Friendly but Persistent

This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
JOHN CLEESE

Stepping Out

I could tell by Romeo's body language that he wanted another outing besides the morning walk and the recent backyard pee. So I put on my raincoat and we stepped out. The rain went from drizzle to steady as I crossed the intersection. A lady in a big silver truck pulled over, opening her driver-side window. It was Jessica, the mother of five girls who lives down the street. "Here, take my umbrella," she yelled holding it out the window.
"But I live right here," I said, pointing to my house.
"Take it, because I love you!"

Create

“We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”
― Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid

Storytelling alters the storyteller. And a story is altered by being told.
MOHSIN HAMID

Maya Angelou

There is, I hope, a thesis in my work: we may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody-two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that it’s just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats—maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats—but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be.

MAYA ANGELOU

José Andrés

Food is a very good example of the urgency of now. If it’s [an] emergency and you’re supposed to take care of your fellow citizens, fellow Americans, if you’re hungry, you’re hungry today. Your children are hungry today. The elderly are hungry today. The very young kids are hungry today. Any day that passes is one day too late. So, this is a very simple thing to understand in emergencies. The urgency of now is now.
-José Andrés
Article

Action

“Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.”
― Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher

“I have two moods. One is Roy, rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood. And Pam, sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs … Sometimes the tide is in, sometimes it’s out.”
-Carrie Fisher

A Cooking Animal

“My definition of man is a cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgement, and the faculties and passions of our minds in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook.”
― James Boswell, The Journals, 1762-95

Tea

“I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues. It comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant on spirituous liquors. Gentle herb! Let the florid grape yield to thee. Thy soft influence is a more safe inspirer of social joy.”
― James Boswell, London Journal, 1762-1763

Hélène Cixous

“And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.”
― Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea

“We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.”
― Hélène Cixous

Fish Tanks and Sewing Machines

I have a distinct mood cycle. When my mood is high I fantasize about setting up an aquarium in my living room but when my mood drops I can't imagine what I was thinking. Two people have given me fish tanks which are still empty, in my cellar along with the huge bucket of gravel and a pump. I even won a fish tank from a pet store when I entered their free contest on a whim. When my mood inevitably dropped I sheepishly told the pet store to please give it to someone else. I was so embarrassed but they were fine about it and had another family to give it to. My other obsession when my mood is high is my sewing machine. I have collected fabric over the years as well as many sewing patterns. My sewing machine is an old and beautiful tool but I rarely use it. Every time my mood lifted I would fantasize bringing it down from the attic. I thought I never sewed because it was too cold or too hot up there. So after many years my husband and I finally moved it into my studio. Now it's ridiculous and in the way and I think I should move it back to the attic. As side effects of my mood cycle I think these things are rather humorous. "It could be so much worse," I said to my husband.

Falling Leaves Falling Moods

Article
Can you explain “diurnal variation,” as opposed to “seasonal patterns”?

Many people experience daily patterns wherein one wakes up in a lousy mood with limited energy and ability to engage with the world. As the morning passes, mood may gradually begin to pick up, and often things feel better by lunchtime or so. This is what clinicians refer to as diurnal variation. While it is frequently incapacitating, it can be useful in monitoring changes in mood. Individuals who are beginning to enter a depressed phase often note that mornings are getting increasingly worse; during the improvement phase, one notices that the time to feeling better shortens.

Snippet

"Jen," I said "I heard Dad on the phone yesterday, he said 'I'd like to be buried next to Marge at Pine Ridge Cemetery.' Do you believe it?"
"I knew he loved her more than mom," she said.

Anne Tyler

"I think of my work as a whole. And really what it seems to me I'm doing is populating a town. Pretty soon it's going to be just full of lots of people I've made up. None of the people I write about are people I know. That would be no fun. And it would be very boring to write about me. Even if I led an exciting life, why live it again on paper? I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances. It's lucky I do it on paper. Probably I would be schizophrenic--and six times divorced--if I weren't writing. I would decide that I want to run off and join the circus and I would go. I hate to travel, but writing a novel is like taking a long trip. This way I can stay peacefully at home."
Anne Tyler
article

Caroline Leavitt

Writing is hard. But waiting to HEAR about your writing is like having no chocolate, no coffee, no books, no friends, no movies, no lovers, no animals, no black clothing.

