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vital-information · 4 years ago

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Not long ago I finished working on a novel, written in a voice I’ve never used before: the first person. Oh, I’ve written essays that say ‘I’, and many emails, obviously, and birthday cards and notes for my children’s teachers, and several lectures like this one — but never fiction. Honestly, I was always a little repelled by the idea. I think because I started writing very young, at an age where I felt that any reader who picked me up would be well within their rights to say: now, who exactly does this girl think she is? My answer to that was: ‘no one’. It became important for me to believe my fiction was about other people, rather than myself, I took a strange pride in this idea, as if it proved I was less self-preoccupied or vain than the memoirist or the blogger of the Bildungsroman-er. No one could accuse me of hubris if I wasn’t there. Looking back, I think this moral queasiness around the first person is very much a British habit. One of the first things we learn in school about our greatest writer, Shakespeare — right after we are informed that he is the greatest — is that he was, in essence, nobody. I don’t only mean that we know very little about him autobiographically, although of course we don’t. I mean that we are consistently encouraged to believe Shakespeare the supreme example of what Keats called ‘negative capability’, that is, a man who appeared to hold no firm opinions or set beliefs, who lived in doubt and in a hundred personas, whose empathy for others was limitless, who is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in his famous plays, like a gnomic god. Now, another way to think about this is that Shakespeare’s ego was so very insatiable he thought he could speak for everybody: a black duke, a transvestite girl, a carefree prince, a mad king. But we tend not to think of it that way in Britain, instead we consider Shakespeare’s breed of impersonality among the highest literary virtues. The first-person voice, in this elevated context, presents itself as a kind of indulgence, a narcisstic weakness, which the French and Americans go in for, perhaps, but not the British, or not very often. In Britain we are always doing this: mistaking an aesthetic choice for an ethical one.”

Zadie Smith, “The I Who Is Not Me”

#zadie smith #writing #feel free #quotes #shakespeare

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writingdotcoffee · 5 years ago

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#127: Doin’ It Right

Advice for writers, eh? What of it? I’ve been posting daily inspiration and all sorts of other advice for writers on this blog for years. Once in a while, a quote I post gets a lot of attention, and the comments start coming in. Oh, the comments.

Contrary to Godwin’s Law, many comments on this blog are positive and very encouraging. But we wouldn’t be on the Internet if there weren’t at least a few negative ones. They range from plain misunderstanding, questioning the credibility of the author (who’s Stephen King anyway?) to outright fury about a specific piece of advice. Today, I’d like to talk about the last category.

All the snippets of wisdom that I curate for this blog are reflections of the respective authors’ experiences. When Susan Sontag says that

A writer, like an athlete, must ‘train’ every day. What did I do today to keep in ‘form’?

What she really means is that she expects herself as a writer to train every day. It might have been something that she did or aspired to do given her own circumstances. Every writer is different, and while it might be good advice for most people, it may not be right for you.

When Ray Bradbury says that

You must write every single day of your life.

Does it mean that if you skip Thursdays, you will never be a successful writer? Well, of course not. Some people prefer writing 500 words every day. Others like burning through 4,000 words on a Sunday. In the words of Zadie Smith

There is no “writer's lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Readers don’t care how you produce your work. We want to see the results. As a writer though, I’m fascinated by the habits and routines of other writers. How did they get to where they are today? What’s it like to be in their shoes?

I’m not looking to adopt their advice wholesale. I’m trying to understand why they did what they did, and what I can learn from it. There’s also plenty of advice out there which I find unhelpful, but I see how it can work for others.

Several famous authors talk about having no backup plan. They went all in, and writing a good book was their only option which finally gave them the motivation they needed. I would never do that.

Writing is an extremely personal matter. There’s no right or wrong, as long as things are working for you.

Then why authors make such grand statements and sweeping generalisations about writing? It’s because they found what works for them. And when that happens, you feel like you’ve just figured out life itself. Suddenly, everything falls into place and you’re wondering why did it take you so long. Naturally, most writers want to share their epiphanies with others, forgetting that we’re not all the same after all.

The next time you see a piece of writing advice that just seems wrong, remember that nobody is really doing it right, except Daft Punk, of course.

Want More?

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Past Editions

#126: How Long Does It Take To Write A Book?, January 2020

#125: Journaling As a Form of Time Travel, January 2020

#124: 5 Inspiring Reads to Kickstart Your 2020, January 2020

#123: 2019 on the Blog, December 2019

#122: Axioms of the Creative Life, December 2019

#writing #writers #write #writing tips #writing advice #amwriting #writing life #writeblr #writing update #update #personal update #me

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felixkalvesmaki-blog · 6 years ago

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Notes on "News writing”

