Notes from 20 year old self (Taken with instagram)
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KAZUO ISHIGURO
After university, when I was working with homeless people in west London, I wrote a half-hour radio play and sent it to the BBC. It was rejected but I got an encouraging response. It was kind of in bad taste, but it’s the first piece of juvenilia I wouldn’t mind other people seeing. It was called “Potatoes and Lovers.” When I submitted the manuscript, I spelled potatoes incorrectly, so it said potatos. It was about two young people who work in a fish-and-chips café. They are both severely cross-eyed, and they fall in love with each other, but they never acknowledge the fact that they’re cross-eyed. It’s the unspoken thing between them. At the end of the story they decide not to marry, after the narrator has a strange dream where he sees a family coming toward him on the seaside pier. The parents are cross-eyed, the children are cross-eyed, the dog is cross-eyed, and he says, All right, we’re not going to marry.
” — Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 196, Kazuo Ishiguro(Source: theparisreview.org)
Write a scene showing a man and a woman arguing over the man’s friendship with a former girlfriend. Do not mention the girlfriend, the man, the woman, or the argument.
“I’m tired of the on and off, on and off,” the houseplant whispered. He offhandedly converted carbon dioxide into some simple sugars and other organic compounds. “When humans love, they are fickle and inhumane.”
His greatest wish was that the stupid cat would knock his terra cotta pot off the ledge of the immaculate picture window so that he might finally rest in reeses pieces.
Gather quickly
Out of darkness
All the songs you know
And throw them at the sun
Before they melt
Like snow
– Langston Hughes
[video]
Tulips