Caroline Leavitt

Leaf Day

I began bagging the leaves this morning and I got in the zone and ran out of bags. We had only 3 bags that I could find. Then I received sad news and decided to walk to ACE hardware in Bellingham and buy more leaf bags with Romeo. It was a 3 mile walk. Then I bagged the leaves until I was done. (15 bags) The rest of the leaves are still on the tree! Now every muscle is sore but this was a way to grieve the sudden loss of a friend on a beautiful day.

Carlos Fuentes

Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
CARLOS FUENTES

Arthur Koestler

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
ARTHUR KOESTLER

Kim McLarin

Community is deeply lacking in the United States; like our savage form of capitalism, our cult of individualism long ago became monstrous, metastasizing into a cancer of selfishness. Toni Morrison once pointed out how even the words used by politicians and marketers have pushed this progression toward me-ism: “The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me’. When I was a young girl we were called citizens — American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the ’50s and ’60s they started calling us consumers. So we did — consume. Now they don’t use those words any more — it’s the American taxpayer, and those are different attitudes.”

Throwing a party is my way of reminding the people in my circles that we are in this thing together, and that even in the midst of crisis, there is room for simple, human joy.
-Kim McLarin

Article

Motion

A good deal of my imagining time is spent on my feet, however, since I like to walk quickly, and I like to run, whenever possible. Writing isn’t really meant to be a sedentary art, I think. Being in motion is stimulating to the soul.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

Rebecca Solnit

“The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Aldous Huxley

“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”
― Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

Solitude

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley

This World

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
― Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Facts

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

Words

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Aldous Huxley

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

On the Street

He buttonholed me and told me his daughter and ex-wife live in the same apartment. They are fighting. The daughter wants to move out. "The kicker is," he said, "My ex-wife plans to have my daughter's ex-boyfriend move in when my daughter leaves. How fucked up is that?"

Yiyun Li

“Life can be reset, it seems to say; time can be separated. But that logic appears to me as unlikely as traveling to another place to become a different person. Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.”
― Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Dream

A few nights ago I dreamed I had been keeping a pet a goat in an apartment bathroom. He had tumors on his head. He needed to pee and he had eaten the shower curtain. He had difficulty walking from being overly confined. I felt terrible!

Arthur Miller

A man sits down at a typewriter with some blank paper on which he types image-describing words, and at a certain point turns around and confronts some four or five hundred people, and trucks and food wagons, airplanes, horses, hotels, roads, cars, lights, all of which he has by some means, untraceable now in its complexity, evoked from nowhere and nothing. Oddly, he ends up with little power over these results of his imagination; they go their own way with not the slightest awareness that they owe their current incarnation to him.

ARTHUR MILLER

The First Person

The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publishers and the readers can and will come later.
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

Discovery

Write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

GERTRUDE STEIN

Sticky Wicket

A sticky wicket (or sticky dog, or glue pot) is a metaphor used to describe a difficult circumstance. It originated as a term for difficult circumstances in the sport of cricket, caused by a damp and soft pitch.
In cricket

The phrase comes from the game of cricket. "Wicket" has several meanings in cricket: in this case it refers to the rectangular area, also known as the pitch, in the centre of the cricket field between the stumps. The wicket is usually covered in a much shorter grass than the rest of the field or entirely bare, making it susceptible to variations in weather, which in turn cause the ball to bounce differently.[4]

