Lindsey Kent on Clarice Lispector, China Mieville on Dambudzo Marechera, Me On My Inadequacy (WARNING: This post contains exclamation marks)

Am feeling ig'nant today, if not as hungover as I should (for which, before my god Neurofen, I bow down). While trying to finish a short story which I have been avoiding for a month or so I have been surfing round tinternet and reading the newspaper. I've submitted a story to a collection called Hyperkinetic and they are doing these author profiles of the people involved and today I read the one belonging to Lindsey Kent. Having chosen Mr Pynchon as her favourite author she was then asked who we should be reading and alongside Cortazar she went for Clarice Lispector, who I must admit I'd never heard of and who turns out to be Brazil's most famous and wonderful modernist, a woman who, if Wikipedia is to be believed, "looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf". Anyway, I've ordered "Hour of the Star" from Abebooks because it's the most readily available, so I will soon be able to nod and look sage at the mention of her name.

I was only just recovering from my dullardity qua non-Anglo-European modernism and all that jazz, when who should I read in the Indie but China Mieville on Dambudzo Marechera, a Zimbabwean "gutter modernist". So I have bought a book by him, too, tho' not the one Mieville recommends, cos like he says, it's really hard to find it. I am a consumer! I have bought off my feelings of inadequacy! Then parlayed them into a post on my fuck-boring blog! Life is sweet!