Felix Kalvesmaki Assignment #? Feb. 11, 2019 WC: 934 “The first thing to do is stop and think. Do not start writing until you have a plan.”I think I do this unconsciously, but I should be doing it with a lot more care. I should be meticulously pouring over information from sources, as opposed to trying to do all the math in my head, so to speak. “The reader of the Guardian will tend to be better educated and to have a larger vocabulary than the reader of the Sun.” Yikes. A little pretentious and presumptuous, don’t you think? I feel as though it’s true, but don’t say it out loud. Incredibly condescending. “It is never better, wherever you are writing, to prefer the less familiar word - "wordy" is always better than "prolix". Nobody is impressed by the use of a word they do not understand or would not use in everyday speech.” I’ve heard, in fact, the NYT does something similar. Or tries to, anyhow. “Self-indulgent writing pleases nobody except perhaps the writer.” I feel as though journalism is one of the only fields of professional writing in which the intent is not for the writer to please themselves, but for a writer to please their audience. Poets, novelists, and creative essayists a la Zadie Smith write to tell stories, sure, but it is often meant to document something personal, whether that’s a crafted narrative or a pivotal moment in the writer’s life. Journalism is different: you’re writing for the benefit of others, not for creative catharsis. "inverted pyramid:” the idea that a journalist should frontload their most important information. “…in extremis (do not use - see later…” I’m glad they at least clarified, but it seems counterproductive to use a big word, and then to say not to use it. Feels like a flex.“the second paragraph will be the most important you write.” the nut graf, correct? “Journalism students are taught about the five Ws: who, what, when, where and why.” I was also taught the H: the “how.” “News is more engaging if it describes something that is happening, rather than something that is not” is a very interesting analysis of both the news cycle and those who are consuming it. “Long quotes bring a story grinding to a halt, particularly if they are from politicians, particularly local politicians, bureaucrats or bores.” This made me think of why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is such a distinct presence in politics. “But a quote will add a different tone of voice, inject emotion or passion, answer the question "what was it like?", "how did you feel?", "what are you going to do next?", "what actually happened." Usually the reporter was not there and is gathering the information after the event. The direct quote provides actuality.” This is good information about how to place the reader in a situation for which the reporter was not there to place themselves in. Journalism is about telling and selling a story. “People do not "proceed"; they walk. Police do not "apprehend"; they stop or arrest or detain. "At this point in time" is now.” I never thought about it like this. We should, in general, be more frank in our storytelling. Like people. Not journalists. To be frank, I found "Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account." more confusing than the first passage. But whatever. “Keith Waterhouse, the veteran Daily Mail and Daily Mirror columnist wrote an irresistible book on journalistic writing called Newspaper Style.” Dude, didn’t you just bash the Mail? Like, rightfully so, but weird to trash the same publication you’re pulling inspiration from. "Use specific words (red and blue)," says Waterhouse, "not general ones (brightly coloured).” This was called “naming the dog” in one of my journalism workshops. The rule being, it hurts more for the reader to read about a dog dying when you give that dog a name. “Anything readers do not understand makes them feel left out rather than included.” That’s so interesting! I never thought about it like this. I always knew not to use jargon, I could never quite put the “why” into words. “Pro bono, inter alia and in extremis have no place in newspapers, and usually mean the writer is showing off.”Do…do people really not know what “pro bono” means? I mean, I’ll listen to this advice, but like…really? “‘Kingsbridge Silver Band has hit a high note with National Lottery chiefs to the tune of nearly £52,000. Tired old instruments struck a chord with the lottery board, which has drummed up enough cash for a complete new set, giving the band plenty to trumpet about.’ Yes, really.” God, I couldn’t help but read this in a mid-Atlantic, ‘40s radio broadcaster voice. Like, remember the Hindenberg broadcast? That voice. This is a terrible piece of writing. REWRITE: Joseph Foster and sister Kate were involved in a small car accident when the car accidentally ran onto the sidewalk. The accident happened when the Volvo, carrying motor parts to Oxford, veered to avoid a police car driving on the wrong side of the road. A spokesman for the police department denied this story. The children were not hurt, only shaken, according to Andrew Brown, a spokesman at a nearby Eddington hospital where the children were assessed. The spokesman went on to say they were incredibly lucky. “They were examined in [the emergency room] and allowed to go home,” Brown said. “Unfortunately, Kate’s buggy was beyond repair.”

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wholesomeobsessive · 6 years ago

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When it comes to weather, New Englanders are delusional. In his ten years on the East Coast Howard had lost count of the times some loon from Massachusetts had heard his accent, looked at him pitiably and said something like: Cold over there, huh? Howard’s feeling was: look, let’s get a few things straight here. England is not warmer than New England in July or August, that’s true. Probably not in June either. But it is warmer in October, November, December, January, February, March, April and May - that is, every month when warmth matters. In England letter-boxes do not jam with snow. Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble. It is not necessary to pick up a shovel in order to unearth your rubbish bins. This is because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England’s got to give.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

#on beauty #zadie smith #book quotes #my finds

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buddaimond · 7 years ago

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Excerpts regarding “High Life”, highlighted parts about Rob, meeting with André Benjamin (another cast of High Life), opps a little spoiler of High Life, BTS of shooting High Life in Cologne, quotes from the producer Andrew Lauren, words from Olivier Assayas about Claire Denis, and words from Des Hamilton :

“High Life,” which cost millions more to make than any of Denis’s previous films, seems, on its surface, dramatically divergent from the rest of her body of work, yet versions of its premise swirled inside Denis’s mind for more than a decade. For years, she had wanted to tell the story of the last person in the world. In the film, the galactic convicts perish one by one. Only a single felon survives, along with his daughter, who was born on the spaceship. (Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic conceptual artist who a decade ago erected waterfalls in the East River, designed the spaceship for the movie.) Their relationship—literally forged in a vacuum, with a whiff of the taboo—was her primary interest in the story. “It’s feminine and masculine,” Denis said. “It’s family blood but it’s not the same sex.”

The script, which Denis wrote with her longtime screenwriter, Jean-Pol Fargeau, took years to complete. (Zadie Smith and Nick Laird worked on a draft that Denis ultimately rejected.) Though Denis treats scripts as provisional and merely suggestive documents, hers are full of vivid sensory detail. When “High Life” ’s main character, played by Robert Pattinson, is introduced, he is “pressed against the exterior of the spaceship, like a mountain climber against a sheer cliff face.” Later, when he changes out of his spacesuit, he does so “like a knight removing armor.”