If rain falls and the wicket becomes wet, the ball may not bounce predictably, making it very difficult for the batsman.[5] Furthermore, as the pitch dries, conditions can change swiftly, with spin bowling being especially devastating, as the ball can deviate laterally from straight by several feet. Once the wet surface begins to dry in a hot sun "the ball will rise sharply, steeply and erratically. A good length ball ... becomes a potential lethal delivery. Most batsmen on such wickets found it virtually impossible to survive let alone score."[6] Certain cricketers developed reputations for their outstanding abilities to perform on sticky wickets. Australian Victor Trumper was one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_wicket

Dark and Light Sourdough Breads

As soon as I shaped the incubating sourdough (wheat oat rye corn) into a dozen mini loaf pans to rise, I decided to mix up a batch of semolina bread for tomorrow. I used leftover potato stock from steamed potatoes at dinner last night. This was the inspiration. Both breads are excellent in very different ways.

Freedom

“I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

Spreading Poison

“Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

Tana French

“What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie. ”
― Tana French, In the Woods

Society

“Our entire society is based on discontent. People wanting more and more and more. Being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their décor, their clothes, everything – taking it for granted that that’s the whole point of life. Never to be satisfied. If you are perfectly happy with what you got, especially if what you got isn’t even all that spectacular then you’re dangerous. You’re breaking all the rules. You’re undermining the sacred economy. You’re challenging every assumption that society is built on.”
― Tana French

Louis L'Amour

Often I am asked if any writer ever helped or advised me. None did. However, I was not asking for help either, and I do not believe one should. If one wishes to write, he or she had better be writing, and there is no real way in which one writer can help another. Each must find his own way.

LOUIS L’AMOUR

Process

The really good ideas are generated in the process of writing, and only if you're working at white heat. You don't get those ideas if you're worrying about the commas.
PAT BARKER

Sandy Banks

I consider it a privilege to be a journalist — to capture life’s interplay of misery and joy, to build bonds with strangers who trust me with their stories, to explore ideas that expand minds and open hearts, including my own.

I was never able to shed the accouterments of journalism. I couldn’t silence the voices in my head when I had a story to tell, or stifle the curiosity that had me chatting up strangers for columns I would never write.

So I’m back and eager to rejoin the public conversation, exploring the forces that shape our region, inform our policies and animate our private lives.

Sandy Banks
Article

Amy Goodman

Go to where the silence is and say something.
AMY GOODMAN

Jamie Dean Hultgren

Not every single creative endeavour you undertake needs to be monetized! You *can* create art just for the love of it, it is possible, and you shouldn't be made to feel shitty about it or pressured out of doing so by anyone.
Jamie Dean Hultgren

Curiosity

“Curiosity is the beginning of wisdom.”
― Françoise Sagan, Dans un mois, dans un an

Are you in love? What are you reading?

“I always wanted to ask people: “Are you in love? What are you reading?”
― Françoise Sagan, A Certain Smile

“A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.”
― Françoise Sagan, Bonjour tristesse

“I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.”
― Francoise Sagan

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
― Sagan

Start Trembling

The story must strike a nerve — in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.
SUSAN SONTAG

Contradictions

“I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy”
― Czeslaw Milosz

Czesław Miłosz

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
CZESLAW MILOSZ

“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“Learning

To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“Language is the only homeland.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.”
― Czeslaw Milosz, Selected Poems Selected Poems

“The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.”
― Czesław Miłosz, The Issa Valley

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“You see how I try
To reach with words
What matters most
And how I fail.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“Tomber amoureux. To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment “already”? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a “cristallisation,” so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“Consolation

Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.”
― Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

The Emergency Poet

Poetry pharmacy set to open in Shropshire

The Emergency Poet, Deborah Alma, plans to dispense literary first aid from a shop in Bishop’s Castle

Savory Waffles

Here

Pumpkin Waffles

After a 4 mile walk all I wanted was pumpkin waffles and a cup of tea. They came out great. I just added a cup of pumpkin to the regular recipe and a dash more salt and sugar.

