I’m leaving early tomorrow, making my slow way to the Democratic Convention. Once the tamasha is underway, do check out my reports. I’ll be filing daily stories for the Indian Express, and a commentary at the end for the Hindu.

For an Englishman as impressionable, and as imaginatively dim, as Entwistle, feeling the surprising heft of the Colt in his palm and the ease of dispatching a bullet on its trajectory with a gentle squeeze of the finger – like clicking on a mouse – was likely to have been a moment of pure Americana as toxic in its effect as any controlled substance, and it’s no wonder that he noted where Joe Matterazzo kept the key to the gun safe.

And

Even on the Hanbury Park estate, home to many of Droitwich’s jobbing plumbers and electricians, he proclaimed whenever he opened his mouth – or imagined that he proclaimed – the social disconnect between his York degree and his professional work for QinetiQ, and his Worksop childhood. But in cyberspace, his natural element, he was anonymous, accentless, free to live inside his steadily multiplying range of personae. It’s curious that this man, so conspicuously lacking an authentic self, evidently regarded his single most authentic feature as a curse and a stigma.

These quotes are taken from Jonathan Raban’s superb report from the LRB. I was prompted to read it by my excellent friend Lisa B. who, in near memory, had told me that she could understand why people wrote novels but not why people read them. But here she was, Lisa, writing to me words to the effect that Raban had provided her the most compelling answer yet to the question of why one would not only write but also read novels. Indeed, she wrote, “if I had a novel on my shelf right now I’d read it.” Of course, the piece we are talking about is non-fictional, but do stay with us, gentle reader. Raban’s account is about Neil Entwistle, “a seemingly ordinary 27-year-old Englishman” who “shot dead” his American wife and infant daughter with “a long-barrelled Colt. 22 revolver borrowed from his father-in-law’s gun collection.” But, more than that, as Lisa says in her own characteristic way, “Just Two Clicks” is an account of a man reduced to mere symptom from the near-death of the imagination in him.

Prodded by Lisa, I began to read the piece and then, somewhere near the middle perhaps, I paused to send a note to Raban. In a report where Jonathan was talking of a person lacking in imagination of a particular sort, his own writing reveals his rich imagination at work, and his talent to sympathize, which, in smallest details, means the ability to enter into another existence. The point where I had stopped was a paragraph that began “I have the weather data from the nearest airport to Entwistle’s route that day.” But there were many such points in the piece. Here’s another one about writing, and particular relevant for this blog post, which has relied so much on borrowing from a friend’s note: “Always imitating, copying, cribbing, Neil could never resist the lure of the readymade, whether inaccurately plagiarising Saint-Exupéry or committing a slipshod version of an American movie murder.”

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