Unspun

Reader Mina has asked what it was like at the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival. I have to confess I was there for only a small portion of the festival as I was visiting a friend in Sanur and dropped by Ubud to see longtime friend, columnist and blogger Jeremy Wagstaff launch his book Loose Wire: a Personal Guide to Technology

It was held at Tutmak restaurant on Sunday and was well attended by participants from the festival as well as some familiar faces from Jakarta such as Tempo’s Goenawan Mohamed, The Jakarta Post’s Endy Bayuni, Sinar Harapan’s Aristides Katoppo and Equinox publisher Mark Hanuz.

The launch was simple: Mark did the introductions, Jeremy gave a short and sometimes humurous speech of his misadventures as a journalist and non-geek in an increasily technologically-oriented world.

Indeed, the book is actually a survival guide for non geeks who need to grapple with technology in their day to day affairs. It must have hit a mark with the literally gifted but probably technology-challenged crowd because all the books there were sold out.

The only other event I attended was the one after Jeremy’s book launch: a debate on love between novelists and poets. The organizers must have been very pleasantly surprized because the restaurant where the spirited debate was held, the Dragonfly, was packed with standing room only. I left early for more mundane pursuits such as dinner, which my friend and I could not have at the Dragonfly because of the crowd. I was told by Dragonfly co-owner Liz the next morning that the novelists trounced the poets.

There is only one more episode worth recalling about thefestival for me. I picked up The Jakarta Post’s Saturday edition and tried to read a feature piece on the Indian author Anita Desai. The story started like this:

The shadows of childhood shyness quietly dust the shoulders and flitter about the rare and gentle smile of Indian born author Anita Desai in her 64th year of living through and within the written word. Over the years that adolescent awkwardness of being, that silent background seeming has
metamorphosed into a calm humility that may, at first, be mistaken for shyness.

Twwo quotations ran through my mind as I tried to grapple with what the author was trying to do. One was by Oscar Wilde: Anything mysterious has a chance of being profound.

The other was from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his book On Writing. Advising aspiring writers who may sometimes indulge in the temptation to come up with the prosiac phrase: “Kill your darlings.”