1¾ cups whole wheat flour

2 tablespoons granulated sugar (dash more)

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt (dash more)

1¾ cups buttermilk

½ cup corn oil (or 1/4 c)

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

and
1 cup of pureed pumpkin

Figured Out

Whatever you write should lead to a higher level of understanding. If you've already got it figured out, it's a waste of time.
TERRY McMILLAN

Dan Neuharth

Taking Back Your Life from a Narcissistic Family Upbringing

One Share

I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
-E. B. White

The Culmination

No, Trump isn’t an aberration. He’s unusually blatant and gaudily corrupt, but at a basic level he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for decades. And U.S. political life won’t begin to recover until centrists face up to that uncomfortable reality.
Paul Krugman

Cheers to the Refuseniks

Young people
Logged off: meet the teens who refuse to use social media

Generation Z has grown up online – so why are a surprising number suddenly turning their backs on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat?

You Never Know

“The hardest thing about the road not taken is that you never know where it might have led.”
― Lisa Wingate, A Month of Summer

Control

“We plan our days, but we don’t control them.”
― Lisa Wingate, Before We Were Yours

Tending Roses

“The secret to a happy life is not in getting what you want. It is in learning to want what you get.”
― Lisa Wingate, Tending Roses

The Only Road they See

“Sometimes we must try to view the actions of those around us with forgiveness. We must realize that they are going on the only road they can see. Sometimes we cannot raise our chins and see eye to eye, so we must bow our heads and have faith in one another.”
― Lisa Wingate

King

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

STEPHEN KING

That Person

“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”
― Anna Quindlen, Living Out Loud

Book Love

“Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung...”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

Anna Quindlen

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”
― Anna Quindlen

“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”
― Anna Quindlen

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

Frankie Shaw

I was actually really sick of being a broke actress with a toddler, so I wrote a script.

Frankie Shaw

Walking

I grew up in suburbia where we went from the fortress (house) into the tank (car) to our destinations. Now that I am an adult I live in the city and I travel by walking with my dog. I know many people from traveling the same route for years and I've come to notice things as a pedestrian that I would miss in a vehicle.

Pearl S. Buck

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him…a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

PEARL S. BUCK

Nick Cave

Vulnerability is the very thing that permits us to connect with each other, to recognise in others the same discomfort they have with themselves and with their place in the world. Vulnerability is the engine of compassion, and can be a superpower, a special vision that allows us to see the quivering, wounded inner world that most of us possess.
-Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files
ISSUE #65 / OCTOBER 2019

Colson Whitehead

What isn’t said is as important as what is said. In many classic short stories, the real action occurs in the silences. Try to keep all the good stuff off the page.
Colson Whitehead

Tom Petty

Q: Do you see your songwriting ability as a gift?

A: Yes, absolutely. It has to be a gift, because why would I be able to write a song instead of someone else? After a while, you come to realize, "I've really been blessed. I can write these things and it makes me happy, and it makes millions of people happy." It's an obligation, it's bigger than you. It's the only true magic I know. It's not pulling a rabbit out of a hat; it's real. It's your soul floating out to theirs.

Tom Petty Billboard Q&A (by Melinda Newman, November 28, 2005)
source

Kathleen Jamie

If I write for anything, it's to bring order out of chaos, but not too much. A wee bit of disorder never did any harm.
KATHLEEN JAMIE

“Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or more usually a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky...”
― Kathleen Jamie

“When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it’s not about voice, it’s about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don’t just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.”
― Kathleen Jamie

“Isn't that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

Jean Kwok

“Sometimes our fate is different from the one we imagined for ourselves.”
― Jean Kwok, Girl in Translation

“Nobody can change who you are, except for you.”
― Jean Kwok, Girl in Translation

“The core power of tai chi begins with awareness. Our stance is the posture of infinity: not tense but relaxed and upright, expectant. From this nothingness, all things begin.”
― Jean Kwok, Mambo in Chinatown: A Novel

“In love and life, we never know when we are telling ourselves stories. We are the ultimate unreliable narrators.”
― Jean Kwok, Searching for Sylvie Lee