Denis saw Pattinson in “Twilight,” she said, and was struck by his “heartrending charisma.” She had wanted someone older for “High Life”—she thought at one point of Philip Seymour Hoffman—but after meeting with Pattinson in Los Angeles and Paris she realized that “he was already in the film.” She went on, “When he said to me, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘It’s already too late. It’s you or nobody else.’ ” She chose “High Life” ’s other stars, including Juliette Binoche and the English model and actress Mia Goth, with similarly instinctual possessiveness. In the summer of 2015, Denis and her producer, Oliver Dungey, flew to Atlanta to meet André Benjamin, the rapper, actor, producer, adroit hat-wearer, and all-around cultural icon, better known by his stage name, André 3000, and for his flamboyant role in the Atlanta hip-hop duo OutKast. Denis had enjoyed Benjamin’s lead performance in “All Is by My Side,” a 2014 biopic of Jimi Hendrix, and she had got it in her mind that he should play a part in “High Life.”

The three had agreed to meet at the St. Regis Hotel’s restaurant for lunch. “Here we are,” Dungey recalled, “me—this sort of posh, square English guy—and Claire—this scorny French lady—and in walks André.” Benjamin said, “I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know who you are or what you want, but everyone is telling me I have to meet with you and I’ve got to do this film.”

“They immediately hit it off,” Dungey said. “I’m just sitting there, picking at grits. The purpose of the trip was accomplished within thirty seconds.”

The only other people in the restaurant were two Gambian ladies visiting from, of all places, the Cotswolds. “Why were they there?” Dungey said. “I don’t know. But, then again, why were we there?

“Claire and André were talking about eating snake,” he continued. He shrugged in a manner that suggested his exclusion from the conversation had been so profound as to be painless. “Claire was saying how it gives you this vitality, this life force. And one of these women from Gambia turns around and says, ‘She’s right!’ ”

Moments later, a statuesque woman arrived. “She waltzes in and apparently knows André,” Dungey said. “She hugs him, asks how he’s been, blah, blah, blah. This woman looks fantastic: she has ribbons in her hair, lots of beads, she’s colorfully dressed. André introduces her to us as Dana.” Here Dungey paused, smiled, and shook his head. “This is not Dana. This is Queen Latifah.

“Claire is obviously taken with this woman while having no idea who she is. She just kept telling her she looked like a queen,” he continued. (Denis insists that she was well aware of Dana’s identity.) “The ladies from Gambia know who she is, though, and they also know who André is, and they ask for a photo. Queen Latifah ended up paying for all our lunches without saying anything.”

Dungey added, “It was really one of the most charming and weird moments of my entire life.”

........

Similarly, in “High Life,” some of the convicts are black, but they are not a message-telegraphing majority. When the film’s American producers read the script, they urged Denis to change the fact that the first character to die was a black man. In the U.S. today, they told her, this was just not done. For Americans, Denis said, the problem of racism “is buried so deep. For me, it was not deep.” She refused to change the plot, writing in more dialogue instead. In the final version, André Benjamin’s character says, “See? Even in outer space, the black ones are the first to die.”

.......

With “High Life,” Denis will inevitably receive more international attention than she ever has, but for years many filmmakers have spoken of her as a sort of secret saint

........

“It’s such a macho, minimalist film,” said Andrew Lauren, one of the producers of “High Life” and its financier, who saw “Beau Travail” years ago, on the recommendation of his father, the designer Ralph Lauren. “When this new project came to us, and I went back through Denis’s filmography, I was, like, ‘Wait, she did “Beau Travail”?’ I would have sworn that a man made it. She’s like the precursor to Kathryn Bigelow.”

........

Unlike Denis’s past movies, which were shot on location, mostly in France and Africa, “High Life” was largely filmed at a studio in Cologne, during two months last fall. The cast and Denis stayed at a hotel thirty minutes away. The drive, made each morning and night—often with a P.A. behind the wheel who was described to me as “the worst driver in the history of mankind”—took them past oil refineries, sausage factories, and tractor-trailer bordellos that were parked, with German efficiency, along the highway exits.

By all reports, it was a trying experience. Denis was unused to filming in a studio. She made scene changes constantly and with little warning, sometimes by text message. Benjamin described an atmosphere of inadvertent method acting. “These convicts are all supposed to be from different places—they don’t know one another at first, and they’re just trying to make it,” he said. “And, on set, it was the same! I’m this guy from Atlanta, Claire’s French, obviously, most of the guys on set are German, the actors didn’t know each other. It was a trip.” Robert Pattinson, who, several people said, spent much of his time on set asking existential questions—Wait, who am I in this movie? What are we making here?—told me, “It’s a very abstract way of working. It feels like experimental theatre, frankly.”

Lauren said, “A lot of people were thinking, This is good for my résumé, but I wish I weren’t here.” He continued, “I think, if you make a movie with Claire, you can make any movie.” He compared the process to over-preparing for the SATs, or training at high altitudes, so that your performance at sea level feels easier on game day. At an early color-test screening, held at an ornate theatre in Cologne, Denis’s voice was the only one in the room, saying, “Merde! Crap! What are we doing? Why am I here?” Lauren said he thought “everyone sort of took it personally.”

At the end of each day, the cast and crew convened at the hotel bar. “Everyone would sort of be sitting at different parts of the bar, and she’d walk in and it was, like, Shit! Claire’s here!” Lauren recalled. “I saw a lot of people wanting to leave many, many times, but they stayed. They stay because they love her—even though they can’t stand her.”

