An online commonplace book
I began to read just after I was four. The letters on the page suddenly gave in and admitted what they stood for.
– Penelope Fitzgerald
Some descriptions are well…FIRE. As read from Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. pg 28
Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).”
I’d add Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Perplexity.ai to without guilt list.
H/T Austin Kleon
Hanrahan, Brían. “The Anthropoid Condition: An Interview with John Durham Peters.” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 10, 2015. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-anthropoid-condition-an-interview-with-john-durham-peters/.
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
As its name implies, the Improvisations is not a meticulously planned book. It’s not a high concept type of thing where you literally move the Eleusinian Myth to New Jersey. William Carlos Williams simply went to work in the morning and when he returned home at night, no matter how late it was, before going to bed, he wrote something, anything, and at the end of the year he had a pile of texts in front of him which were now the rough precursor of a book. Those texts were loosely based on what had happened to him throughout that day, or on something he had seen or thought about.
Astral Codex Ten, Your Book Review: Kora In Hell, August 26, 2022
William Carlos Williams’ work ethic was astounding. He wrote bits of Kora in Hell every night during a time as Astral Codex Ten points out, he must’ve been slammed with house calls and gynecology requests due to the WWI doctor shortage.
Kora in Hell must be one of William Carlos Williams less heralded works. It’s not his standard volume of poetry, but it’s not a novel either.
Read the full review here.
You have to stop thinking about anything other than what happened when you were a little kid, and you laid on the floor, and you drew. And you lost yourself in that drawing. And in the end, you absolutely loved that drawing because you made it yourself. And the drawing got hung up on the fridge regardless of how good it was, because your mom loves you and everybody loves you. Why can’t you be that kind to yourself?
Jeff Tweedy, How to Write One Song, pg 58
Jeff Tweedy‘s book, How to Write One Song, applies to anyone who makes things. Music is the medium he reflects on, but when you read the book, swap the word “song” with anything you make – paintings, birdhouses, stock cars, stained glass windows.
Anything.
The advice will still apply.
All quotes are from: On the Move: A Life. By Oliver Sacks
In the final pages, of the final chapter of On the Move, Sacks returns to one of his favorite topics – writing.
Journaling was essential for Sacks. He always kept a notebook close:
I started keeping journals when I was fourteen and at last count had nearly a thousand. They come in all shapes and sizes, from little pocket ones which I carry around with me to enormous tomes. I always keep a notebook by my bedside, for dreams as well as nighttime thoughts, and I try to have one by the swimming pool or the lakeside or the seashore; swimming too is very productive of thoughts which I must write, especially if they present themselves, as they sometimes do, in the form of whole sentences or paragraphs.
On using journals as method for talking to one’s self:
My journals are not written for others, nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.
Sacks strays away from the tortured writer narrative. His attitude towards writing is similar to Ray Bradbury.
It’s a pleasure. It’s a joy. It’s an elixir to the chaos of life.
The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place – irrespective of my subject-where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day.
And after seventy years writing is still fun!
Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago.
Floodlights and Goalposts 