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
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
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
Dan’s mother being one of the rare mother’s who follows through on the military school threat:
COWEN: What did you learn from your time as a Royal Canadian Army cadet?
WANG: I think the trite answer is just a lot of discipline. I think that I was a bad kid growing up. I was absolutely not a good child, and I’ll be the first to admit that.
COWEN: What does that mean concretely?
WANG: Ottawa is not only the federal capital of Canada, but it is also the drug capital of Canada. It is very easy to fall into a mischievous crowd when you’re over there. I was playing hooky from school a little bit too much, and running off, and trying to do whatever I found fun and not going to school. I never had good grades growing up. To this day, I will admit that I was academically challenged.
I always just enjoyed taking a book to read in the park or something, rather than sitting in class. My main issue was that I played hooky a little bit too much, raised the ire of my parents. My parents threatened to give me to the army, and I laughed that off, because no parents ever do that. Then, my mom did it. She gave me to the Royal Canadian Army cadets, and they straightened me out.
Taking the opportunity seriously and reconceptualizing tough tasks:
I was a very good army cadet. I was awarded recruit of the year. I was the fastest person in my regiment to be promoted to corporal. I was in the marching band, and I did excellent drill as well. Something I take away from some of the commanding officers whom I grew close to, they would tell me that the ethic of the army was that whatever you imagine is the most difficult thing, you should simply reconceptualize it as the easiest thing, and then you just do it. It turned out to have been a fairly robust lesson.
and writing exercises for the curious and ambitious:
COWEN: How did you learn how to write so well?
WANG: I have always grown up loving to read. My grandfather bought so many books for me, first picture books that had text underneath. Then, my mother also encouraged a reading habit. We had so many books growing up. I think that if I were thinking about writing, first and foremost, I pay attention to cadences. I think about beat. I think about the musicality of the effect.
I think that it is really, really valuable to just have a sense of how the words sound before it falls out of your pen. I have a sense of practice. When I was a musician, every so often I would take some time when I was still a college student to just go to the music library, check out some scores. I did this with a Mahler symphony as well as some Mozart symphonies, to just simply copy out the scores, and just write it all out.
I did this exercise also when I was early in my writing. I would just take a New Yorker article that I really liked, and simply rewrite the entire thing. When you engage in that sort of exercise, you really have a sense of what the composer was thinking when he was plotting out the harmonies. When you do that with a really good piece of writing, whether that’s a New Yorker article, or a really good book, you start having a sense of the choices that the author was making in terms of syntax, in terms of sentence length, in terms of the word choices, and being in a position to make those sorts of choices, I think, is very valuable.
As read from the short story Free, from the Night Train collection. I read a Henry Oliver tweet today that asked: what is your favorite fiction you’ve read this year? This entire collection by A.L. Snijders would be my answer.
The stories don’t always make sense, a stream of consciousness type. But I enjoy every short morsel.
Hope Lydia Davis has another translation of Snijders’ stories in queue.
Snijders, A. L.. Night Train. United States, New Directions, 2021. pg 81
When people ramble about the ills of the internet I think of Sheehan Quirke. He’s a man who wouldn’t be here without the internet. He’s a man who makes the internet great. This video is one example.
The internet is his fuel and platform. Without it we’d be robbed of his curiosity and wonder.
A few nods to Wes Anderson in this video also. I saw it.
We should not be impressed by anybody who describes themselves, or is described, as a ‘philosospher’, and should recognise that many who are never called it might be that very thing. That brooding bartender, the distant cousin who makes curios comments, the cab driver saying things that make your ‘ragged Ronts all shiver and shake’ – any or all of these might be a philospher. Even You-Tubers, bearded or otherwise! I am not making this up. Any attempt to gather people who have been called a ‘philosopher’ and work out what they have in common yields one answer: it was not what they studied, what they believed, or when they lived – it was simply that they thought, and thought well.
I sympathize with this sentiment. That one doesn’t need an academic degree to be considered a philosopher. Or that it’s knitted only to one type profession. But how does one “think” well. We’ve all thought. Is thought well the memorization of facts? Is it generating new ideas? Or is it an apprenticeship of deep research on specfic topic?
Maybe Opus 4.1 has an answer. Enjoying this book though. Self recommended. Deserves more love and buzz.
Sheehan Quirke, The Cultural Tutor: Forty-Nine Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School (London: Viking, 2025), 83,84.
Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet–no doubt, as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer.
As read from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
The “knack” is typically a trait linked with natural ability, not diligence and attention.
In the movie “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” Ricky Baker and his foster uncle, Hec get lost in the New Zealand bush. They split up to find food. The boy, raised in the city can’t catch a thing worth eating. Hec, played by Sam Neill catches a catfish with ease.
They eat.
They sit by the fire.
Ricky Baker asks Hec: “How did you catch that fish?” Hec replies. “I don’t know, I have the knack.” (all paraphrased.)
Finding your destiny is step after step after step. Plenty of what you don’t want to do mixed with more of what you don’t want to do. Choose to love your task. A difficult but rewarding approach.
Floodlights and Goalposts 