My advice? Get back out there. Live life to the fullest – and stay for the whole damn show. It’s amazing.
Nick Cave
Mr. Cave is right.
Get back out there.
Savor it.
As read from his blog The Red Hand Files.
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Bath, inspiration in; Bible, knowledge of; critical spirit; Edwardian; emotion at war with intellect; family feeling; fearlessness; foreign travel, distrust of; games, love of inventing rules for; generosity; honesty; intellectual severity; love, need for; pipe speaking; poetry, love of; rhyming, skill at; speaking ability; temper, loss of; tender-heartedness; transport, passion for forms of (railways, trams, bicycles, motor-bikes); understatement, tendency to.
As read from Hermione Lee’s Penelope Fitzgerald, A Life
Writer Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote a biography on her father and his three brothers. Fathers and uncles aren’t the typical biographical portrait.
The structure of this index could be something to replicate. Quick notes on a new topic or city. Similar to Jack Kerouac’s sketches.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United Kingdom, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014. pg10
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As the sketches tell us, anything Jack saw was important. Anything that caught his eye and that he wrote about became priceless. Because in the way that an artist like Picasso could see with a brush, Jack could see with his pen. He was able to capture the spirit of his time without making things up. And as it came to us from nowhere it certainly was astounding how concrete it all is now. It is as if the only true picture of humanity we will ever have was given to us by Jack Kerouac. All else is false and dressed up. Only Jack and Vincent van Gogh told the inner truth.
–George Condo
As read from the introduction of Book of Sketches.
Disagree with the last two sentences, uh Shakespeare.
Lovely book to dip into, also a great practice for writers, taking down quick prose “sketches” in a pocket notebook.
Notice. Notice. Notice
Kerouac, Jack. Book of Sketches. United Kingdom, Penguin Publishing Group, 2006. pg xi,xii
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I’m the kind of person who is always early. I know a lot of people think it’s not very rock and roll to be punctual and courteous, but I disagree. I think manners are cool, and even revolutionary, and you won’t convince me otherwise. So fuck you.
As read from How to Write One Song.
Fight the power man. Be polite.
Tweedy, Jeff. How to Write One Song. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2020. pg 116,117
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It was the miracle God had wrought. And it was patently the sort of thing that could only happen once. Mechanically uncanny, it was like nothing that had ever come to the world before. Flourishing industries rose and fell with it. As a vehicle, it was hard working, commonplace, heroic; and it often seemed to transmit those qualities to the persons who rode it. My own generation identifies it with Youth, with its gaudy, irretrievable excitements; before it fades into the mist, I would like to pay it the tribute of the sigh that is not a sob, and set down random entries in a shape somewhat less cumbersome than a Sears Roebuck catalogue.
E.B. White
That from the essay Farewell, My Lovely!
I’d argue the miracle is happening twice. Watch this space.
Also, can you imagine living in an age where the 1909 Model T Ford was a symbol of Youth?
White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States, HarperCollins, 2014. pg 202
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Thank You
for all my hands can hold--
apples red,
and melons gold,
yellow corn
both ripe and sweet,
peas and beans
so good to eat!From the poem Thanksgiving, by Ivy O. Eastwick.
As read from the glorious Random House Book of Poetry for Children.
Let’s be thankful today too. Happy day-after-Thanksgiving everyone!
The Random House Book of Poetry for Children. United States, Random House Children’s Books, 1983. pg 47
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What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.Snow in Paris? What is November doing?
T.S. Eliot…
A snippet from East Coker.
Eliot, T. S.. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950. United States, Harcourt Brace, 1958. pg124,125
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It may be the beautiful, the terrible, the awe inspiring, the exhilarating, the pathetic, the comic, or the merely piquant. Literature gives entrée to them all.
C.S. Lewis
As read from Jason Baxter’s The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis.
We lost C.S. Lewis on this day in 1963. His words live on.
Baxter M. Jason, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022. pg. 35
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When the video game artist Peter Chan was young, he loved to draw, but he would crumple up his “bad” drawings in fists of frustration. His father convinced him that if he laid the “bad” drawings flat instead of crumpling them up, he could fit more of them in the wastebasket. After his father died, Chan found a folder labeled “Peter” in his father’s possessions. When he looked inside, it was full of his old, discarded drawings. His father had snuck into his room and plucked the drawings he thought were worth saving from the wastebasket.
Encouragement takes many forms. Sometimes it’s fishing out beauty from a wastebasket.
As read from Austin Kleon’s Keep Going.
Kleon, Austin. Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad. United States, Workman Publishing Company, 2019. pg 33,34
Floodlights and Goalposts 