Category Archives: writing

L'Internet, writing

our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts

“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

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workstyle, writing

more on that “writing schedule” business

“…two years later, promoted to the position of chief clerk at the Insurance Institute, he [Kafka] was now on the one-shift system, 8:30 A.M. until 2:30 P.M. And then what? Lunch until 3:30, then a sleep until 7:30, then exercises, then a family dinner. After which he started work around 11:00 P.M. (as Begley points out, the letter and diary writing took up at least an hour a day, and more usually two), and then “depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two, or, three o’clock, once even until six in the morning.” Then, finding it an “unimaginable effort to go to sleep,” he fitfully rested before leaving to go to the office once more. This routine left him permanently on the verge of collapse.”

– Zadie Smith, “F. Kafka, Everyman,” Changing My Mind.
She goes on to quote the biographer, Begley, assaying that “As he [Kafka] recognized, the truth was that he wasted time.” Yep. Appropriate, on what has turned into another w[or]kend.

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gradschool, the academy, workstyle, writing

“Are you getting somewhere…

or did you get lost in Amsterdam?”
– Guster

I have been mounting a lot of defenses of creative writing programs lately. It’s come up when talking to Harvard lawyers, to Hopkins grad students, even to complete strangers. May and June of 2010 seems to be defend-your-workshop season.

My favorite strategy, hitherto only used in my head, is the one where I quote song lyrics as if they mean something. “As Ray LaMontagne writes in ‘Hannah,’ ‘I lost all of my vanity when I peered into the pool,’ which I think we can use as a metaphor for the workshop process.’ ” Like that. I’ve started to view everything as a potential defense for creative writing programs, since every occasion becomes an occasion for defending them.

I’ve thought of putting one up here, or writing a kind of point-by-point rebuttal to all the questions I’ve gotten since doing a year at this program, as well as to the objections made in print. It seems like it might be of interest. What might be of more interest would be a bad satirical defense of creative writing programs, in the manner of the “Dr. Grant Swinger” character, invented by Daniel S. Greenberg*, from the mythical Institute for the Appropriation of Federal Funds. Perhaps both.

“SWINGER: …Actually, our people have an advantage. They aren’t torn between research and teaching. They’ve resolved that conflict.
GREENBERG: How?
SWINGER: By doing neither.”
– from a mock interview in the 2002 Science

Not right now, though. I’m going to go for a walk, as I have for the last five days running. First thing in the morning, before trying to get any work done. Blogging beforehand is cheating, a bit. But rules were made to be bent.

* Heard about Greenberg & Swinger from this NYT review of Greenberg’s new campus satire, “Tech Transfer,” in which Nicholas Wade writes:

“…“Tech Transfer” is the world of Dr. Swinger writ large, populated by scientific entrepreneurs who have learned how to absorb federal funds, suppress charges of malfeasance and live high off the hog. When Dr. Winner assumes the presidency of Kershaw University, he learns the folly of challenging the tenured faculty on any of their sacrosanct, non-negotiable issues:

“These included annual pay increases, lax to near-non-existent conflict-of-interest and conflict-of-commitment regulations, and ample pools of powerless grad students, postdocs and adjuncts to minimize professorial workloads. As a safety net, the faculty favored disciplinary procedures that virtually assured acquittal of members accused of abusing subordinates, seducing students, committing plagiarism, fabricating data, or violating the one-day-a-week limit on money-making outside dealings.”

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art, Baltimore, writing

I don’t think I’m allowed to title any more posts on this blog “don’t call it a comeback”

Drove out to Mt. St. Mary’s today, and attended a career interest lunch for Maryland sophomores, which meant I got to spend an hour and a half at a table with seven sixteen-year-olds who were interested in writing, theater, or both. They were running around from one leadership event to the next, and were a bit worn down: the way we ran it was I talked while they ate, and then I ate quickly while they asked questions. I had a great time with them. I hope some of them will email me.

I found it surprisingly inspiring. Telling other people not to give us has a good effect on making you (one) not give up.

After it was over, my friend dropped me off at the art supplies store on North, and I bought colored pencils (Lyra) and markers (Sakura) and the best pencil sharpener ever (Staedtler tub sharpener with a lid, for those of you who sharpen pencils / draw in bed) and spent a couple of hours scribbling. I now think I have the new concept for the ever-shelved Sander Lamori project.

