Interview Roundup: Visualization and Perception

I discovered the artblog Vividmind today, and it led me to an interesting conversation between the late Spalding Gray and the Dalai Lama on visualization and meditation. I've also been catching up with some Gothamist interviews from last week (conducted by Nichelle Newsletter) with authors Danyel Smith and Bennett Madison, both of whom have new books coming out in the months ahead. And Bella Stander (BookReporter) chats with Julian Fellowes, who explains his new novel, Snobs, as "a rather caustic look at the British upper classes and their obsession with rules."

"There certainly were mixed feelings as to whether or not I had, in some way, betrayed my own kind by holding them up to ridicule [he adds]. Of course, lots of people thought they had sat for the portraits--although they were mostly wrong. Characters, as you know, are usually an amalgam of different acquaintances and seldom drawn from a single model. Having said that, there were one or two pretty close depictions, and one person in particular was very annoyed. "Really!" she said. 'A lifetime of avoiding the newspapers, and now look!' Although, in my defense, I never gave away her identity."