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.
The patron saint of overworked teachers, Alice Kober, taught five classes at a time at Brooklyn College in the 1940s. At any rate, she taught during the day. At night, she set about deciphering an ancient language, Linear B, that had been uncovered on clay tablets at the turn of the century and that stood as a Mount Everest for linguists, a seemingly impossible puzzle. A middle aged spinster, the daughter of working class immigrants, she collected the statistics for each sign of the dead language onto two hundred thousand paper slips. Because of paper shortages during and after the war these slips had to be repurposed from any spare paper she could find. The slips in turn were collected into old cigarette cartons. Her work was cut off by an untimely illness, but she laid the foundation for the dramatic decipherement that took place only a few years after her death.
One never knows when their work will bear fruit. Keep going.
Hitz, Zena. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. United States, Princeton University Press, 2021. (pp 41)
I tell people who want to write they should try to write every single day without exception. They don’t all like hearing that. Obviously, it’s not how every writer works, but it’s a good initial test to see whether you really want to be a writer.
– Tyler Cowen
This a good test of how badly one wants to write. Also, I’d take this as you don’t have to publish said writing.
You can keep it to yourself. Remember writing is a powerful method of thinking.
Good writing should be smooth, clear and short, and the art of saying little in much must be avoided at all costs. In written discourse, every needless thing gives offense and must be eliminated. . . .Had this always been done, many large and tiresome volumes would have shrunk into pamphlets, and many pamphlet into a single period.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez did not merely write of “trees”; he wrote of almond trees — from a generic group noun to something specific. We can say that Mansa Musa was a “very wealthy king”, or we can say that when he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca he left behind so much gold that he ruined the Egyptian economy. The words “very wealthy” are abstract and conceptual; the fact that Mansa Musa was rich enough to give away sufficient money to damage an economy — that is an action, and it is concrete. A handy question, one asked most often by those in the copywriting business, is: “can you visualise it?”
Consider the King James Version of the Bible, compiled by a committee of forty-two translators and published in 1611 under the patronage of King James I. It is probably the most influential single book ever written in English; the King James Bible has shaped the English language itself — how it was spoken and written — for centuries thereafter. And little wonder! Those translators wrote a work of exemplary literary and linguistic clarity, simplicity, dignity, and elegance. They also had a wonderful penchant for using highly specific, marvellously concrete language. Consider this verse, where the Israelites are turning against Moses as they look back fondly on their time in Egypt:
We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick: But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.
I like printing. I get a real kick out of it. I mean sometimes when I’m feeding the press, I forget that’s nothing but an old broken-down machine. I think to myself, that’s a black monster who’s going to snap off my fingers if I don’t keep him tame. You know what I mean?
MR. HEALY
I often have the same image myself.
THE BOY
When I go out on deliveries, I always wear my apron because I want everybody in the street to know I’m a printer.
MR. HEALY
Boy, I never met a linotyper who liked his job.
THE BOY
They like their job on payday, I bet you.
MR. HEALY
They sit all day, plunking keys. There’s no craft to it. There’s no pride.
THE BOY
Nowadays, I don’t know you have to be so proud. Mister Healy, I just figure there ain’t much future in being a compositor. I mean, what’s wrong with linotyping? If the didn’t have linotype machines, how would they print all the books in the thousands and thousands of copies?
MR. HEALY
Are there so many good books around? Are the authors any more clever?
THE BOY
How are you going to set up daily newspapers? You can’t supply the public demand for printed matter by hand setting.
MR. HEALY
Are the people any wiser than they were a hundred years ago? Are they happier? This is the great American disease, boy! This passion for machines. Everybody is always inventing labor-saving devices. What’s wrong with labor? A man’s work is the sweetest thing he owns. It would do us a lot better to invent some labor-making devices. We’ve gone mad, boy, with this mad chase for comfort, and it’s sure we’re losing the very juice of living. It’s a sad business, boy, when they sit a row of printers down in a line, and the machine clacks, and the mats flip, and when it comes out, the printer has about as much joy of creation as the delivery boy. There’s no joy in this kind of life, boy–no joy. It’s a very hard hundred dollars a week, I’ll tell you that!
Intriguing contrast in this scene. Mr. Healy doesn’t view The Boy’s work as craft, but the boy does. He take genuine pride in his work.
In a way both Mr. Healy and The Boy are both right. Reminds me of when Spike Lee mentioned drama is created when two opposing perspectives are right (paraphrasing).
I disagree with Mr. Healy though. We’re not inventing enough laborsaving devices…
How a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary lit the path…
The first time I visited Oliver Sacks on Wards Island northeast of Manhattan, I had mislaid the house number but knew the name of the street. It was evening, wintertime; the slightly sloping street was icy. I parked and tiptoed along the icy pavement looking into every lit-up home. None of the windows had curtains. Through one window I saw a man sprawled on a sofa with one of the hefty volumes of the OED propped on his chest. I knew that had to be him, and so it was. Our first subject was the dictionary; for him as well, it was the books of books.
Some people, when they have taken too much and have been driven beyond the point of endurance, simply crumble and give up. There are others, though they are not many, who will for some reason always be unconquerable. You meet them in time of war and also in time of peace. They have an indomitable spirit and nothing, neither pain nor threat of death, will cause them to give up.
Little Peter Wilson was one of these.
Dahl Roald. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. New York: Viking, 1977.
Despite setbacks, he kept reading, writing, and cataloging.
Sometimes we don’t even know we’re preparing for our big project. At this point in J.A. Baker’s life he was back in Chelmsford, unemployed. But…
He was not disheartened. As far as he was concerned his real work was going very well: in the three months between returning from Roffey and starting work in London he had read almost sixty books; such ‘aesthetic stimulus’, as he called it, was far more important to his long term goals. Now that he had time on his hands, he was keen to devote it to his literary projects. Days and nights were spent feverishly reading and writing.
He built up his personal library. Something he’d continue to do through his lifetime:
By the end of January 1946, Baker’s library had grown to remarkable levels. Dozens of books of poetry had been consumed as he made his way through the canonical writers of the nineteenth century, including Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Browning (as well as translations of the French and German poets Rimbaud and Rilke), and moved on to modern writers: John Masefield, T.S. Eliot (whom he had grown to like, despite not having been offered a job at Faber), Cecil Day Lewis and Stephen Spender. He discovered a love for the lilting style of the ‘ultra-modern’ Dylan Thomas, whom he thought perfectly mirrored his own memories of childhood and love of the countryside.
and Baker practiced his writerley scales:
Exercise books were filled with notes on form and metre, and hundreds of poems carefully copied out. Study was an outlet: it helped him to stave off bouts of depression that continued to threaten.
Floodlights and Goalposts 