Category Archives: writing

art, quotes, writing

No – never.

Ethel. And do you think you will never be able to paint as well as M. Delaroche?
Clive. No – never.
Ethel. And – and – you will never give up painting?
Clive. No – never. That would be like leaving your friend who was poor; or deserting your mistress because you were disappointed about her money. They do those things in the great world, Ethel.
Ethel (with a sigh). Yes.

– W. M. Thackeray, THE NEWCOMES

Chapter 47, in the heart of THE NEWCOMES, which “Contains two or three acts of a little comedy,” is almost entirely done like a play, in dialogue. It was my favorite portion of the entire book. The lovers have escaped from the watchful chaperones and from the author’s digressive narrative, for a very short time. And it was in this chapter, where Ethel asks Clive if he can’t leave art to do something more respectable, something at which he might actually excel, that Clive stands up for himself. He’s not a very good painter, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to quit painting, either. I respected him much more after that.

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writing

Present tense

Riding home along Montrose Avenue with a bicycle basket full of poetry magazines, from last evening’s Printer’s Ball, I immediately think of the sentence, “Riding home along Montrose Avenue with a bicycle basket full of poetry magazines…” and notice that I am turning my experiences into words in the moment of experience, and noticing this makes me stumble and almost fall off the bike, making the words no longer true. But I manage to keep writing. (Riding.)

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books, writing

les livres arrivent

Robert brought the boxes with my books in them up from Indianapolis today. (That line feels like some kind of very-long-winded meter, but I can’t match it. Less peripatetic, more ptero-dactylic.)

This was a surprise. I didn’t expect them until later on. But all of my books are here in the same city, in the same place, with me. If I wanted to, I could ride my bike a mile east, lakeward right now, break open the black Isuzu Trooper, and read every one of them. Right now. I could sit on the bumper, in the light of the open door, with Tom Stoppard and Flaubert and Brian Teare spread all around me and read until morning. They will wait there like eggs in their box-shells, waiting to hatch, until Ee and I move into our new apartment, on Sept. 1st. So soon!

I haven’t seen them from April 2007 on. For the whole year of assistant directing, they lived in Menlo Park, and I lived everywhere but there.

Existing without them hurt very much at first, and I have to write something more on that subject. But it was ultimately a powerful choice to let them all go. Helped me to understand their role in my life. I will write more on this.

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quotes, writing

Yes, he had to start his day.

He awoke punctually at oh-four-hundred hours, as he always did “in the field” (and that was what he called the maneuvers) His valet was already standing in the room. And the equerries, he knew, were already waiting outside the door. Yes, he had to start his day. He would have scarcely a moment to himself all day long. To make up for it, he had outwitted all of them that night by standing at the open window for a good quarter hour.

– from THE RADETSKY MARCH by Joseph Roth.

Kaiser Franz Joseph’s interior monologue. And Roth makes me see more clearly that the phrase “interior monologue” refers to the dramatic – to the monologue – and that when it is practiced well, as it is here, brilliantly, you can feel the point-of-view of the character as if it’s spoken.

The idea is taken from drama, of course. Or it takes from the same thing from which drama takes. From spoken language. Almost all Roth’s narration is one form of interior monologue or another. It’s like people are always speaking, even when silent. Saying things like “Yes, he had to start his day.” It’s the I-voice without the monotony and selfcenteredness of the I.

Maybe all the bad monologues I keep writing belong as fiction narration. Maybe this is how I get into fiction, by thinking of all narration as monologue. Because if I don’t know who’s speaking, I don’t know how to write. My short stories all turn into plays. That’s fine. Some day a play will turn into prose.

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quotes, style, workstyle, writing

Who are these people?

Q: Are you one of those writers who keeps a regular schedule?

A: No. How I wish! Who are these people? That sounds marvelous. It takes me a long time to write, because I think out everything before I write it. When I write something, even a tiny section of a long thing, I think about it for many weeks. Perhaps that’s why my work is always so much “my work.”

– Jamaica Kincaid in a Salon interview. I read her collection of Talk of the Town essays, TALK STORIES, today, and was overwhelmed by the exact simplicity. Every word means something. She has an overheard person at a party say “Sensation, as you know, is the tyranny of Los Angeles.”

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quotes, writing

Who would not be poor if he could be sure of possessing genius?