“I began to see beauty as something that could be unleashed from within a person rather than a set of physical features like a perfect nose or big eyes.”
― Jean Kwok, Mambo in Chinatown: A Novel

“When I’m with you, I could drink water and be full.”
― Jean Kwok, Girl in Translation

Cal Newport

“If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“What we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“As the author Tim Ferriss once wrote: “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“To simply wait and be bored has become a novel experience in modern life, but from the perspective of concentration training, it’s incredibly valuable.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“If you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“(As Nietzsche said: “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”)”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Another key commitment for succeeding with this strategy is to support your commitment to shutting down with a strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed. In more detail, this ritual should ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right. The process should be an algorithm: a series of steps you always conduct, one after another. When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion (to end my own ritual, I say, “Shutdown complete”). This final step sounds cheesy, but it provides a simple cue to your mind that it’s safe to release work-related thoughts for the rest of the day.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Sourdough Library

Video
Meet the Man Behind the World’s Only Sourdough Library

Lentil Stew

I just put everything in a big cast iron pot in a 350 degree oven and baked it for an hour; for strips of boneless pork ribs, 2 coarsely chopped onions, 6 whole garlic cloves, 1 cup of red burgundy jug wine, 2 chicken bouillon cubes, sprinkles of Adobo, 1 pound of lentils, a head of chopped celery, 3 cubed potatoes, 4 chopped carrots, a 4" chunk ginger root, and water. What could be bad? It came out great.

COZY October Buttermilk Waffles

Last night we watched a library film about Jackson Pollock starring Ed Harris. It was good. The best parts were Ed Harris staring into space. What an amazing actor!


This morning we made whole wheat buttermilk waffles and they were excellent.


1¾ cups whole wheat or all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt (more if using kosher salt and whole wheat flour)

1¾ cups buttermilk

½ cup corn oil or unsalted butter (melted and cooled to room temperature)

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Evil Donald: DNA Collection

“That kind of mass collection alters the purpose of DNA collection from one of criminal investigation basically to population surveillance, which is basically contrary to our basic notions of a free, trusting, autonomous society,” said Vera Eidelman, a staff lawyer with the ACLU
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/us/dna-testing-immigrants.html

Stop! Thief

On my downtown jog this morning Romeo nabbed a stale BK hamburger placed at the shrine opposite Kennedy Manor and ate it.

Stoner Parents

And it's effect on the kids

RIP Richard Jackson

Article
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/81388-obituary-richard-jackson.html

Start the Day

If I don't start the day with beautiful writing, exercise and a good breakfast I feel poisoned by the world news.

Oval Office

I'm really looking forward to the day my mother is not the president.

Sacred Pattern

“Beauty appears when something is completely and absolutely and openly itself.”
― Deena Metzger

“Understanding the Way of Story as a sacred pattern and a living event. Story can reveal a spiritual path and or the way to healing. Stories become the foundation of health, peacebuilding and vision. Learning to listen, to recognize, to understand and attend the teachings and revelations of the Stories we have been given to live guides us toward the 5th world. Our individual stories, when carefully attended, can reveal each person’s particular path of healing and transformation. Even illness is a story that can lead us to our own and to community healing. Learning to recognize the Story that we or another is living can be a worthy life work.”
― Deena Metzger

“Without compassion, we will never know anyone or anything, not even our own story. Too much judgment, too many ideas and attitudes will stand in the way of the fundamental principle that we are similar to, connected with, and part of everything else.”
― Deena Metzger

Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!
― Deena Metzger

Hemingway

Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Sadness

Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand, but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.
ZADIE SMITH

An Enemy

“One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.”
― E.B. White, Essays of E.B. White

For it's Own Good

“I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively, instead of skeptically and dictatorially.”
― E.B. White

a true friend and a good writer

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”
― E.B. White

“A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book."