Denis does not deny such behavior. “I can be the worst person, the meanest person on a set,” she said. “Shouting, screaming, complaining. I don’t have a lot of respect for myself as a director. People accept me the way I am, because they know I’m not faking. Probably.”

When I described these accounts to the filmmaker Olivier Assayas, a close friend of Denis’s, he laughed. “There’s a certain form of chaos in the way she works,” he said. “When you make movies, it’s always disturbing how confident everyone involved is that they know how things should be done. And you have to constantly remind them, No, you don’t know how it’s done, I don’t know how it’s done, nobody knows how it’s done. You create chaos as a way of destabilizing the surroundings that could bring you to make something that would otherwise be conventional.”

.....

Hamilton (casting director)recalled witnessing the initial meeting between Denis and Pattinson, in Los Angeles, and feeling like “these are two people on a date, and I really shouldn’t be here, maybe I should actually remove myself?” With obvious pride, Denis recounted how Pattinson took the train from London to visit her in Paris. “He came to me like a friend,” she told me. “You know, in London, Robert has to hide because of girls?” (A representative for Pattinson said, “He doesn’t hide from anyone.”)

Full Article

#Claire Denis #Robert Pattinson #The New Yorker #High Life

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inspiredink · 7 years ago

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On having literary role models

I have often wondered about popular writers and their role models. Ama Ata Aidoo has said that her father had a strong influence on her "journey" to becoming a writer. Zadie Smith has declared that E. M. Forster was her "first love"; and Gabriel Garcia Marquez remembers that he learned about interior monologue from James Joyce's Ulysses, but later realised that he preferred how Virginia Woolf used the technique in her writing.

I remember some of the writers I connected to emotionally at different stages of my life. C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe created the most amazing mental images during my childhood. Judy Blume's books inspired me to start keeping a personal journal in my early teens, and I've done so till today. I can still recall my fondness for Ola Rotimi's adaptation of Oedipus Rex, The Gods Are Not to Blame, a play. It contained memorable Yoruba proverbs like: "Until the rotten tooth is pulled out, the mouth must chew with caution." and "It is sickness that man can cure, not death."

In college, I read and re-read James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man so many times that it became my bible. During that same period, I was smitten by Chinua Achebes Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart. My fascination with Charles Bukowski's writing came in my late twenties. Since then, I've evolved in my view of writers as role models, but one fact remains constant:

most of the influential writers whose works I love have spent months and years studying and imitating, to some degree, other writers they connected with on an emotional and intellectual level, from sentence structure, to word choice, to plot.

A few weeks ago, it occurred to me how similar Ambrose Bierce's style in story telling was to Edgar Allan Poe's. I had been reading short stories by both writers for a while, and at one point I realised that I kept reading Poe's stories and thinking they were written by Bierce. Of course, this led me to conduct a comparison between the two writers.

I first checked their dates of birth. I needed to know who came first. After finding out it was Poe, I went on to compare stories written by Bierce and Poe which I felt were similar.

Now, I read Bierce's works long before I started reading Poe. Even though Poe's poems were part of my university's recommended readings, I never read them because I wasn't interested in poetry during my college years. My first introduction to Bierce's writing was The Devil's Dictionary. Any writer who can make me howl with laughter becomes an immediate favourite. I love Bierce's wit. I went on to read many of his short stories including One of Twins and Beyond the Wall. It was when I started reading Poe's short stories that I discovered something interesting.

I remember reading The Cask of Amontillado and thinking by default that it was written by Bierce. This happened because I was going to add the link to the story in my online library and wrote Bierce's name as the author only to double check and realise this was Poe's story. Initially, I thought it was one of my usual mistakes and ignored it. But then, I went on to read other short stories by Poe and after about the fifth story, I had to pause and ask myself: Why do I keep reading Poe's works and thinking they were written by Bierce? Both writers sounded similar. Also, their style reminded me of Aurthur Conan Doyle's writing.

I later found out that there was indeed some connection between these three writers. One's work, influenced the other two.

Finally, I read The Fall of the House of Usher by Poe, and just like that, something clicked into place. I immediately recalled Bierce's short story Beyond the Wall. The plot of Beyond the Wall is way too similar to that of The Fall of the House of Usher not to have been a creative modification of it.

Now, the few articles I've read about Bierce discuss Guy De Maupassant as having influenced Bierce's later approach to unexpected endings in his stories which would often shock the reader's expectations. When Bierce talked about early influences on his writing, he does not mention Poe. He once said to a friend:

"My father was a poor farmer, and could give me no general education, but he had a good library, and to his books I owe all that I have." (Letters of Ambrose Bierce).

I never sought a connection between Poe and Bierce until I noticed the similarities in their horror writing. That's when I did some more reading on Bierce and discovered that writers like Arnold Bennett had compared his work to Poe's:

"In the line of the startling, half Poe, half Merimee he cannot have many superiors. A story like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge well, Edgar Allan Poe might have deigned to sign it. And that is something." - Arnold Bennett (Letters of Ambrose Bierce).

After these findings, I decided to search for articles analysing Poe's influence on Bierce's writing. Because, if I have now noticed the similarities, someone has already written about it. And they had.

I found an online presentation titled Influence of Edgar Allan Poe on Ambrose Bierce posted by a user on Prezi. It briefly highlights some of my observations.

I noticed a few elements in The Fall of the House of Usher and Beyond the Wall which drew my attention to their similarities. First of all, both stories are written in the first person narrative by an unnamed narrator. Now, that should not mean they are the same. However, in both stories, there is a letter exchange between the unnamed narrator and the main character. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Roderick Usher invites the narrator to his house. In Bierce's Beyond the Wall, the narrator writes to Mohun Dampier requesting a visit.

