{"id":56,"date":"2009-02-20T16:19:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-20T21:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=56"},"modified":"2009-03-09T17:31:59","modified_gmt":"2009-03-09T22:31:59","slug":"quoted-without-comment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2009\/02\/20\/quoted-without-comment\/","title":{"rendered":"Quoted without comment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nHow <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2009\/feb\/16\/rushdie-mcewan-fatwa-books\">Ian McEwan validates his novels before publication<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"cite\">\n<p>\nFans of McEwan&#8217;s novels will be interested to learn that before he finishes any book he has it read by three friends &#8211; Amis firmly not being one of them. &#8220;I don&#8217;t want a novelist reading my work, thank you very much!&#8221; McEwan says.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe three are the Oxford historian and Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash, the poet Craig Raine, and the philosopher Galen Strawson. Garton Ash persuaded him to drop the &#8220;An&#8221; from the title of his novel An Atonement. Raine berates him whenever he slips into cliche, as he once did with the phrase &#8220;flickering log fire&#8221; &#8211; they now have a running joke of marking f.l.f. in the margins of each other&#8217;s work.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe spirit of constructive criticism is not always happy. When they met to discuss The Comfort of Strangers, Raine told McEwan: &#8220;Listen, love. It&#8217;s complete crap, and you should put it in a drawer and forget it.&#8221; McEwan refused to speak to him for almost two years.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\nMcEwan is of course the author of <a href=\"\/books\/saturday.html\"><cite>Saturday<\/cite><\/a>, recently reviewed here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How Ian McEwan validates his novels before publication: Fans of McEwan&#8217;s novels will be interested to learn that before he finishes any book he has it read by three friends &#8211; Amis firmly not being one of them. &#8220;I don&#8217;t want a novelist reading my work, thank you very much!&#8221; McEwan says. The three are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,10],"tags":[48,49],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-decent-left","tag-ian-mcewan","tag-saturday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions\/57"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}