Blank pages beg to be filled, and it helps to have them around.
– Seth Godin
Keep blank pages around, but don’t keep them blank forever.
Category: amreading
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There I think the attitude of Epictetus helps guide one to the right reaction. He thought every mischance in life, however bad, created an opportunity to learn something useful, and one’s duty was not to become immersed in self-pity but to utilize each terrible blow in a constructive fashion.
– Charlie MungerMunger, Charles T.. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. N.p., Stripe Matter Incorporated. pp279
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The patron saint of overworked teachers, Alice Kober, taught five classes at a time at Brooklyn College in the 1940s. At any rate, she taught during the day. At night, she set about deciphering an ancient language, Linear B, that had been uncovered on clay tablets at the turn of the century and that stood as a Mount Everest for linguists, a seemingly impossible puzzle. A middle aged spinster, the daughter of working class immigrants, she collected the statistics for each sign of the dead language onto two hundred thousand paper slips. Because of paper shortages during and after the war these slips had to be repurposed from any spare paper she could find. The slips in turn were collected into old cigarette cartons. Her work was cut off by an untimely illness, but she laid the foundation for the dramatic decipherement that took place only a few years after her death.
One never knows when their work will bear fruit. Keep going.
Hitz, Zena. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. United States, Princeton University Press, 2021. (pp 41)
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We promise “till death do us part” when our love is young and good-looking and when life is full of promise, but it is in failure or decrepitude or at the hospital bed that we learn what we meant and why.
Zena HitzZena dropping truth right from the introduction.
Hitz, Zena. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. United States, Princeton University Press, 2021.
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A reader beginning a poem is like someone stepping into a rowboat with a stranger at the oars; the first few draws on the long oars through the deep water tell a lot — is one safe, or is one apt to be soon drowned?
– Mary OliverA simile to help one recognize a “good” poem.
A Poetry Handbook might be the modern Rhymester
Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Taiwan, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. pp56-57
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I write by hand, and handwriting is drawing, the hand moves and leaves ink traces on the paper – – isn’t that drawing?
– Mary RuefleAustin Kleon interviewed Mary Ruefle via type-writer and postal service.
Read the entire, brilliant, interview here.
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Never in his life had he seen a river before – this sleek, sinuous, full bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again.
An original description of a river is rare, but Kenneth Grahame unlocks one here. Since it’s a long one, I’ll break it up into three parts.
Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. United Kingdom, Welbeck Editions, 2021. pp11
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One learns by thinking about writing, and by talking about writing — but primarily through writing.
Mary OliverIt’s in the doing, where the learning happens.
Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Taiwan, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. pp17
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Imagine if Jhumpa Lahiri taught a class on journaling and diaries. What would the Syllabus look like?
From the Paris Review:
Course Description:
What inspires a writer to keep a diary, and how does reading a diary enhance our appreciation of the writer’s creative journey? How do we approach reading texts that were perhaps never intended to be published or read by others? What does keeping a diary teach us about dialogue and description, or about creating character and plot, about narrating the passage of time? How is a diary distinct from autofiction? In this workshop we will evaluate literary diaries—an intrinsically fluid genre—not only as autobiographical commentaries but as incubators of self-knowledge, experimentation, and intimate engagement with other texts. We will also read works in which the diary serves as a narrative device, blurring distinctions between confession and invention, and complicating the relationship between fact and fiction. Readings will serve as inspiration for establishing, appreciating, and cultivating this writerly practice.
Schedule
Week 1: Susan Sontag, Reborn: Diaries and Notebooks, 1947–1963
Week 2: André Gide, Journals and The Counterfeiters
Week 3: Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923
Week 4: Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary
Week 5: Carolina Maria de Jesus, Child of the Dark
Week 6: Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935–1950
Week 7: Bram Stoker, Dracula
Week 8: Robert Walser, A Schoolboy’s Diary; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Week 9: Leonora Carrington, Down Below; Primo Levi, “His Own Blacksmith: To Italo Calvino”
Week 10: Annie Ernaux, Happening
Week 11: Lydia Davis, “Cape Cod Diary”; Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness
Week 12: Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook
Week 13: Alba de Céspedes, Forbidden Notebook
Lahiri, Jhumpa. “Syllabus: Diaries.” The Paris Review, 28 Mar. 2024, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/03/28/syllabus-diaries/.I’d add two more to the list. Josep Pla‘s The Gray Notebook and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle.
The Paris Review’s Syllabi series is a gem. Read the Archives here.
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I was often tempted to turn tail, but held my ground for all that, and got some profit of my lessons; if it was but to stand on guard with an assured countenance, which is often all that is required. So, though I could never in the least please my master, I was not altogether displeased with myself.
David Balfour“Turn tail” sounds like a 50’s phrase, but here it is, in print, from a book published in 1886.
One more thing. Sometimes all it takes is standing confidently, acting confidently to deter.
And one final thing. The one person you don’t want to be displeased with is yourself.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Kidnapped. New York: Running Press, 1989. pp189
Floodlights and Goalposts 