Both narrators are friends with the main character. Both Roderick Usher's house and Mohun Dampier's house seem to be haunted and falling apart. Both men seem to have lost their previous good looks and suffer from some mental illness. Both men die by the end of the story.

One similar element which I found important was the fact that the two stories are about the manifestation of a female ghost. The “ghost” reveals its presence in such a way that the narrator becomes a witness to a paranormal phenomenon; and both stories include a storm which adds to the atmosphere of horror.

In Poe's story, the female "ghost" is Madeline, Roderick’s twin sister. In Bierce's tale, the ghost is female, but unnamed, and his story turns out to be more about romantic love than family relations. I could go into more detail about how both stories are similar and how each writer does have his own approach to executing the elements of horror in their specific tales, but I prefer that readers read the stories for themselves and decide.

After confirming Poe's influence on Bierce, I realised some truths about having literary role models, whether you are publishing your own works or blogging.

Bierce and Author Conan Doyle studied Edgar Allan Poe's writing style and enhanced the techniques they learned with their own mastery in writing. Doyle chose Poe's detective writing style and Bierce followed Poe's horror writing approach. This leads to my next question. Who were Edgar Allan Poe's influences?

Bierce's horror writing may have been influenced by Poe but he still maintained his wit and his own point of view. He was able to create his version of horror in reader's minds through his stories.

Bertha Clark Pope makes a strong statement about the quality of Bierce's writing in Letters of Ambrose Bierce:

"...In all his best work there is originality, a rare and precious idiosyncracy; his point of view, his themes are rich with it. Above all writers Bierce can present brilliantly present startling fragments of life, carved out from attendant circumstance; isolated problems of character and action; sharply bitten etchings of individual men under momentary stresses and in bizarre situations. Through his prodigious emotional perceptivity he has the power of feeling and making us feel some strange, perverse accident of fate, destructive of the individual, of making us feel it to be real and terrible."

Many influential writers who had literary role models seemed to have spent a lot of time reading and studying the writing strategies of their role models. They took particular notice of how their favourite authors constructed sentences, developed plot, created suspense, structured an essay, a book, and used literary devices to stimulate the imagination of readers. Joan Didion has said that she spent many hours typing out the stories of Hemingway in order to figure out how sentences worked.

In her essay Write Till You Drop, Annie Dillard said:

"Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev. Isaac Bashevis Singer, as it happened, also chose Hamsun and Turgenev as models. Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov.

Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; E. M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if you ask a 21-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, ''Nobody's.'' He has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.

Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Bohr and Gauguin, possessed powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The work's possibilities excited them; the field's complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure."

Most creative writers today may not be able to live off of their work, but some are still as passionate, as intense, and as relentless in their desire to learn, create, and share enduring literature and insight with the ever growing number of readers today, as Bierce and his counterparts did during the nineteenth-century.

#writing tips #writers on tumblr #poets on tumblr #writers corner

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limejuicer1862 · 5 years ago

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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

V. B. Borjen

is an author and visual artist currently based in the Czech Republic. His first poetry collection in Bosnian, Priručnik za levitiranje (en. Levitation manual), won the 2012 Mak Dizdar Award for the best first manuscript by a young poet. His work in English and his recent visual art have appeared in AZURE, Hypothetical: A Review of Everything Imaginable, The Esthetic Apostle, Not Your Mother’s Breast Milk, Chaleur Magazine and Honey & Lime.

Twitter: @Borjen

Instagram: samoniklo

The Interview

1. What inspired you to write poetry?

It goes a long way back, but I am not sure I would call it inspiration. I was eleven and I suddenly started writing poems. I have a vague memory of finding my father’s poem ‘Melancholy’ in one of the cabinets (he had perished some seven years before, during the Bosnian War). Perhaps that was what made me think I could write too? I don’t think he was ever serious about it though, I mean as I am.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

Beyond that memory, I don’t remember poetry having much importance in my nearest surroundings in those early days. Nobody at home encouraged me to write, or discouraged me for that matter. My interests have always been many and quite various, so it must have been hard to see any one activity as worthwhile some significant engagement from my mother’s side. But as far as encouragement outside of home is concerned, I had a great teacher of Bosnian in the 5th grade of primary school, Murisa Jukan, and she would always end her lessons by saying: OK, and now Beganović will read us one of his poems. What she saw in those ridiculous little things, I cannot say. But it was the first encouragement from a person of some literary authority. So I kept at it.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

Not at all for many years. I guess the first serious brush with other people’s poetry was in the secondary school and then later at university. Was there “anxiety of influence”, to quote Harold Bloom? I don’t think so. Early twenties are characterised by a strange, oblivious sense of unwarranted entitlement. This is not unusual, but as one gets to late twenties/early thirties one realises how strong a sway the past and tradition hold over us after all. It’s a humbling experience.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I used to get up really early, at five or so, and write till 7 or 8. Now with the full-time job, the part-time jobs and the PhD dissertation pending, it is a bit hard to keep to a strict writing routine. But I am trying to get back to this regime. I’m at my best very early in the day. But I write whenever I can find the time.

