“I encourage myself, since nobody else encourages me,”
– Werner Herzog
But how?
On every page lives a gem.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. p. xxiv
Category: ideas
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‘All rising to great place is by a winding stair’
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. p.1
and
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It is interesting to learn once more how much further one can go on one’s second wind. I think that it is an important lesson for everyone to learn for it should also be applied to one’s mental efforts. Most people go through life without discovering the existence of that whole field of endeavor which we describe as a second wind. Whether mentally or physically most people give up at the first appearance of exhaustion. Thus they never learn the glory and the exhilaration of genuine effort…
– Agnes Meyer
Agnes Meyer was Mrs. Graham’s mother. Mrs. Graham the former CEO of the Washington Post.
This was the valuable lesson Agnes instilled.
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. p.3
and
Graham, Personal History, p. 40.
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“Number 26 is a very intelligent player,” says Werner. “Who is he?” This is not a question I am able to answer, so Werner turns to the portly, slightly inebriated gentleman and his mates standing next to us, and asks again. “That’s Joe Cole,” we are told. “One of the best there is. Only eighteen years old.” “Yes,” says Werner. “He really knows how to use the space around him, even when he doesn’t have the ball. He’ll be playing for England soon.”
Werner Herzog scouting a young Joe Cole. A West Ham Joe Cole.
Herzog’s prediction came true.
I’m afraid this site is becoming a Werner Herzog commonplace book.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. ppxiv
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People are always speculating – why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.
– Malcolm X
X, Malcolm. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2015.
and
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. pg V
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I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.
– John Carter
Is Edgar Rice Burroughs overlooked?
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. The Collected John Carter of Mars (Volume 1). United States, Disney Book Group, 2012. pg3
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“Good grief the bodies are piling up.”
“Good grief the bodies are piling up..” Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron. Directed by Kaku Arakawa, NHK, 2024.(*translated from Japanese)
Best movie, documentary or otherwise I’ve watched this year. It lingers in the mind after each viewing.
There’s a Dante reference.
Miyazaki works at the same type of desk as the rest of his team.
COVID-19 is brisked over – Miyazaki kept working.
The field they keep next to the studio is for the neighborhood kids. It has an abandoned soccer goal on one end. At one point the grass finally grows in and Miyazaki overhears a group of kids playing sandlot baseball.
Realizing a dream doesn’t make the suffering go away. Miyazaki suffers over thousands of binned sketches.
The longer you live the more you experience the death of friends and colleagues.
This is inescapable.
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What was it about May ’68 that made you choose that time as the context of the second story? Is it a product of all the time you’ve spent in Paris? Is there a personal connection?
Mavis Gallant. That was the inspiration. Her experience of May ’68 as a foreigner in Montparnasse: that especially engaged me. Our apartment in Paris is less than a block from where she lived, and I love her descriptions of the neighborhood. I love her voice and her analysis in general: clear, sharp, sometimes even bluntly judgemental – but with deep feeling and understanding. She listens, and her opinions are her own. She sees the young people not how they see themselves, not how their parents see them. She is amused, annoyed, rolls her eyes, and really does love and admire them.
Mavis Gallant was Wes Anderson’s inspiration for Lucinda Krementz in the French Dispatch. Will report back.
Anderson, Wes. The French Dispatch. United Kingdom, Faber & Faber, 2021. pg viii
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Poetry, on the other hand, was a family pastime–almost an obligation in the Verne household. Brothers and sisters, parents and children, uncles aunts, and cousins exchanged verse as if they were handshakes or hugs. Jules could have taken rhyming as one more family duty; instead, he rose to the occasion. Later, he would tell a journalist that he began to write at the age of twelve–began to write poetry, that is–“and dreadful poetry,” in his words.
I’m surprised Silicon Valley types and other tech optimists don’t mention Jules Verne more often. I mean he was the first science fiction writer. He was maybe the first techno-optimist.
The Tablet Palmer Luckey profile mentioned Luckey was “Jules-Verne” obsessed. But he’s the only one. Is something missing here?
Jules Verne is underrated.
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I would rather read the 1545 Bible translation of Martin Luther than any of the German Romantics, and who can walk past Joseph Conrad’s short stories or Hemingway’s first forty-nine stories — especially “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” — without experiencing something phenomenal?
– Werner Herzog
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp144
Floodlights and Goalposts 
