As Dubus put it in my interview with him, “I think most writers quit between the ages of twenty and thirty for various reasons. They are alone then unless they have exceptional parents; even if they have very loving and tolerant parents, they still know in their heart of hearts that their parents wonder about what in the fuck they are doing. Unless they live in a community of writers, like at a graduate school, they don’t have friends who really understand what they are doing. They don’t get published. They work and of course, don’t get money for it. There is no one to set the alarm clock for. There is no one who cares whether they get there to work, no one who can threaten them with firing or reward them with money, and you put all that on one poor young man or woman’s back, and it takes an awful lot of courage, because it comes down to that person believing in him or herself and saying, I will do it. While having a job that supports me. And you finally do publish in something as lovely as Tendril or Ploughshares, for example, and you call your mother or father and tell them, and they say, ‘What’s that?’ I think that is why young writers can be persuaded so easily to change things to be in The New Yorker. Not for the goddamn money. What’s three thousand dollars going to do? You can’t live in Mexico on it and write. Not for long anyway. Won’t change your life. I think they do it because it takes care of those blank faces when you say, ‘Yes, I’ve published,’ and they say, ‘Where?’ and you say, The New Yorker, and they say, ‘Ooh! You must be real!’ “
Publishing in the New Yorker takes care of those blank faces when you say, Yes I’ve published
Filed under literature, Uncategorized, writing
The Energy and Complication of long sentences
To pick up a book is, ideally, to enter a world of intimacy and continuity; the best volumes usher us into a larger universe, a more spacious state of mind akin to the one I feel when hearing Bach (or Sigur Rós) or watching a Terrence Malick film. I cherish Thomas Pynchon’s prose (in “Mason & Dixon,” say), not just because it’s beautiful, but because his long, impeccable sentences take me, with each clause, further from the normal and the predictable, and deeper into dimensions I hadn’t dared to contemplate. I can’t get enough of Philip Roth because the energy and the complication of his sentences, at his best, pull me into a furious debate in which I see a mind alive, self-questioning, wildly controlled in its engagement with the world. His is a prose that banishes all simplicities while never letting go of passion.
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The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else
I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.
Filed under literature, writing
Writing as Transformation
What I’m hinting at is a power and mystery beyond me. I have to write mindlessly and without getting in the way of the process. This means, that almost everything I do, my words, my thoughts, my feelings are all a product of something beyond myself. Who I am is only slightly visible to myself. I’m afraid this strange force will leave me, eventually. And I’m afraid of what I might find the deeper I go within. I move slow and with patience. So that each word I write is an act of re-creation, a renewing, and a redemption.
Filed under Uncategorized
Accessing my subconscious in order to write
When I sit down to write and I see the white blank page, the first words that inevitably come to my mind are, “In the beginning…” I’ve never started a story in that fashion, but for some reason, my mind begins with Hebrew, “Bereshit bara…”
I’m fascinated by the eternal power within the beginning of darkness and silence and the creation that comes out of that void, or as the writer of Genesis says, “tohu vavohu.” I think this way because I feel compelled to create. And because I contain a vast amount of silence. Almost everyday someone tells me how quiet I am. Very many of my thoughts, opinions, and feelings are hidden within myself. I do not know why this is so. It is a mystery to me. I often feel things before I consciously think them. Somehow my subconscious is brooding and I only feel the result of that. Accessing the thoughts in order to vocalize them or to write them is close to impossible. Therefore, what does come to my voice and to my fingers is something pulled from the depths, still dripping with darkness and pulsing with mystery.
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My first thought is never my best thought, but someone else’s
William Deresiewicz in a lecture titled “Solitude and Leadership”.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
(via The American Scholar)
Filed under Uncategorized
Writing is the World’s Greatest Invention
Tom Standage on the world’s greatest invention.
The amazing thing about writing, given how complicated its early systems were, is that anyone learned it at all. The reason they did is revealed in the ancient Egyptian scribal-training texts, which emphasise the superiority of being a scribe over all other career choices, with titles like “Do Not Be Soldier, Priest or Baker”, “Do Not Be a Husbandman” and “Do Not Be a Charioteer”. This last text begins: “Set thine heart on being a scribe, that thou mayest direct the whole earth.” The earliest scribes understood that literacy was power – a power that now extends to most of humanity, and has done more for human progress than any other invention.