5. What motivates you to write?

With me it’s a need. Kafka said it well: “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”

6. What is your work ethic?

Work is one of the most rewarding things, both for my physical and mental well-being. But it has to be meaningful. Like reading, writing, or painting. The corporate job is rather numbing and draining because I see no purpose in it, other than that it pays the bills. Could I transplant Dr Angelou’s title here and say I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? I must.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

The books I read in my childhood and all the books I’ve loved since are very much alive inside me. They are like a protective circle of good friends. I do not find them threatening, I do not think I’ve outgrown any of them. I’ve learned to appreciate that all the books have their greatest meaning in their own time, which comes for each of us individually. It would be ideal if they could come to us always exactly when we need them, but even if I read Winnie the Pooh or Moominvalley in November only now when I am 33 it does not matter; they speak to the child in me and so are timeless.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

From among the writers, I need Dubravka Ugrešić (for the beauty of her prose and the timely calibration of my moral compass), the late Toni Morrison and Ursula K. Le Guin for the same, then Jeanette Winterson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith…

As far as the poets are concerned, I love the work of Heather Derr Smith, Ferida Duraković, Julia Beach, Senka Marić, Anita Pajević, Todd Smith, Monika Herceg, Šima Majić, Mathew Yates, Lee Potts, Moira J. Saucer, Lidija Deduš, Kyla Houbolt… This is such an exciting time for poetry. The digital age has reinvigorated it.

9. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?

To share the experience of being alive and out of the need to understand, everything and anything, or at least to try to. All writing is, among other things, an attempt at understanding.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

If they must ask that, I would tell them: don’t bother. People write for different reasons, but I do not think this is a kind of work that should be done lightly, or because it seems cool. I mean, everyone is welcome to do it, but if one cares deeply about literature, one has also this sense of responsibility. If one is supposed to be the continuation of the great voices of the past then think of the responsibility. I would not want to publish something now that 10 years on I would be ashamed of.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I am currently working on a poetry collection in English. My first collection in Bosnian, Priručnik za levitiranje (2013, en. Levitation Menual) won the Mak Dizdar, an important award in the region of former Yugoslavia. The second collection in Bosnian, Odjezd (roughly, Riding Out) is still waiting for a publisher. So this English collection is my third. I have another project going on, a hybrid of prose and poetry which could be published as a chapbook once it’s done. Meanwhile, I keep submitting, as most of us do, and talking literature and sharing my paintings with our inspiring literary community on Twitter. It’s a great time to be a poet.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: V. B. Borjen Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

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loosejournal · 5 years ago

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Dwight Garner’s favorite quotations

For nearly four decades I’ve kept what is known as a commonplace book – a bound notebook, and later a long computer file, passed from desktops (1990s) to laptops (2000s) to my cell phone, into which I’ve poured verbal delicacies, “blasts of a trumpet”, as Emerson put it, and bits of scavenged wisdom from my life as a reader. Yea, for I am an underliner, a destroyer of books, and maybe you are, too. Commonplace books are not so uncommon. John Locke kept one, as did Virginia Woolf. W. H. Auden published his, as did the poet J. D. McClatchy. E. M. Forster’s was issued after his death. The novelist David Markson wrote terse and enveloping novels that resembled commonplace books in many regards; they were bird’s nests of facts threaded with the author’s own subtle interjections. For fans of the commonplace book genre, many prize examples have come from lesser-known figures like Geoffrey Madan and Samuel Rogers, both English, who produced books that are notably witty and illuminating. These have become cult items. Christopher Ricks noted about Rogers that, although he may not have been an especially kind man, “he was very good at hearing what was said”.

I use my own commonplace book as an aide-mémoire, a kind of external hard drive. Reading it is a way of warding off what Christopher Hitchens, quoting a friend, called CRAFT (Can’t Remember a Fucking Thing) syndrome. I use my gleanings in my own writing. Like Montaigne, I quote others “in order to better express myself”. Montaignecompared quoting well to arranging other people’s flowers. Sometimes, I sense, I quote too often, swinging on them in my writing as if from vine to vine. It’s one of the curses of spending a lifetime as a word-eater, and of retaining, so far, a semi-reliable memory.

I am no special fan of most books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the Yale Book of Quotations and the New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, to name three dependable reference books, have their uses, for sure. They are sturdy repositories of literary and verbal history. (Countless other books of quotations aren’t reliable at all.) But even the best contain a good deal of dead weight. They lean, sometimes necessarily, on canned and overused thought and, more grievously, are skewed to the upbeat. So many of the lines they contain seem to vie to be stitched on throw pillows or ladled, like chicken soup, on the credulous soul. “Almost all poetry is a failure”, Charles Bukowski contended, “because it sounds like somebody saying, Look, I have written a poem.” The same is true of quotations and aphorisms; too many have a taxidermied air, as if they were self-consciously aimed at posterity.

This small slice of the material I’ve hoarded is a sliver of a much larger book project, one that will break with the conventions of commonplace books and volumes of quotations by organizing quotes by feel rather than by category. There are few life lessons except by accident. I must add that I do not agree with everything that is said: retweet does not, as they say on Twitter, necessarily equal endorsement.

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(small selection)

“It’s only words, unless they’re true.” – David Mamet, Speed-the-Plow

“Why are you all reading? I don’t understand this reading business when there is so much fucking to be done.” – Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

“Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet.” – Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy

“Everything that is true is inappropriate.” – Oscar Wilde

“Everyone nodded, nobody agreed..” – Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

“Let’s, as if sore, grab a few things from the flood.” – A. R. Ammons, Complete Poems

“Fragments, indeed. As if there were anything to break.” – Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought

“He licked his lips. ‘Well, if you want my opinion–’ ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I have my own.’ –Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Love poems must be bounced back off a moon.” – Robert Graves, Paris Review interview

“See the moon? It hates us.” – Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories

“You know where the Beatles got that shit from. You know that’s our shit they fucking up like that.” – Albert Murray, South to a Very Old Place

“How come the Beatles never got busted for statutory rape – because they’re white?” – Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

