“The hell with passion. Find something you can do. That would be great.”
“Find fascination. Fascination is way better than passion. It’s not so sweaty.”
– Jerry Seinfeld
And three keys to life:
Bust your ass.
Pay attention.
Fall in love.
Category: Commonplace Book
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Go back? he thought. ‘No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!’ So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.
– Bilbo Baggins
Notice how Tolkien flips “pitter-patter” in the final line. Small technique for avoiding a cliche.
Sit back and let our favorite retired professor Malcom Guite read the passage to you:
Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Hobbit: 75th Anniversary Edition. United States: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. pp66
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She shows us that simply deciding to act when faced with a challenge can reveal new depths of capability. The more she did, the more capable she became. ‘Do your work,’ said Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘and you shall reinforce yourself.’
Henry Oliver on Katharine Graham
That from the introduction to Henry’s new book: Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life
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Lucas took it all in, reading books and comics, watching movies, filing away the bits and pieces he liked, discarding what he didn’t. “I researched kids’ movies and how they work and how myths work,” Lucas said, “and I looked very carefully at the elements of films within that fairy tale genre which made them successful. I found that myth always took place over the hill, in some exotic, far off land. For the Greeks, it was Ulysses going off into the unknown. For America it was out West. . . . The last place left ‘over the hill’ is space.”
May the Fourth be with you.
Jones, Brian Jay. George Lucas: A Life. United States, Little, Brown, 2016. pp179
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It was a week before the solstice when Little Helmut finally realized he was being hunted by a polar bear.
I loathe marketing, but this commercial. Damn it.
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What Emerson kept, and what he recommended enthusiastically to others, were what used to be called commonplace books, blank bound volumes in which one writes down vivid images, great descriptions, striking turns of phrase, ideas, high points from one’s life and reading — things one wants to remember and hold on to. A commonplace book is not a diary, an appointment calendar, or a record of one’s feelings. If your journal consists of the best moments of your life and reading, then rereading it will be like walking a high mountain trail that goes from peak to peak without the intervening descent into the trough of routine. Just reading in such a journal of high points will tighten your strings and raise your pitch
– Robert D. Richardson
This is the aim of Floodlights and Goalposts. I hope its a high mountain trail that goes from peak to peak.
If you’re keeping a commonplace book, which I hope you are, or any notebook, be sure to go back and re-read what you’ve captured.
Richardson, Robert D.. First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. United States, University of Iowa Press, 2015.
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Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies — in holiness and in mirth. It is in honest hands-on labor also; I don’t mean to indicate a preference for the scholarly life. And it is in the green world — among people, and animals, and trees for that matter, if one genuinely cares about trees. A mind that is lively and inquiring, compassionate, curios, angry, full of music, full of feeling, is a mind full of possible poetry. Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision–a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.
Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Taiwan, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. pp122
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“What maps do, is they abruptly take you from the darkness to the light.”
Maps are one of those inventions, the timekeeping, that are vital but overlooked. Think for a moment, how could the modern world operate without maps?
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Though I urge possession-by-memory of poems, through repeated readings, I suspect that reading aloud is also a valid test for poetry and fictional prose alike. Reciting a bad poem is a distressing experience, reading aloud a poor story is scarcely better. But it can be astonishing how an excellent story or poem suddenly expands into a cosmos of absolute illumination when one listens to its recitation. I remember then that the Homeric epics were chanted aloud to audiences, and that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in order to read his work at the royal court and in the house of the great nobles.
– Harold Bloom
How can you tell if your story or poem has potential? Read it aloud to your self.
Do you cringe?
Are you distressed?
Bloom, Harold. Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages. United States, Scribner, 2002.
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“Go and do your duty; and be hanged, if you must, like a gentleman. There are worst things in the world than to be hanged.”
– Lawyer
Go and do your duty today, despite the pain.
Make yourself proud.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Kidnapped. New York: Running Press, 1989. pp286
Floodlights and Goalposts 