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Meet Mister Fear (perhaps you know him already?)

In this week’s issue, our hero finally meets his arch-nemesis face to face… and with astounding courage and lightning speed, leaps up and strips away the mask from his terrifying visage, revealing fear’s true face…

I suspect this is no way to go about writing a book. No, let’s take that one step further: I am absolutely certain that by any normal measure of such things, it’s an insane way to attempt such a thing. Books are written in private, right? You toil away for months or more likely years on end, researching, scribbling out draft after draft… mountains of paper pile up, you rewrite and edit, rewrite and edit some more, all alone (darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there!)… and at the end of it, somehow, is a finished thing, which finally you can unveil to the world – which for some reason is supposed to care. Yes, the final product is public, but the actual writing of books is not a performance art, right?

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I just came in from taking part, in a very small way, in Berlin’s celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s interesting how this city seems to have a knack of capturing the attention of the world in moments like this… or perhaps it’s more than that: Berlin seems from time to time to assume a role as a kind of microcosm of the rest of the world (at least the Western world), its struggles and its constantly evolving ideas about itself. Tonight was a re-enactment of a moment 20 years ago when the eyes of the world were upon this city, and saw something many never thought they would see: the victory of people over a repressive regime, the fall of a Wall that was supposed to last 100 years. Read the rest of this entry »

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I have a piano concert tonight. It’s a solo concert, and it’s also a CD release – for an album that was recorded at another solo concert a few years ago. These events are a little out of the ordinary, and I don’t do them often – but I’ve done a number of them over the past decade and I think it’s worth saying a little bit about them here.