Tag Archives: Writing

Sonnet L’Abbé on Poetry and Important Stuff

01/19/2013 2:50 pm / Leave a Comment /

“She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want to read the books immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines–not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master’s call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.”

–Sonnet L’Abbé
from “On Beauty: Sonnet L’Abbé”

Posted in: Contents, Creators, Interview, Sonnet L’Abbé / Tagged: , ,

on Poetic Reverie (Gaston Bachelard)

10/14/2012 8:07 am / Leave a Comment /

Poetic reverie is a cosmic reverie. It is an opening to a beautiful world, to beautiful worlds. It gives the I a non-I which belongs to the I: my non-I. It is this “my non-I” which enchants the I of the dreamer and which poets can help us share. For my “I-dreamer,” it is this “my non-I” which lets me live my secret of being in the world.”

–Gaston Bachelard
found in The Poetics of Reverie

Posted in: Contents, Creators, Essay, Gaston Bachelard / Tagged: , , , ,

on Being an Instrument for Experiencing (May Sarton)

12/05/2011 11:08 pm / Leave a Comment /

“My own belief is that one regards oneself, if one is a serious writer, as an instrument for experiencing. Life–all of it–flows through this instrument and is distilled through it into works of art. How one lives as a private person is intimately bound into the work. And at some point, I believe one has to stop holding back for fear of alienating some imaginary reader or real relative or friend, and come out with personal truth. If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and artist, we have to know all we can about one another, and we have to be willing to go naked.”

–May Sarton
from Journal of a Solitude

Posted in: Contents, Creators, Essay, May Sarton / Tagged: , ,

Sven Birkerts on Writer’s Block

12/05/2011 10:20 pm / Leave a Comment /

Yucca, AZ by moominsean (cc) “Writer’s block — or, maybe more accurately, a writer’s expressive frustration — has many presenting symptoms and many causes, but it is at root language-related. Versions of creative stasis may afflict those who practice in other fields — painters and composers can find themselves short of ideas or inspiration — but the situation is not quite the same. Certainly we never hear anything comparable affecting statesmen, lawyers, coaches, electricians or pastry chefs. This affliction afflicts self-anointed users of language, writers, and because their medium of choice — or compulsion — happens to be the universal medium of consciousness and communication, it takes on a metaphysical inflection. If language is the distinctive human feature, its single greatest evolutionary feat, then writers are in a most privileged and vulnerable situation. In the movement from ape to apex, the engaged — successful — use of language, literary expression, represents the latter. It follows then that a frustration or failure in its use must be seen as something more sweepingly indicative as well. The fact that any true success is rare and difficult is not consoling to the person who is failing in the attempt.

Reason naturally persuades otherwise, but for many of us the deeper superstitions rule. Though the writer may believe that the finest productivity is fickle and cannot be willed, arriving on its terms, not his, he might still blame himself for productive lack. For he has the idea — I do, certainly — that inspiration has something to do with being in the right relation to things, and if arrival of words is out of his control, the achievement of that relation is not. If he has not made himself a worthy vessel, he has in the largest sense failed. Call it complete and utter nonsense, but when it eludes you — the tone, or the feeling of surprise, the current you can feel when the circuit is complete — when you know what that’s like and don’t have it — then such repudiation is useless. The psyche is irrational.”

–Sven Birkerts
from “The Pump You Pump the Water From”

Posted in: Contents, Creators, Essay, Sven Birkerts / Tagged: ,

To Write Well is to Think Clearly (David McCullough)

12/05/2011 9:17 pm / Leave a Comment /

"Typo" by quinn.anya “The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it. If a child learns nothing but that as a guide to life, that’s invaluable. You can’t learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can’t learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can’t learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

–David McCullough
found in “The Title Always Comes Last”

Posted in: Contents, Creators, David McCullough, Interview / Tagged: ,

on “The Essence of Damaged Books” (Carol Ciavonne)

04/06/2011 5:03 pm / Leave a Comment /

CC licensed image by The Shopping Sherpa

The chance of my acquisition of a damaged book is a puzzle I solve about my own inclinations. It is an opportunity to transcend myself, and in so doing, rediscover old loves, follow new threads of interest. Something about the partial erasure of information by damage in the form of time and or physical destruction acts as catalyst for this process which then becomes the ground for writing. For me, the reading and translating is only the first step and the research that I do is all for ambiance, not accuracy. In The Nature of Fire, I enjoyed the personality of de Beausobre; a little fey, a little pompous, and from a later century’s scientific point of view, sometimes laughable. Still, there is such heart beneath the science, and he takes such obvious delight in his own intellectual understanding. Reading science or criticism (which also purports to be logical, in the vein of scientific method) and using them as inspiration for writing confirm Adorno’s dictum: Art is magic liberated from the lie of having to be true. But what really quickens my interest is how I will use the totality of the book: the personality of the author, the particular language of place and time, the look of the page, the nicks, scratches, torn corners, battered covers; the missing pages. Lacunae: what might have been as important as what is, lost alchemical texts we must re-create.