So, hear me out: instead of a first-person narrative (Sander’s blog, Sander’s journal, etc.) I’m thinking of a first-person narrative told by multiple writers, a la Moonstone, in the form of a collective blog put together by a group of art students. This means that I don’t have to make Sander’s personality incorporate all of the visual things I want to do with the project: I just have to invent enough other co-bloggers for him. This is a very attractive idea to me. There can be co-bloggers who tend to supply more of the writing, or others who do more of the visuals.

I’m exhilarated about this, but if I had a nickel for every time I’ve reinvented Sander’s concept platform over the years, I’d have ten years of Sander comics / graphic novels / blog posts.

Also cleaned bathroom.

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gradschool, writing

making plans

for an interdepartmental par-tay on May 15. You know it’s nearing finals when you are having to plan post-finals blowouts. I’m in D Level again, and there are many other Writing Seminarians here, trusting the library’s atmosphere to make us productive.

Started a new story yesterday, about a woman who has an antagonistic relationship with her infant. It’s a lot of fun to write, even more so because it’s required for nothing.

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theater, writing

rehearsal report

This afternoon, we held the first meeting of the lyricist/composer collaboration group, which is what I’m calling it now instead of “musical theater collaboration group.”

We heard both recorded and live music, and had actors present to read aloud the lyrics. Spontaneously, some lyrics were read to some improvised music on the piano. This was more than I had hoped for, and exactly the kind of thing I wanted to make happen with this.

Apart from the usual obstacles, which serve to remind us that it’s still theater – bagel logistics*, enormous reception in lobby of Mattin confusing people, unopenable CD drive on monolithic scary Mac, one participant being down for the count with a kitchen injury – today’s meeting was very successful.

It remains to see what will come from this, but the mere fact of having put words together with music, in the presence of other people, is more than enough. I am becoming more a follower of late-period Grotowski, I think, in that the participants compose an audience. Not the only audience: but, still, an audience.

We’ll meet again in April.

*Economics of cream cheese: complicated.
A: How much cream cheese do you need for twenty people?
B: It depends how much they put on the bagels.

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writing

writing routine…

what writing routine? At the recent frustration of my latest ability to make a writing schedule for myself, to have an “office,” to have a “desk,” to have set hours of the day in which to write, as everyone says you ought… I have decided to give up. I have never, ever been able to establish a routine, and every time I do, I end up disrupting it. It must be the case that my routine is to not have a routine. For example, right now, there is a half-ironed shirt on the board, and a half-read poem in a book. And this…thing. And also there’s a line of a poem that I’m going to write down really soon.

I did once have a writing routine. First semester, freshman year, I laid on my bed with my head and arms hanging off the mattress, laptop on a chair just below mattress level, and typed. I did this every night, I wrote an enormous many-legged piece of rhymed freshmanalia in that position. It was probably not good for my neck, or my eyes. But it got the job done. After finishing that piece, I decided it was not good to allow myself to write in that position any more. Since then, however – no writing routine. None.

Oh, there was also the “routine” where I could only finish writing projects by staying up all night. Once I discovered that staying up all night existed, I wrote every single creative assignment and paper in that format, for three and a half years of college, until I realized that wasn’t going to work for a thesis.

I don’t remember what the line of the poem was. It had seven syllables and ended with something like “but not to me” and had the verb “to say” in it.

Maybe one day I will be the kind of writer who wakes up every day and runs five sonnets before breakfast. Until then, though, I’m going to enjoy being the kind of writer who writes for too many hours one day and none for the next three. You can’t tell me it’s not more fun this way.

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poetry, writing

the most relevant question

I love that question, “What is your work now?” That should be a question I ask myself every day — a question we should ask of each other every day. It’s beautiful and the most relevant question a human being can ask. Not “Are you happy?”, as I used to think; one’s happiness is largely a condition of one’s having real work to do.

– Poet Jason Koo interviewed in the Feb 2010 Bookslut. Here is a link to two of his poems in Shampoo, “Shopping with Mayakovsky” and “I Just Got Out Of A Serious Relationship.” From the latter:

[…]
Instead of giving me some good old-fashioned
Attention he’d stare into my colander all night long
Trying to count the number of holes. “Honey,

I think I see some constellations!” He’d bring this
Lunacy into the bedroom, saying, Little Dipper,
Big Dipper … and as if that weren’t bad enough, he took
My six-volume Modern Library box set of Proust

And drew Garfield cartoons all over the margins.
Imagine Gilberte strolling down the Champs-Elysées
And Garfield stuffing himself with lasagna at her side…

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