Alma: Coffee or tea?
Reynolds Woodcock: Do you have Lapsang? I’ll have a pot of Lapsang please.
Enjoy.
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I have managed to fill up sixty pages of a new exercise book. I now have in my personal anthology – over 600 poems by some 300 poets. 802 pages written so far. I think that this proves, if proof were needed, that I do not take my vocation lightly.
– J.A. Baker
Baker’s contagious enthusiasm. A young writer, ambitious, looking to master his craft. Not sure where to turn, begins by copying.
Saunders, Hetty. My House of Sky: The life and work of J.A. Baker. Lower Dairy, Toller Fratrum, Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2017. pg25
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The Green Room is like a letter written by hand. If you write by hand it will not be perfect, the writing may perhaps be trembly, but it will be you, your writing. The typewriter is something different. I don’t mean any comparison running down actors, because there are Olivettis with marvelous type, Remingotons which have a lot of personality, and Japy portables. Myself, I adore typewriters!
– François Truffaut
Here Truffaut contends and concedes the beauty of both handwriting and typing. A decade or so before word processors appeared on the scene.
Originally captured in an interview by Daniele Heymann and Catherine Laporte, L’Express, March 13, 1978,
Truffaut, François. Truffaut by Truffaut. United States: Abrams, 1987. pg 160
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Every weekday she went doggedly off to work, typically wearing her father’s tweed jacket over smocks and full skirts and sensible flat shoes, her hair bushy and unkempt (no hairdressers’ bills were possible), with no make-up. But also, all the time, she wanted beauty and art and fine language and ideas, listened to the Third Programme on the radio constantly (they had no gramophone), watched television avidly from 1965 onwards, went to art galleries and cinemas and the Old Vic and to pottery classes, made ceramics, drew Christmas cards, studied Spanish and Russian, read incessantly and widely, and travelled as much as she could inside and outside England. Her spirit, her will, her appetite for life, her interests, her energy were vital and powerful.
– Hermione Lee
This coming after her leaky house boat sank, and her husband nearly died. Penelope Fitzgerald kept her interests close, gave them oxygen. Despite near poverty, she kept going.
Keep going.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 161,162
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“I am devoted to your generation.”
A generous woman delivering insightful and important lectures. The Sarah Paine and Dwarkesh team up is a must rewatch for 2026.
The latest will open your mind to the virtue of incremental reform, George Bush Sr. the statesman, and German unification.
Happy New Year.
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At the end of the year, deep in mid-winter, night falls early in Copenhagen. Along with Rosenborggade, lamplight and firelight and candlelight fill the upper windows by four o’clock. Passers-by who brave the cold streets glimpse Christmas trees in glowing rooms, hear snatches of songs and children’s laughter. Kierkegaard’s rooms are quiet, and he is alone. ‘1848 has raised me to another level,’ he writes in his journal: ‘it has shattered me religiously; God has run me ragged.’
How quickly we forget that Christmas day is the first day of Christmas.
Also, Christmas trees in glowing rooms is Christmas maxxing.
An observations on Clare’s style and prose. Love the phrase “snatches of songs.” The word “snatches” here is part verb, part noun. Delightful.
Carlisle, Clare. Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard. United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. pg180
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He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!
Scrooge learned.
Dickens knew.
May we all learn to keep Christmas well.
Thank you for a great year everyone, and Merry Christmas.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol: And Other Christmas Books. United States, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011. pg85
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An Italian, born in Palermo, he brought to Hollywood the secrets of the commedia into the deepest dimensions of desperate human situations (I have often wept during the tragic moments of Capra’s comedies) before he reestablished a balance and brought off the miracle that let us leave the theater with a renewed confidence of life.
– François Truffaut
Spot on Truffaut. Spot on.
Truffaut called Capra “the good doctor”.
Tonight, whether you watch It’s a Wonderful Life, or You Can’t Take it With You, you will leave your sofa (or even better, the theater) heartbroken. Heartbroken but encouraged.
It’s what Frank Capra does.
Merry Christmas Eve.
As read from François Truffaut’s essay Frank Capara, The Healer.
Truffaut, F. (1978). The Films in My Life. United Kingdom: Simon and Schuster. pg69
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With sands that will bear your enemies' boats,
But suck them up to th'topmast. A kind of conquest
Caesar made here, but made not here his brag
Of 'came and saw and overcame'. With shame -
The first that ever touched him - he was carried
From off our coast, twice beaten, and his shipping,
Poor ignorant baubles, on our terrible seas
Like eggshells moved upon their surges, cracked
As easily 'gainst our rocks. For joy whereof,
The fame Cassibelan, who was once at point -
O giglot Fortune! - to master Caesar's sword,
Made Lud's town with rejoicing fires bright,
And Britons strut with courage.
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There are plenty of “what’s going on here?” passages in Cymbeline, but then, like above, there are sublime bits of oration.
Maybe skip this play. Maybe don’t.
Ok don’t.
It’s still Shakespeare for goodness sa
Wayne, Shakespeare. Cymbeline Ed3 Arden. N.p.: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017.
Floodlights and Goalposts 