“For whatever reason–success, removal from Ireland, the realities of the war years, a comparatively settled and domestic routine–the number and variety of Beckett’s complaints had diminished. He would still get cysts from time to time, his teeth would give him trouble and so would his eyes, but the panic attacks which had impelled him into psychoanalysis were now a thing of the past.”
-Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, (27.439)
you can edit for hours, with multiple windows in multiple programs, Tracked Changes and Notes and all that, with clipboards of both the paper and electronic variety; you can do all that till the cows come home; but no one will walk by your cubicle until the exact moment when you’re staring at your fingernails like there’s a little green alien dancing on them.
there is a truck with a handpainted sign reading "FLAMABLE" (sp) hanging from the railings above the bed.
“11:30 A.M., Groningen, The Netherlands
Wow! Cloud outside looks just like Henry Moore’s “Reclining Figure” (1939).
11:35 A.M.
So does the croissant.”
– Christopher Niemann’s graphic diary of a NY-Berlin flight, Red Eye, Abstract City blog
till TA Training boot camp and the start of the academic year.
As I wind down two large editing projects for work, I have more respect than ever for people who work as editors, day in, day out, throughout their lives. It requires so much care and patience and generosity. I have a tendency to compare everything I like or honor to directing, but it really *is* a lot like directing, to edit something–the best people, I think, manage to do the least of it, or do the most by doing the least. I am not the best people, but I am better for a summer of it.
One project went “to the printers” yesterday–that was very exciting. The other is more of an ongoing deadline. I’ll keep working on it during the semester.
“In June [of 1958], however, he [Beckett] was still resolutely struggling with the new prose work and finding it horribly difficult. Even though he could see clearly what he wanted to do, and that it should be only about 100 pages, he felt he was making very little progress, or only just enough to keep him from giving it up in disgust. ‘I rely a lot on the demolishing process to come later and content myself more or less with getting down elements and rhythm to be knocked hell out of when I am ready…It all takes place in the pitch dark and the mud, first part man alone, second with another, third alone again. All a problem of rhythm and syntax and weakening of form, nothing more difficult,’ he told Barney Rosset. Yet, comically perhaps, he was once again hankering after other forms of composition–theatre or radio. ‘I hear their siren voice and tell them to stick it up.’ “
– Anthony Cronin, Beckett: The Last Modernist (30.489)
“Remember when you could tell a lot about a guy by what cassette tapes—Journey or the Smiths?—littered the floor of his used station wagon? No more, because now the music of our lives is stored on MP3 players and iPhones. Our important papers live on hard drives or in the computing cloud, and DVDs are becoming obsolete, as we stream movies on demand. One by one, the meaningful artifacts that we used to scatter about our apartments and cars, disclosing our habits to any visitor, are vanishing from sight.”
–Mark Oppenheimer, “Judging A Girl By Her Cover,” Slate
(http://www.slate.com/id/2261955/?from=rss)
“Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.
But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose ‘changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.’ ”
– from “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the Atlantic
Parallel Octave is back to meeting again today after a two-week hiatus for Artscape and Whartscape. It’s our first meeting of the smaller core group, which will occur before the open session. Core group is working on “Emperor of Ice-Cream” again, trying to see what happens if we have it memorized–open session will be our first time working on the text of a living poet, Ric Royer. The poem is his book-length work “the weather not the weather.”
After that, I am also going to try to make potsticker dough from scratch if I’m feeling crazy.
Dara Weinberg 