A couple of days ago, yet another reader (this is the third) admitted, in a rather apologetic way, that my book was in his toilet (or ‘half bathroom’ as you might put it in America). Far from being offended I thought this was wonderful. For ‘Everything’s an Offer’ to have made it into that most intimate of personal spaces seems a very fine thing indeed and nothing to apologise about - unless he meant that he had been flushing it down the toilet….

Funnily enough there was a bit in an early version of the manuscript about toilet reading. It didn’t make the cut but there were some ideas I very much liked.  So in the spirit of ‘using what you have’ here it is:

“A book about improvisation might seem something of an oxymoron. The fluid, dynamic nature of improvisational theatre (on stage or in a workshop) is the very opposite of the long line of words that make up a book. Which is perhaps why so many people’s knee jerk reaction has been to suggest that this book should be highly unconventional. An encounter in a San Francisco bathroom convinced me otherwise.

The bathroom in question was just off Haight and Ashbury, at the house of my friends Mark and Doris. Their bathroom is always stocked with stimulating reading and on one visit I came across a book that seemed to be just the kind of thing that people were telling me this book should be. It was a marvel of design and combined images, text and graphics in an original and inventive way. But it left me completely cold. It looked like a website yet behaved like a book; which to my mind gave it the virtues of neither and the flaws of both; being printed on paper you couldn’t leap instantly from one place to another and being designed like a website, there was no narrative to draw you forward. I left the smallest room in the house with a clear idea that I wanted to write a conventional book, of the kind you now have in your hands - one word after another, forming sentences, paragraphs and chapters and relying primarily on the meaning of the words to engage you, rather than how they are arranged on the page.”

 

A world class violinist plays a 3.5 million dollar violin in the subway and people barely notice (apart from a small child). Which throws into sharp relief the importance of noticing more. It is an example of how our senses are anything but objective, being “tuned” to what we choose to give importance or pay attention to. There are more interpretations out there than facts, even at the level of our senses, even before we begin to abstract. For the full story, click here: Joshua Bell plays the subway

Yesterday, Gary and I were talking to Chad Dick about collaborating with eatbigfish.  Chad is the only person I know who has read the book cover to cover at one sitting (indeed, he may be the only person to ever do so) so I think it is fair to say that he liked it.  And he has a purple one.  Coincidence? I wonder. Maybe the colour of the image on the jacket shapes people’s response to the content in some profound way….

(p.so. At least here on the blog I get to use English spelling!).