Saturday, December 26, 2009
“I am one of those who like to stay late at the café,” the older waiter said. “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.” — Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
Monday, December 21, 2009
This volume collects an assortment of Paul Park’s early short stories, written between 1983 and 2002. Park is primarily a novelist, and an excellent one, and his short fiction affects me as well as his work in longer forms. The Tourist is the first Park story I read. I found it online before I went […]
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Some quotes from Cormac McCarthy, in this interview with The Wall Street Journal. Mr McCarthy says: Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, […]
Damien G. Walter wrote this call-out post asking for suggestions of currently working writers who are bold, who experiment, and who risk themselves. Somebody help him out; I want to know too. I’ve been thinking about risk in literature lately—mostly in the context of wanting not to retread smooth ground—but I run into the same […]
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Watch how de Saint-Exupery builds his ideas brick-by-brick, each sentence resting atop the previous, until the last sentence of each paragraph sets the keystone, and the paragraphs together create an arch: In a world in which life so perfectly responds to life, where flowers mingle with flowers in the wind’s eye, where the swan is […]
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. — William Shakespeare, cymbaline
Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, of detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving … — Gertrude […]
“I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will […]
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Oh, Yes there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it’s too late and there’s nothing worse than too late. –Charles Bukowski
Both the book and the movie made me squee like a school girl. Which is to say: this is not my most dignified moment ever. Come to think of it, my other moments aren’t bursting at the seams with dignity either. But there’s certainly a graduated scale. For instance, it’s rare for librarians to guffaw […]