Muir was a quintessential romantic frontier figure. Unarmed, carrying only a few crusts of bread, a tin cup a small portion of tea, a notebook, and a few scientific instruments, Muir walked into the vastness of the Sierras to search out truths. Single- minded, he did not hesitate to challenge the accepted the accepted authorities and their explanations regarding the wilderness he loved. He formulated his own theories and carefully searched out the evidence. America has always loved its rebels, even if it turns out later that they have not discovered the whole truth.
Category: writer’s inspiration
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As consequent from store of summer rains,
Or wayward rivulets in autumn flowing,
Or many a herb-lined brook's reticulations,
Or subterranean sea-rills making for the sea,
Songs of continued years I sing.
- Walt Whitman, Autumn RivuletsWhitman, Walt. The Complete Poems. United Kingdom, Penguin Books Limited, 2004. p.379
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Don’t be afraid to fail. There’s a wonderful poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that talks about the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, being defeated, but coming away stronger from the fight. It ends with an exhortation that goes something like this: “What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things.”
– Tim O’ Reilly
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Cohn-Bendit on TV. Intelligent, cunning, devious, has the memory of everything he has ever read; impertinent; good, rapid speaker; wraps up his opponents ( a trio of middle-aged newsmen). He has the ruthlessness of someone unable to put himself in another’s place.
– Mavis Gallant
How does Mavis get away with writing sentences like this? Describing so much with so few words. Incomplete sentences my elementary school teachers would say.
Read a few pages of the Paris Notebook and you’ll realize where the inspiration for the French Dispatch came from. Not only the Lucinda Krementz part. The entire film!
Even the typeface at the top of the pages and chapter beginnings will look familiar.
Gallant, Mavis. Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews. United States, David R. Godine Publisher, 2023. p. 19
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The truth is Franklin failed often. He never folded, though. When confronted with a setback, he didn’t abandon the idea. He retooled it and tried again. Franklin never let failure discourage him from taking new risks, including his biggest gamble of all: jumping from British Loyalist to American rebel, and at age sixty-nine. For Franklin, failure was a down payment on success.
That from a fascinating new book Ben & Me. Ben Franklin, late bloomer. Kept an open mind at age sixty-nine.
Weiner, Eric. Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder’s Formula for a Long and Useful Life. United States, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2024. p.104
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“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
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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
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If I were caught on a desert island, without a doubt I would want all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary to keep me company. Such an incredible achievement of human ingenuity, one of the greatest cultural monuments the human race has created. Thousands of scholars have contributed to it over one hundred and fifty years.
– Werner Herzog
Werner’s birthday was this week. Reference books are underrated.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp144
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What he does best is fantasy — fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art — the art of myth-making — is a species of the literary art. The objection to so classifying it is that the Myth does not essentially exist in words at all.
– C.S. Lewis
From the beginning intellectuals were trying to figure out where to classify fantasy and myth. Is myth-making a literary species?
MacDonald, George. George MacDonald. United Kingdom, HarperCollins, 1946.
Floodlights and Goalposts 