All books are damaged, in that they are partial; fragments of life that we choose.

Creation comes from damage. Each of us puts together a new and different whole from the pieces of the world. Not “picking up the pieces,” but selecting the fragments, the particles, the way they look in the afternoon light, on the desk, or on the edge of sleep, falling open.

–from “The Book, The Leaf, The Skive of the Cover: Why I Love Damaged Books” by Carol Ciavonne
found in Pleiades 31.1

Posted in: Carol Ciavonne, Contents, Creators, Essay / Tagged: , , ,

True essayists (Cynthia Ozick)

03/10/2011 1:16 pm / Leave a Comment /

True essayists rarely write novels. Essayists are a species of metaphysician: they’re inquisitive and analytic about the least grain of being. Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea or to Africa or at least out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death. Only inner space–interesting, active, significant–can conceive the contemplative essay. Essays, unlike novels, emerge from the sensations of the self. Fiction creeps into foreign bodies: the novelist can inhabit not only a sex not his own but also beetles and noses and hunger artists and nomads and beasts. The essay is personal.

–from “Introduction” by Cynthia Ozick
found in Best American Essays: 1998

Posted in: Contents, Creators, Cynthia Ozick, Essay / Tagged:

Reading and metonymy (Jeffrey Lependorf)

03/10/2011 1:12 pm / Leave a Comment /

With the publication of Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I wrote certain of my books), Raymond Roussel posthumously revealed the secret of his idiosyncratic method of writing. He would compose many of his fantastical stories by creatively connecting two different meanings of the same word, or two different words spelled nearly the same, in clandestine, virtuosic acts of metonymy. He describes this as “essentially a poetic method.” As strange as his procedure may at first seem in terms of writing, I think we all do something like this when we read, especially when we love to read; we allow one thing we’re reading to suggest something else to read and find delight in the surprises and correspondences generated between the texts along the way.

–from “Dining with Proust” by Jeffrey Lependorf
found in A Public Space, issue 12, 2011

Posted in: Contents, Creators, Essay, Jeffrey Lependorf / Tagged: , ,

on the Ego Needed for Blogging (Marc Ambinder)

11/23/2010 8:25 am / Leave a Comment /

Really good print journalism is ego-free.  By that I do not mean that the writer has no skin in the game, or that the writer lacks a perspective, or even that the writer does not write from a perspective.  What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter’s insecurities or parochial concerns intervening. Blogging is an ego-intensive process. Even in straight news stories, the format always requires you to put yourself into narrative. You are expected to not only have a point of view and reveal it, but be confident that it is the correct point of view. There is nothing wrong with this. As much as a writer can fabricate a detachment, or a “view from nowhere,” as Jay Rosen has put it, the writer can also also fabricate a view from somewhere. You can’t really be a reporter without it. I don’t care whether people know how I feel about particular political issues; it’s no secret where I stand on gay marriage, or on the science of climate change, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called “Marc Ambinder” that people read because it’s “Marc Ambinder,” rather than because it’s good or interesting.

–Marc Ambinder
from I Am a Blogger No Longer (The Atlantic)

Posted in: Contents, Creators, Essay, Marc Ambinder / Tagged: , ,

on Writing Nonfiction (David Foster Wallace)

11/23/2010 8:13 am / Leave a Comment /

Whereas the thing that was fun about a lot of the nonfiction is, you know, its not that I didnt care, but it was just mostly like, yeah, Ill try this. Im not an expert at it. I dont pretend to be. Its not particularly important to me whether the magazine, you know, even takes the thing I do or not. And so it was just more, I guess the nonfiction seems a lot more like play. For me.

–David Foster Wallace
from Scocca : “Im Not a Journalist, and I Dont Pretend To Be One”: David Foster Wallace on Nonfiction, 1998, Part 1.

Posted in: Contents, Creators, David Foster Wallace, Interview / Tagged: