of the crime novelist James Ellroy on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. The writer was incredibly open about his motivations – for writing, and with women – many [...]

Wolf Hall and death in stone

Early on in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, set in the 1500s and retelling the stories of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey, the Cardinal imagines the remembrance of his death.
The cardinal, who thinks upon a Christian’s last end, has had his tomb designed already, by a sculptor from Florence. His corpse [...]