February 2012
11 posts
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“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a...”
– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
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“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
—David Foster Wallace (born today in 1962)
Happy 50th, DFW. You are much missed.
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Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens
“In 1812, the year Charles Dickens was born, there were 66 novels published in Britain. People had been writing novels for a century—most critics date the genre to Robinson Crusoe in 1719—but nobody aspired to do it professionally. Many works of fiction appeared anonymously, with attributions like ‘By a Lady.’ The steam-powered printing press was still in its infancy; the...
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The Five Stages of Creativity
Preparation
Incubation
Insight
Evaluation
Elaboration
(via Mihaky Csikszentmihalyi’s “Creativity: Flow & The Psychology of Discovery”)
January 2012
7 posts
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A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person—perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human...
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Bookstores are a place where people go not just to find a new book or an old book, but to have a fundamental conversation with themselves about who they are and who they aspire to be.
—Jim Mustich ‘77, Editor-in-Chief of the Barnes & Noble Review, in the Princeton Alumni Weekly’s “The New Tastemakers”
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“Old men cross the road in front of you on foot, behind flocks of newly shorn...”
– from Chapter 4 of Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife
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Why I Write: Orhan Pamuk
I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of...
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“I am an unashamed, unapologetic believer that the purpose of literature is to...”
– Alexander Nazaryan in “Against Walter Dean Myers & The Dumbing Down of Literature”
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This year I want to figure out why, when an author says the phrase “working on a story collection” (as in “I’m working on a story collection”), everyone in publishing reacts as if they have instead heard the phrase “molesting several children.”
—James Hannaham in Jacket Copy’s “25 Literary Resolutions for 2012”
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December 2011
18 posts
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Good sentences, the ebullient critic and novelist Wilfrid Sheed wrote in 1990, are sent into the air like a series of jazz licks.“You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.”
—Dwight Garner, in The New York Times...
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Authorship as we know it
‘Authorship’ — in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity — was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the ‘books’ they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service...
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Why America Needs Its Indies
“Culture, at a least a compelling one, develops when people are collectively engaged with a whole range of books, authors, artists, musicians, television shows, theater, magazines, etc. We would not consider an artistically robust culture to be one where everyone had been exposed to Matisse and Dali but no one else. The same is true of a literary culture: to have a good one, it is vital...
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“The books that matter to me—and they are books of all...”
– Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies, Pg. 102
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“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something,...”
– Nora Ephron, in I Feel Bad About My Neck
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“People have to understand that their short-term decision to save a couple bucks...”
– Tom Perrotta as quoted today in Richard Russo’s NYT op-ed “Amazon’s Jungle Logic”
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Why Digital Naysayers are Real Grinches
“Music divorced from packaging is all about the songs, not the disk it comes on or the sleeve it comes in; novels and other works of literature will be all about their words.
“Critics who can’t believe this, that great novels will still be great novels when separated from their physical packages, are much like The Grinch in Dr. Seuss’s classic story The Grinch Who Stole...
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“Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.”
– Willa Cather (born today in 1873)
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"Why I Write"
“In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming,...
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“I have never fallen in love with a book that I did not love all the more the...”
– Patti Smith, in this wknd’s NYTBR essay “Read it Again, Sam”
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November 2011
11 posts
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“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen;
the more select, the more...”
– Louisa May Alcott (born today in 1832)
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The Ten Commandments of Writing About Writing
1. Position the author, say who she/he is and what the book represents in relation to her/his work.
2. Situate the book and judge it from the perspective of a long literary tradition.
3. Give reasoned arguments, with examples, so that the reader can understand and evaluate.
4. Inform, educate and entertain.
5. Little synopsis and plot.
6. Be informative about the style, the meaning and the...
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How to Discuss Books You've Never Read
By Gary Shteyngart
The first thing to do is bring up your nightstand. “Ah, yes, of course. He’s on my nightstand.” The second is to invent your own writer: “I haven’t read the new Murakami, but have you read the latest Kobayashi Maru?” Then pray your interlocutor hasn’t seen “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” As relayed to Spencer Bailey
via
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The Pathology of Plagiarism
“It’s so difficult to think about plagiarism for several reasons. First, all writers, especially good writers, borrow and imitate. That’s how we learn. We are constantly influenced unconsciously by things we read. And it can be hard to distinguish an homage from an imitation from a borrowing from a bank robbery.
“Writers are uncertain about plagiarism because none of...
October 2011
6 posts
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“A library is many things. It’s a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It’s a...”
– From a 1971 open letter E.B. White wrote to the children of Troy, Michigan upon the opening of the state’s first public library