“I hope you don’t mind, I’m from the South. We’re touchers.” – Charlie Rose, attributed

“Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.” – Robert Christgau, Village Voice

“Somehow he knew, based on very little experience, that this faux-casualshit spelled money.” – Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities

“Being rich is about acting, too, isn’t it? A style, a pose, an interpretation that you force upon the world.” – Martin Amis, Money

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” – Dorothy Parker

“Oh, fuck, not another elf.” – Hugo Dyson, as J.R.R. Tolkien read aloud an early draft of The Lord of the Rings

“I am putting a mental jigsaw together of what a hobbit looks like, based on a composite of every customer I have ever sold a copy to.” – Shaun Bythell, Diary of a Bookseller

“You put your finger in it, and go swish, swish, swish.” – Jane Jacobs, on how to make a West Village martini

“Wasn’t the whole 20th century a victory lap of collage, quotation, appropriation, from Picasso to Dada to Pop?” – Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence

“I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The not paying for things is intoxicating.” – Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“I don’t trust anybody who hasn’t shoplifted.” – John Waters

“Cleanliness might not be next to godliness but it is certainly adjacent to horniness.” – Geoff Dyer, on hotels, in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

“The assumptions a hotel makes about you! All those towels.” – Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show

“The meat around my skull can’t stop smiling.” – Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Let’s have some new clichés.” – Sam Goldwyn

“I need some new attitudes, some new affirmations and denials.” – Lionel Trilling, letter

“Good-bye, and I don’t mean au revoir.” – Christopher Ricks

“Of course it’s all right for librarians to smell of drink.” – Barbara Pym, Less Than Angels

“Edward worried about his drinking. Would there be enough gin? Enough ice?” – Donald Barthelme, Flying to America

“I have no enemies. But my friends don’t like me.” – Philip Larkin

“There was obviously nothing to recommend me to anyone.” – Deborah Levy, Hot Milk

“I have always disliked myself at any given moment; the total of such moments is my life.” – Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine.” – Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son

“Every time he played a note he waved it goodbye. Some times he didn’t even wave.” – Geoff Dyer on Chet Baker, But Beautiful

“Let us reflect whether there be any living writer whose silence we would consider a literary disaster.” – Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

“If we did get a writer worth reading, should we know him when we saw him, so choked as we are with trash?” – George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“Book publishing should be done by failed writers who recognize the real thing when they see it.” – Robert Giroux, Paris Review interview

“Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else.” – Nick Hornby, Ten Years in the Tub

“Revenge is the capitalism of the poor.” – Aravind Adiga, Selection Day

“It makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance.” – Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“The face of ‘evil’ is always the face of total need.” – William S. Burroughs, preface to Naked Lunch

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.” – Edna O’Brien, The Love Object

“How desperate do you have to be to start doing push-ups to solve your problems?” – Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book Two

“The primary object of a student of literature is to be delighted.” – Lord David Cecil

TLS, 2018

#quotes #dwight garner #commonplace book

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hflannery · 6 years ago

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reading? for pleasure?

Hi, these are my books for the year of 2018 so far, now that we’re at the halfway point*

*it’s gone past the halfway point, I know

with thanks to goodreads for allowing me to track this

1. Meet Me In The Bathroom by Lizzy Goodman

I’m so sad that I thought this book was ultimately a waste of time. I assumed it had even the smallest amount of narrative structure - no (my fault for missing the oral history I guess but it still sucks). It’s just a book of quotes from people in the nyc indie scene of the 00′s, which made reading it difficult as fuck for me because it was just boring and an eyesore. Furthermore that structure means that people who are kind of nobodies are just introduced without any indication as to who they actually are. However owning it is cool I guess - the Strokes were my favourite band as a teen and lcd are my favourite band now, and they’re probably the most signifiant nyc 00′s bands. TWO STARS.

2. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

This book is famous for being shit I think? A lot of ridiculousness happens but I did generally enjoy it as an interesting snapshot of a time and place I have no experience of. It was a bit long for what it is. Which is, badly written and melodramatic as fuck. THREE STARS

3. Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman

Like many people did I’m sure I picked this up after watching the movie. Boy, if you thought the movie had some outrageous scenes, the book has more!!! Some of the prose in this is not my cup of tea but gosh it really is captivating and stunning. I wish I’d saved it for summer because it would be a perfect beach read (I live nowhere near the beach, lol). Also it’s trope-y as balls but I’m not sure if it kind of was pre-tropes. Like it might have caused the tropes to exist. Anyway, it’s good. FOUR STARS.

4. On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Ok disclaimer I guess, Zadie Smith is my favourite author so maybe I’m bias. I realllllyyy loved this book a lot. It look me a long time to finish reading because I was coming to the end of my undergrad, but I adored the university setting, the warring families, the warring familY, in fact. I loved that Zadie made almost all the characters so dislikable (bar Kiki and perhaps the middle son) - having spent a good recent chunk of my life in acadamia good god do I know these characters. It was a fun family drama whilst also being enlightening about racial issues within mixed race families. Not my favourite work of hers; but still very very enjoyable! FOUR STARS

5. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

I hadn’t read in a long time when I felt compelled to purchase this strange book about a strange woman. I have to say that’s becoming a favourite genre of mine. I really seem to enjoy Japanese fiction (s2g not a weeb) and this was no exception. In our (meaning Britain’s) recent heatwave, I sat in my garden and read this in an hour flat. The heroine is a confusing but not confused woman who tries desperately to be thought of as normal through working at a convenience store. Though she does end up working in the exact same store for 18 years so this plan stops working. After trying to find other ways to prove her normalness she eventually realises that it’s not worth it. That is what you call a poor quality review of a really lovely book. I was so thrilled to have found this! If I am to recommend a book, it’s this one. I only had an issue with the pacing - it sped up quite a lot at the end. FOUR STARS

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dhaaruni · 2 years ago

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White Teeth was the first ~adult book I read back in the 5th grade and I didn’t understand much of it back then, but now that I do, I can confidently say, nobody does it like Zadie Smith and nobody probably ever will.