[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971]”
― E.B. White

“Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.”
― E.B. White

“After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.”
― E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.”
― E. B. White, Letters of E. B. White

Merely Seductive

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E.B. White

Morning Mile

The past three mornings at 6:30 AM I've taken Romeo for a mile jog downtown. The streets were empty today but normally there are kids walking to school. This morning being a Saturday the only people I saw were the men coming out of the shelter wearing dark backpacks. There was frost on the cars in the parking lot and my fingers were cold but it felt good to force a warm up both physically and mentally. I find that I am grinning ear to ear when we arrive back home and the coffee always tastes better after a run. This morning I made coffee mocha with Droste cocoa, milk, coffee and sugar and a few grains of salt. It was fantastic.

E.B. White

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

E.B. WHITE

William Zinsser

Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it’s because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you’ll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga.

WILLIAM ZINSSER

Saving my Life

In writing you work toward a result you won’t see for years, and can’t be sure you’ll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.

TOBIAS WOLFF

Each Day

“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
― Seneca

A Play

“Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.”
― Seneca

Escape

“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

Seneca

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
― Seneca

Repeat Run

This morning I ran with Romeo downtown at 6:30 AM and I saw all the same people as yesterday, the two dog walkers and the man putting out the sign at the liquor store. I also bumped into Roger and Gregg and my neighbor with magenta hair. Early is good. The streets are not empty. Middle school students head to the school at seven AM. When I came home I made my first batch of Irish oatmeal in the pressure cooker. It was delicious with raisins, raw sunflower seeds and cream.

Rescued Racoons with Pitbull Mom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiU0TWEMA7s

their mother's signature dish: “muskrat stew.”

Article

Duncan White: Global War on Books

Opinion NYT
The Global War on Books, Redux

Governments are spending a remarkable amount of resources attacking books — because their supposed limitations are beginning to look like ageless strengths.

By Duncan White

Mr. White teaches history and literature at Harvard.

Oct. 3, 2019


Around the world, many authoritarian regimes — having largely corralled the internet — now have declared war on the written word, their oldest enemy. The received wisdom after the close of the Cold War was that physical books were outdated, soon to be swept aside in the digital age; and that the internet was instead the real threat to governments seeking to repress provocative thinking. A generation later, the opposite may be true.

The People’s Republic of China has been the most successful in curbing the internet. But their stranglehold on society is also the result of their largely successful push in the past decade to ban nearly all bookstores, books, authors and academics that do not adhere to the Communist Party’s line. Even before the current Hong Kong protests, there was a crackdown on Hong Kong publishers. In the fall of 2015, associates of the Causeway Bay Books store disappeared, later discovered to have been detained on the mainland, accused of trafficking in “illegal” books critiquing leading members of the Communist Party. In 2017, the Communist Party formally took control of all print media, including books.
More on the Hong Kong Literary Crackdown
The Case of Hong Kong’s Missing Booksellers
April 3, 2018

They are, of course, far from alone. Wherever authoritarian regimes are growing in strength, from Brazil, to Hungary, to the Philippines, literature that expresses any kind of political opposition is under a unique, renewed threat. Books that challenge normative values, especially those with L.G.B.T. themes, have been hit especially hard. History textbooks crafted by independent scholars are being replaced with those produced by the state at a disturbing rate. In Russia, a new even stricter set of censorship laws was announced in March to punish those expressing “clear disrespect” for the state (i.e. effectively Putin himself).

Last month, the Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s education minister Ziya Selcuk revealed — proudly — that 301,878 books had been taken out of schools and libraries and destroyed. All these books were purportedly connected to Fethullah Gulen, the cleric blamed for the failed coup attempt against Erdogan’s government in 2016. Since the coup, a report by English PEN found that several periodicals and 30 publishing houses had been shut down and that 80 authors have been prosecuted or criminally investigated.

The list around the globe goes on. In Egypt, the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has imprisoned independent writers, raided bookstores and forced libraries to close. At the extreme end of the scale, ISIS notoriously burned over 100,000 rare books and manuscripts housed in the Mosul Public Library, some dating back a millennium.