“Sir,” says the Colonel, “I hope it is not your practice to measure and estimate gentlemen by such paltry standards as those. A man of letters follows the noblest calling which any man can pursue. I would rather be the author of a work of genius, than be Governor-General of India. I admire genius. I salute it whenever I meet it. I like my own profession better than any in the world, but then it is because I am suited to it. I couldn’t write four lines in verse, no, not to save me from being shot. A man cannot have all the advantages of life. Who would not be poor if he could be sure of possessing genius, and winning fame and immortality, sir? Think of Dr. Johnson, what a genius he had, and where did he live? In apartments that, I daresay, were no better than these, which, I am sure, gentlemen, are most cheerful and pleasant,” says the Colonel, thinking he had offended us.

– from THE NEWCOMES, by W. M. Thackeray

Why have I waited this long to read more Thackeray? I only picked up THE NEWCOMES in the Ravenswood library because it had illustrations by Edward Ardizzone, who I have loved since seeing his illustrations of Eleanor Farjeon’s THE LITTLE BOOKROOM when I was a kid. Little did I know how good it was going to be. I find myself slowing down in deference to the density of Thackeray’s writing. I’m going to have to start over again from the beginning and read it at the pace of a snail – but what a happy snail. I think I’m going to enjoy this as much as the time when I was in Berlin and I decided to read every novel Thomas Hardy had ever written.

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quotes, writing

What stories are new?

If authors sneer, it is the critic’s business to sneer at them for sneering. He must pretend to be their superior, or who would care about his opinion. Besides, he is right sometimes; and the stories he reads, and the characters drawn in them, are old, sure enough. What stories are new?
[…]
There may be nothing new under and including the sun; but it looks fresh every morning, and we rise with it to toil, hope, scheme, laugh, struggle, love, suffer, until the night comes and quiet. And then it will wake Morrow and the eyes that look on it; and so da copa.

– from the first chapter of THE NEWCOMES, (entitled “The Overture”) by W.M. Thackeray

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books, quotes, style, writing

Ken Sparling is in your kitchen, rocking your prose style

I worked at a grocery store and they paid us in cash every week. I would just stick the money in my pocket and never go to the bank. I bought Tutti a giant stuffed animal, a Mickey Mouse telephone, sheets and pillowcases with cats wearing running shoes on them, and I bought a kit and made her a Christmas stocking with her name on it. I can’t remember what else I bought. Anytime I saw something, I bought it. This past year was our eleventh Christmas together, and I bought her a plastic rack for inside the kitchen pantry door, where she can put her rolls of food wrap.

She is lying in bed beside me right now, with her back to me. I think she has finally gone to sleep. I came back from a meeting where I had just been elected to the board of directors and I came home in the rain, and there she was, on the couch, watching TV.

Now we are up here in bed and I am wide awake. I think she’s asleep. But she might just be pretending she is asleep so she doesn’t have to listen to me anymore. She might, at some point, have said to her self, “I can’t listen to this anymore,” closed her eyes, and pretended to be asleep.

I don’t think she’s pretending. I really don’t.

But, the thing is, it occurred to me. There was a time when something like this would never have entered my head.

– from the novel DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL, by the Canadian author Ken Sparling, who has the prose style I want to be when I grow up.

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grants & fundraising, theater, writing

(technically unlimited) access to artistic excellence

I’ve been working for over a month now as a freelance grantwriter for a theater company in Los Angeles on a NEA Access to Artistic Excellence grant. It’s been a humbling process. I really wanted to work on this one in particular so that if, in the future, a company I was with wanted to apply for NEA funding, I’d have some experience.

The checklist for the grant contains eleven separate items, each of which is a discrete document – and then there are also three artists’s statements and three work samples. Also, in order to apply for NEA funding, you have to be registered as a contractor with three different online entities, which maintain data.

In contrast to the convoluted bureaucratic process, if you actually call the NEA and speak to the two-person staff of Theater Specialists (as I have done a few times) you get some of the most helpful, nice people you’ve ever talked to on the phone, who really care about theater and want to help you get through the grant.

One thing I thought was interesting, which I learned from one of the Theater Specialists, is that there is no annual budgetary minimum for applying organizations. No matter how small you are, you can apply within the Access to Artistic Excellence category. We learned this when we were asking about our consortium partner, which has a much smaller budget than the lead applicant.

Although I’m sure it’s hard for small theaters to manifest an interesting enough project or a committed enough staff to complete this intensive grant, I’m glad that technically, if you work hard enough, it’s still open to everyone.

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quotes, writing

time as we know it

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily, perhaps not possibly, chronological.

The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow.

– Eudora Welty, ONE WRITER’S BEGINNINGS

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