Alma: Coffee or tea?
Reynolds Woodcock: Do you have Lapsang? I’ll have a pot of Lapsang please.
Enjoy.
Tag: writing
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I have managed to fill up sixty pages of a new exercise book. I now have in my personal anthology – over 600 poems by some 300 poets. 802 pages written so far. I think that this proves, if proof were needed, that I do not take my vocation lightly.
– J.A. Baker
Baker’s contagious enthusiasm. A young writer, ambitious, looking to master his craft. Not sure where to turn, begins by copying.
Saunders, Hetty. My House of Sky: The life and work of J.A. Baker. Lower Dairy, Toller Fratrum, Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2017. pg25
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The thing you should try to do in your writing is to be grateful for being alive. Just to be suffused with gratitude at what is given you.
– Dana Gioia
A masterclass on tap. Coincidence that two of America’s best writers, The Gioia brothers, are also openly very metaphysical?
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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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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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It’s no coincidence that the world’s best writers tend to keep diaries. If you faithfully record your life in a journal, you’re writing everyday — and if you write every day, you become a better writer. David Sedaris has kept a diary for forty years. This means that if you’ve kept a diary for a year of your life or less, Sedaris is at least forty times better at writing than you are.
Prefaces and dust jacket copy are underrated.
Sedaris, David. Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002). United States, Little, Brown, 2017.
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Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.
This sentence reads like a modern “Once upon a time”. Immediately after reading it I felt like yeah, I want to be part of this story.
Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury, 2005. pg3
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My debt to Plato is a certain number of sentences: the like to Aristotle. A large number, yet still a finite number, make the worth of Milton and Shakespeare, to me. I would therefore run over what I have written, save out the good sentences, and destroy the rest.
He only is a good writer who keeps one eye on his page and with the other sweeps over things. So that every new sentence brings us a new contribution of observation.
Richardson, Robert D.. First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. United States, University of Iowa Press, 2015. pg 53,54
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What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 287
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Thanks to Madame Lafayette, they were seated in a gallery overlooking the choir, “as good a place as any in the church,” thought John Quincy, who in a long description of the spectacle in his diary demonstrated that besides being precociously erudite, he had learned, as his father urged, to observe the world around him and was well started on becoming an accomplished writer. He described the Parliament lined up to the right side of the choir, robed in scarlet and black, the Chambre des Comptes on the left, in robes of black and white; the bishops arriving two by two, “a purple kind of mantle over their shoulders,” the Archbishop of Paris, “a mitre upon his head,” and finally the arrival of the King.
John Quincy Adams heeding his father’s advice to observe the world around him.
Or as Teju Cole begs: observe, observe, observe.
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 327
Floodlights and Goalposts 