Reading this this Guardian article on Tintin, and browsing this anarchist pastiche, in which Tintin morphs into a revolutionary leader, makes me want to go sharpen my pencils and start drawing a Tintin pastiche myself.

It shall be called "Tintin in Rampur", and in it Tintin will travel to Rampur gaaon, located in Taluk Bollywood, in order to rescue a yummylicious actress called Basanti from the clutches of a real life Chambal ka dakoo (i.e., dacoit) called Gabbar Singh. The climax will involve Snowy snipping at Gabbar's, um, sensitive geography, saying "ye ... mujhe de de, Gabbar!" in Snowy-auge, while Tintin will end up exploring Basanti's choli to discover the answer to that age old puzzle 'Choli Ke Peeche Kaya Hai?". Also in the course of such adventures, Captian Haddock will most definitively get drunk on bhaang, add pungent desi gaalis to his rather tame repertoire of curse words, dance Bhangra (he can easily pass for a Sardar given his thick beard) all the while crooning "Mehbooba Mehbooba". As for Thomson and Thompson or Bianca Castafiore, you tell me, kind reader, what we should make them do in course of this great comic strip, soon coming to a theater near you?

I didn't know Auden could be as tart (and hence true) as this:

"“Why do you want to write poetry?” If the young man answers: “I have important things I want to say,” then he is not a poet. If he answers: “I like hanging around words listening to what they say,” then maybe he is going to be a poet."

"The girl whose boyfriend starts writing her love poems should be on her guard. Perhaps he really does love her, but one thing is certain: while he was writing his poems he was not thinking of her but of his own feelings about her and that is suspicious. Let her remember St Augustine’s confession of his feelings after the death of someone he loved very much: “I would rather have been deprived of my friend than of my grief.”"

"The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means that, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets."

It was good to wake up to a cloudy sky greeting me, as seen up above, at the end of this inner tenament shaft of mine, and to begin the day by re-reading this edited section from Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own".

Even though, Ms. Woolf talks about women making space, and claiming freedom in their lives to write, her diagnosis and prescriptions hold, I think, for anyone infected with this low grade fever of wanting to write. Some extracts:

"...for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in."

"...I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals - and have £500 a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come..."