the difficulty of writing

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Rowling was very funny, and quite touching, about her

memories of the years she spent on public assistance, and on

the difficulty of writing, and the insecurities that plague

writers, even wildly successful ones. “We are thin-skinned

people,” she said. A few times she mentioned the famous

question of the Marauder’s Map, which caused her no end of

trouble in the Harry Potter books. “My husband was the only

one who never asked me why Harry had the Marauder’s Map back

when it had been confiscated” (this plot-hole appears, if

memory serves, in Goblet of Fire.) Later she remarked: “that

map told you way too much.”

She and Patchett spent some time analyzing Fats, an

adolescent boy who may be the most complicated, subtly drawn

character in The Casual Vacancy. Fats is virtually amoral,

but he’s also magnetic — “I feel guilty that I like him,”

Rowling said. “He’s cool.” Patchett and Rowling had a

brief exchange over whether Rowling is herself cool. They

agreed to disagree.

The closing minutes were given over to questions submitted in

advance by the audience (apparently I could have done this,

but if so I never figured out how; I would have liked to hear

Rowling talk about the significant amounts of negative

coverage The Casual Vacancy has been getting, and how she

feels about it. But see, this is why it’s good that it was

Patchett up there and not me.) There were questions about

what she was working on next — something, probably for kids,

was the answer. Rowling was asked where she would live if she

could live in any fictional place. “I’d like to go to

Meryton and cut out Elizabeth Bennett with Mr. Darcy,” she

said, and she added, to wild applause, “I do still walk in

and out of Hogwarts.” But Rowling’s final answer was

Moonacre Manor, the setting of a novel that she loved as a

little girl called The Little White Horse.

managing their careers

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Surprisingly, Dixit we hear, agrees with her husband.

According to a source, the actress has been avoiding Rikku,

refusing to answer his calls even.

That isn't reason for an animosity build-up, though. On

Rikku's 60th birthday last November, the actress co-organised

a party together with his children Shaina, Karannath and

Dakshina, and former actress Namrata Shirodkar whose account

Rikku had once handled.

Six years ago, when she was planning a comeback in Bollywood,

she had planned to do it with a film her manager had planned

to produce. "She respects him just as much as she once did.

And it's not about his fees either. Times have changed, and

the biggest stars are now being managed by professional

agencies. Even the likes of Karan Johar and Farhan Akhtar,

whose productions firms Dharma Productions and Excel

Entertainment respectively, are mentoring new talent and

managing their careers.

Dixit has always maintained that Rikku has played a

significant role in her professional success.

"It is great to have someone take care of your dates, fix

appointments with directors and producers, and everyone who

wants to meet you. It is difficult for an actor to keep track

of everything that's going on," she is said to have told

journalists.

Rikku is also said to have micromanaged Dixit's affairs,

"deciding on the costumes, telling her if her make-up is

right or wrong, and getting the best for her."

diminishing by one-fifth the global

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Does it matter? What claim should this bird, or any other missing creature, have on our conscience? Extinction is nothing new; there are more extinct species than extant ones. We ourselves stand on the bones of superseded primate ancestors. Extinction is hardly a phenomenon only of modern industrial civilization; it is widely believed that the woolly mammoth was hunted to extinction by Neolithic man, and I learned from a book about avian extinction called Hope is the Thing with Feathers that "prehistoric islanders in the Pacific killed off some 2,000 bird species, diminishing by one-fifth the global number through a variety of activities, including habitat destruction."
But there is something about the disappearance of animals in the modern age that is different. I would not presume to know the mental state of those prehistoric islanders, but I can't help but imagine they were not conscious of the end they were causing. Edward O. Wilson, the great biologist, has speculated that, having evolved in the midst of abundance whose limit we could never fathom, we are all but programmed to go at nature with an exterminating fury necessary for our own survival that, until quite recently--when modern technology amplified human will to an equally unfathomable degree--had few lasting consequences.
I associate that pre-modern delusion of abundance with my assimilating grandmother, who was born on the Lower East Side in 1900. Shedding Yiddish and Jewish ritual observance as a young woman, it never occurred to her that her language or people could disappear in traumatic fashion; there was plenty back in the old country and a sense of everrenewing abundance. Similarly, those first settlers who came here--like Audubon himself, who arrived in this country from France in 1803, the year the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country--could hardly imagine that swinging an ax or firing a gun might, in the space of 50 or 100 years, lead to the end of entire species. Nowadays, though, we must prop up the natural world we evolved to contend with, which is, to say the least, stressful and confusing.