Pity. Of Young & Old.

This afternoon Hanif Kureishi, English-Pakistani novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, came to Pierson College for a Master's Tea, blanketing my 4pm procrastination in a bitter British coziness. Kureishi wrote the charmingly geriatric film with Peter O'Toole, Venus: the story of an unexpected relationship between a lazily gauche girl and an elderly actor (a veteran of Britain's stage and screen now type cast as "the corpse").

Kureishi discussed "the crash" that occurs in a writer's process, after the thrill of the seminal idea has subsided: it's like in love—after six months, when you realize what that person is really like, and then you either break up or you come to terms with who they are. I wonder if love is always as bleak and businesslike as Kureishi describes it.

On his unwillingness to sell out, after Kureishi turned down a big Hollywood deal, he said, "I could see the check hovering in my retina all the time." He has the expenses of twin fifteen-year-old boys to consider, but he distilled the fate of the young generation down to the following question: "Do you want to read a book by Tolstoy or do you want to spend the day on Facebook?"

For all his cynical spins on success, Kureishi had a clever finish. His teenage sons say to him of his writer's lifestyle: "Dad, we've never seen you do a day's work—whenever we look in your study, you're always laying on the sofa and listening to the Beatles."