#white teeth #Zadie Smith #quotes #book blogging

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aldridge · 8 years ago

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Things I Liked in 2016

Mark O'Connell reviews a book of Gerry Adams's tweets

Janet Malcolm profiles the pianist Yuja Wang

FILMS: The best things I saw in the cinema this year were old. Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour documentary about Holocaust is imperfect but essential. Four scenes that will stay with me for a very long time: the bartender pouring drinks ("Mr Oberhauser, do you remember Belzec?"); the letter about the trucks ("the following technical changes are needed"); the scene in the barber shop ("We must go on"); the final scene ("I'm the last Jew"). Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is underrated, if it's possible for a Hitchcock film to be underrated. I like Geoff Dyer's take on the film – I don't believe it for a moment, but I don't think he does either. But more than these two films specifically, this should be taken as a general recommendation of watching old films in the cinema. | Of new stuff, I'd pick Arrival or the one-shot Victoria

Citizen Khan is the best piece about a murdered Afghan Muslim tamale vendor in mid-century Wyoming I read all year

TV: O.J.: Made in America is about two things: OJ Simpson, and everything else. Here, "everything else" includes sport, economic inequality, law enforcement, television, celebrity, capitalism, politics, misogyny (although perhaps insufficiently so), drugs, journalism, the legal system, and, of course, race. It's seven-and-a-half hours long, and it's barely long enough. | By being the funniest thing I saw all year, Fleabag tricked me into thinking it wouldn't also be the most tragic. | The "San Junipero" episode of Black Mirror | The last ever episode of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle was also the best. | The SNL "Black Jeopardy" sketch

I made this because I thought it was funny, although no one else did.

David's Ankles ("The first thing to hit the floor is his bent left elbow, the arm that holds the heroic sling, and it bursts along the lines of its previous breaks, old scars left over from an incident in the 16th century involving an unruly mob and a bench. Then the rest of the marble will meet the floor, and the physics from there will be fast and simple: force, resistance, the brittleness of calcite crystals, the shearing of microscopic grains along the axes on which they align. Michelangelo’s David will explode.")

youtube

MUSIC: Best album: Predictably, I choose Radiohead's hyphenlessly-titled A Moon Shaped Pool (runners-up: Bon Iver's 22, A Million and PJ Harvey's under-praised The Hope Six Demolition Project) Joint award for best single/best video: six-way tie between Burn the Witch [above], Lazarus, Drone Bomb Me, Fuck with Myself, Voodoo in My Blood, Nobody Speak | Best thematically related (?) reissued albums: Illinois by Sufjan Stevens and Boys for Pele by Tori Amos | Best Eurovision song contest-winning song about the historical geopolitics (and obliquely about the current geopolitics) of the Crimea: 1944 by Jamala | Best musical sung in the style of (and by the cast of) a different musical: Hamilton/Sweeney Todd | a playlist

BOOKS: The Lonely City by Olivia Laing (excerpt) | When in French by Lauren Collins (excerpt)

"Your Honor, if it is all right, for the majority of this statement I would like to address the defendant directly."

The Queen getting excited by cows has kept me amused today. pic.twitter.com/8ht0yDFwOJ

— SimonNRicketts (@SimonNRicketts) June 20, 2016

PODCASTS: This American Life at a Greek refugee camp (part 1, part 2) | The Reply-All phone-in show | Short clips from The New Yorker Radio Hour: at a high-school mock election (part 1, part 2); meeting a bee-stylist | Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History on the Toyota acceleration scandal | The Slate Culture Gabfest: for example, this discussion of names (from 33:30), or Dana's Bob Ross endorsement (from 57:00)

Christine Who Fed the Hungry: Emily Gould on volunteering in a New York soup kitchen, and the woman who ran it

"I Cooked Jeremy Corbyn’s Marrow Recipe And Had Some Thoughts About The Labour Party"

We didn't start the fire It was always burning since the world's been turning pic.twitter.com/9LIb6qbdn8

— #JAMWAH2017 (@JAM_WAH) December 18, 2016

New Yorker writers' encounters with Shakespeare. (I think I've put too many New Yorker links in this list, but it's too late now...)

OLD THINGS I CAME ACROSS THIS YEAR: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (Some unrequested advice: read Appendix I in its original place, and don't bother with Appendix II) | "Scorpio sphinx in a calico dress" | "Golden age" Hollywood films, which I"m arbitrarily defining to be sound films before 1965. Some favourites in approximate light-to-dark order: It Happened One Night (feather-light), The Philadelphia Story (James Stewart is funny drunk), everything by Howard Hawks, The Wizard of Oz (perfect), Casablanca (almost as good as To Have and Have Not), everything by Alfred Hitchcock, Double Indemnity ("There was no way in all this world I could have known that murder sometimes can smell like honeysuckle"), All About Eve (better than Sunset Blvd), On the Waterfront (Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint are excellent), In a Lonely Place (super-depressing ending). | A Manifesto from People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction

Notes on dancers by Zadie Smith

Found Sonnet: The Wig by Rita Dove | Elegy for Pedals (the walking bear) by Michael Robbins

Previously: Things I liked in 2015, 2014

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