January 2009
9 posts
John Updike R.I.P.
“If I say that Henry Green taught me to write, it implies that I learned and it is not a business one learns, unlearns rather, the premature certainties and used ecstacies unraveling as one goes.”
—quoted from loving memory, switch out Updike for Green and it says what I want to say.
He was the first great writer who wrote about a world I recognized: church basements,...
“It’s like drinking soy milk. As long as you’re not thinking...”
– moonlight ambulette
This quote seems to absolutely nail certain movie adaptations.
“Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which...”
– I’ve noticed lately that quantities are often funny. Here, the key is the word “several.”
http://www.theparisreview.org/media/4825_HEMINGWAY4.pdf
“I was itching in eleven different places now.”
– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
What’s funny here isn’t just the specificity. It’s the suggestion of an inventory. The number “eleven” is a verb.
“[Dostoevsky’s characters] are John the Baptists of wayward intellect and...”
– Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext
Dostovesky and Milk
The movie Milk struck me a commendable and engrossing movie–like most biopics, a little slow to get going because life is so poorly paced. It had interesting things to say about the politics of movements (as opposed to the poliics of...
December 2008
24 posts
“In regarding formal conventions primarily as ‘rules’ to rebel...”
– http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs/Wallace-Prose_Poem.pdf
David Foster Wallace, on the prose poem
“The [Zot] series said, too, in almost every plot, that to give up the innocent...”
– Stephen Burt in Rain Taxi, reviewing Zot!: 1987-1991: The Complete Black and White Collection by Scott McCloud
Reading this, I realized that, for me, sports were comics. The same enhanced identities, the same extraordinary skills, the same Armageddon-in-installments.
“Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov,...”
– http://www.theparisreview.org/media/4825_HEMINGWAY4.pdf
Hemingway, in the Paris Review Interview.
This makes me feel like my comments on photographs in this blog aren’t cheating. Although how you can cheat in your own blog is beyond me.
“Whom Do You Like In The World Series?” Thoughts...
“There is a wrong way and a right way to break up with someone.”
This sentence is grammatically incorrect. Because the subject is compound, the sentence is plural. The grammatically correct sentence is, “There are a wrong way and a right way to break up with someone.”
It freaks me out me that I didn’t know the first sentence was incorrect.
***
The freaking out was eased by the reaction of my two...
On Faith: The Spirit in Marilynne Robinson's...
Marilynne Robinson writes well about spirituality, because she writes well about despair. Like the political, the spiritual seems tricky in fiction: polemics can sneak in.
But in Housekeeping, the spiritual passages are so entangled with the narrator, so rooted in the book’s world, so drenched with the book’s story, that they are absolutely compelling. To quote the book’s explicitly spiritual...
I Shall Immobilize You By Pushing You Into This...
Despite the big talk in this blog’s description, I realize I have commented on no movies. Last Friday, E and I watched an episode of the Avengers from 1965. Most movies wish they were as cool as an Avengers episode. Note to self: any narrative is enhanced by the presence of Mrs. Emma Peel and a sleepy village where visitors mysteriously disappear.
The longest literary sentence --... →
I will probably need to read this, just to see what such a sentence might accomplish. I’m hoping I don’t feel compelled to diagram it. From Chicago Tribune via Maud Newton.
“this book really really nails it, whatever the it I mean is. And it does, I...”
– from moonlight ambulette
Somebody’s trying to tell me something.. See post below.
“Sometimes in the spring the old lake would return. One will open a cellar door...”
– Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Note the details, “tallowy soles”; the precise verbs, “”bumping”; the careful observation, “brim … mud … silty water … chill water to its tips.”
“When you ask someone old, tired questions, you are apt to receive old, tired...”
– Hemingway, The Paris Review Interviews, replying to the question, “Would you suggest newspaper work for the young writer?”
OK. Hemingway was a dick.
But I also think this petulance reveals his limitations as a writer. His comments lack empathy and imagination, which are writerly qualities.
The...
“Writing The Broom of the System, I felt like I was using 97 percent of me,...”
– The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace : Rolling Stone
The obvious question is, what percentage of my brain am I using when I write fiction?