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Giving Ourselves to Something Which May Change Us – John Ashbery
John Ashbery, Winner of the 1976 National Book Award for SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR.
For as long as I have been publishing poetry, it has been criticized as “difficult” and “private,” though I never meant for it to be. At least, I wanted its privateness to suggest the ways in which all of us are private and alone, in the sense Proust meant when he said, “Each of us is truly alone.”
And I wanted the difficulty to reflect the difficulty of reading, any kind of reading, which is both a pleasant and painful experience since we are temporarily giving ourselves to something which may change us.
At any rate, this dose of public recognition comes at a time when I had just about resigned myself to being relegated to my own privacy, and needless to say it has had a tonic effect. And I am pleased not least because the award seems to confirm my own feeling that my privacy has “gone public” and is being construed the way I meant it to be. It’s very difficult to accept an honor of this sort without sounding self-congratulatory, so I shall purposely avoid complimenting the judges on their “wise choice,” and end by saying how very happy I am to have been given the National Book Award.
(via NBA)
Filed under art, literature
A Writer’s Palinopsia
When I was five I dressed up as a football player for Halloween. I wore an Oregon State Beaver football jersey and a plastic Seattle Seahawks helmet. I painted black marks under my eyes, wore my baseball cleats, and stuffed small dishtowels into my sweatpants like legs pads. Toward the end of an evening of trick-or-treating I looked up and saw the silhouette of a witch decoration against the backdrop of a bright house light. During the walk home and even when I crawled into bed, whenever I closed my eyes I saw that black witch lingering in my vision. I cried out to my parents and it wasn’t until they prayed over me and fatigue overwhelmed me that I finally fell asleep.
The phenomenon of seeing the witch even after closing my eyes is called an afterimage. This is an optical illusion that occurs after one looks at a particular image for a period of time. The afterimage is why we can still see the ghost of an image even after we look away or close our eyes. The image can float in our vision retaining it original colors, but often inverting the colors. The longer one looks at an image the longer the afterimage will persist.
An extreme condition of a prolonged afterimage is called Palinopsia, which is when a visual disturbance that causes images to persist to some extent even after their corresponding stimulus has left. In essence the afterimage appears more defined and for a longer period of time.
Writers attempt to give readers a Palinopsia of the mind. That is, they attempt to provide strong afterimages, so that even when the pages are closed and the book is set down, the reader can still see and feel the story.
A strong afterimage is a mysterious one that forces itself upon the reader in an incomprehensible way. These images aren’t stand-alone pictures, but point to the greater context of the story. In Ian McEwan’s Atonement, insects are “gyrating above a candelabra,” and it’s explained that, “it was the visual impression of an even deeper darkness beyond the light that drew them in. Even though they might be eaten, they had to obey the instinct that made them seek out the darkest place, on the far side of the light—and in this case it was an illusion” (140). The afterimage that draws us in seems like an illusion. It can be so vague and mysterious that it hardly seems present at all. Yet we continue to be drawn to it through story.
Filed under art, fiction, literature, writing
Anesthesia, Like Sleep, a Loss of Consciousness (or Small Deaths)
Linda Gedde’s article “Banishing Consciousness: The Mystery of Anesthesia” looks at how anesthetists don’t know how exactly or what exactly anesthesia does to our consciousness. It’s similar to being in a coma. In fact, it’s a medically induced coma. It’s as if you die and come back to life. Speaking of her own experience going under, Gedda says, “For a brief period of time “‘I’ had simply ceased to be.”
“My experience leaves me with a renewed sense of awe for what anaesthetists do as a matter of routine. Without really understanding how, they guide hundreds of millions of people a year as close to the brink of nothingness as it is possible to go without dying. Then they bring them safely back home again.”
This reminds me of the Modeh Ani, a Jewish prayer one says in bed when they wake up.
“I thank you living and eternal King for giving me my soul back in mercy. Great is your faithfulness.”
It is based on the idea that when we fall asleep we are in a sense dead, but when we wake God restores our soul. We are restored by God as a new creation.
If we continue praying we’ll reach the Elohai Neshama where we pray “The soul you placed within me is pure. You created it. You formed it. And you breathed it into me.” If we are saying this in Hebrew we breath out the word “neshama”, exercising this gift of life from God. Life created with His breath.
A daily resurrection.
Filed under faith
