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We are The Keepers of the Dying Cursive. We should do more handwritten posts.

Nabokov wrote his novels on index cards.

About six months ago, I realised that I had no idea what the handwriting of a good friend of mine looked like. I had known him for over a decade, but somehow we had never communicated using handwritten notes. He had left voice messages for me, emailed me, sent text messages galore. But I don’t think I had ever had a letter from him written by hand, a postcard from his holidays, a reminder of something pushed through my letter box. I had no idea whether his handwriting was bold or crabbed, sloping or upright, italic or rounded, elegant or slapdash.

It hit me that we are at a moment when handwriting seems to be about to vanish from our lives altogether. At some point in recent years, it has stopped being a necessary and inevitable intermediary between people – a means by which individuals communicate with each other, putting a little bit of their personality into the form of their message as they press the ink-bearing point on to the paper. It has started to become just one of many options, and often an unattractive, elaborate one.

Read Philip Hensher on Why Handwriting Matters.

Now you can stop taking Polaroids of everything. Ubud connection: Guy Pearce starred in The Proposition which was written by Nick Cave who is in the Writers’ Festival.

3. Make a gesture

It may sound dubious, but even simple eye movements might help. Andrew Parker and Neil Dagnall at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, have found that subjects were better able to remember a list of words they had just studied if they repeatedly looked from left to right and back for 30 seconds straight after reading the list – perhaps because it boosts the transfer of information between the two brain hemispheres. It’s worth noting, however, that this only seems to benefit right-handers. Perhaps the brains of left-handed and ambidextrous people already engage in a higher level of cross-talk, and the eye-wiggling only distracts them.

Read Memory: Six Tips to Master Yours in New Scientist.

We can vouch for tip #3. Our “gesture” is note-taking. We find that if we’ve written something down, it’s sealed in the memory. If you have a good memory you don’t have to study for exams, and in the real world your instant access to facts gets you mistaken for an intelligent person.

Nick Cave and Jeffrey Eugenides at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2012. Photo by Sally May Mills.

On Thursday dinner was held in the garden of the Honeymoon 2 Guesthouse. The place was half full when we got there: the writers had already settled into groups. (Most of the writers were Australian or Indonesian, with a smattering of Americans, Canadians, Europeans and other Asians.) It was like walking into the high school cafeteria, looking for an empty seat and hoping the Heathers would not notice you.
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We talk to InterAksyon editor-in-chief Roby Alampay about journalism from the hard copy era to the digital age.

Podcast episode 8 is here. Listen, download, or subscribe via iTunes.

Ignore the intro that says “episode 4”. This was the fourth podcast we recorded (Hence reference to the forthcoming martial law anniversary) and we ended up changing the sequence.

Oops the podcast server is having issues. Everything will be restored by day’s end. If you subscribe via iTunes you should get this week’s episode on time.

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For this week’s podcast quiz we’re giving away a hardcover first edition of J.K. Rowling’s non-Harry Potter novel, The Casual Vacancy.

Thanks to National Bookstore! The Casual Vacancy is available at their 100+ branches nationwide.

Answer the following questions in Comments for a shot at the prize.

1. What was Roby wearing during the interview?
2. What did Roby do on his first day of work as a reporter?
3. Our guest alleges that to a straight guy there are only three types of shoes. What are they?
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We are traveling but did not want to miss Argo so we asked Warner Brothers if we could get a preview before we left for Bali. Their publicist acceded but said there was a review embargo until 7 October. He also asked that we write it up in our newspaper column. As we’d always intended to review it for Philstar, we said yes.

After we enjoyed the movie, we asked again if 7 October was the earliest date we could run our review. (We could’ve blogged it the minute the movie ended.) The publicist said yes. Then we told him that we intended to publish it on 7 October, just so we’d be first. He encouraged us to do so.
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Jeffrey Eugenides signs books for fans at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. The reader on the left brought a lot of books, the reader on the right was trying to interview Eugenides while he was signing.

The yellowed pages. We have the movie tie-in edition of The Virgin Suicides. Eugenides is working on the screenplay adaptation of his third novel, The Virgin Suicides.
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