Regimes are expending so much energy attacking books because their supposed limitations have begun to look like strengths: With online surveillance, digital reading carries with it great risks and semi-permanent footprints; a physical book, however, cannot monitor what you are reading and when, cannot track which words you mark or highlight, does not secretly scan your face, and cannot know when you are sharing it with others.

There is an intimacy to reading, a place created in which we can imagine the experiences of others and experiment with new ideas, all within the safety and privacy of our imaginations. Research has proved that reading a printed book, rather than on a screen, generates more engagement, especially among young people. Books make us empathetic, skeptical, even seditious. It’s only logical then that totalitarian regimes have made their destruction such a visible priority. George Orwell knew this well: the great crime that tempts Winston in “1984” is the reading of a banned book.

The United States used to stand up against this erasure of intellectual freedom. When America entered the Second World War, verbal attacks on Nazi book burning were a central plank in the Office of War Information’s propaganda strategy. “No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny,” President Franklin Roosevelt declared.

During the Cold War that followed, the federal government established a network of 181 libraries and reading rooms in over 80 countries. In 1955, specially-made lightweight copies of Animal Farm were flown from West Germany into Poland by balloon. The unifying principle — despite the terrible hypocrisy of Jim Crow — was that freedom of thought abroad would ultimately favor the spread of tolerant, free liberal democracies.

The United States was not always on the side of the angels in the Cold War and in Latin America presidents have backed authoritarian regimes at the expense of dissidents. But Jimmy Carter, for instance, forcefully defended playwright Vaclav Havel and his fellow Czechoslovak dissidents in the late 1970s, even when it imperiled his foreign policy of détente.

The tepid response of the Trump administration to the murder and dismemberment of the Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi is just the most egregious example of why the global defense of freedom of the press and speech is no longer an American priority. The State Department has made barely a peep about any of this. Perhaps it should come as no surprise coming from a president who is almost comically boastful about his antipathy to reading.

Not that literary dissidents are helpless. As the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who himself died in a Soviet gulag, is said to have put it: “If they’re killing people for poetry, that means they honor and esteem it, they fear it, that means poetry is power.” The perverse logic of censorship is that in attempting to repress literature, it lures a new generation of dissidents.

The age-old strategy of “samizdat,” clandestine self-publishing, is mobilizing once again. Even in North Korea, where the pseudonymous author “Bandi” managed to smuggle out a collection of stories and poems to the West.

The consequences of America standing by apathetically could be disastrous — particularly if Mr. Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, remain in power for another four years. In classic dystopian novels of the near-future — “Brave New World,” “1984,” “Fahrenheit 451” — the digital world is ubiquitous. The ghostly absence of books, and the freethinking they seed, is the nightmare. For much of the world, it’s not an impossible fate

Duncan White, assistant director of studies in history and literature at Harvard University, is the author of “Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

The French

I'm reading a memoir of a woman living in Paris for a year.

Manners...

It’s the birthday of Emily Post (books by this author), born in Baltimore (1873), who wrote about etiquette. She said: “Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.”

Part of why I don't entertain is people don't have manners anymore... and besides that I'm an introvert so when people are badly behaved I never forget. Don't feel bad, everyone has been crossed off the list.

Romeo's 2nd Year Adoption Birthday

I'm in a Dicken's novel this morning.

Lady on sidewalk speaking into phone. "There's my bicycle and stroller at 134 on the porch, I'm calling the police. (hangs up) "Get me the Woonsocket police dept."

Meanwhile my neighbor Ellen was picking up 35 piles of dog shit "the third floor locks their dog on the porch and it pees down!" I wish I could help but it has to come from you. Have you called the landlord? Yes. Okay if you are not getting results call Jacob in housing. He can help you. Here's his number and email. Then I wrote to Jacob to keep his ears open for Ellen. I try to be a resource!

Just ran into Jen, a woman whose saga I've been following. She said "I'm sober, I have a new boyfriend and my ex is letting me see the kids, cuz I'm off crack for 3 months." I shook her hand.

Today is ROMEO's 2nd year ADOPTION BIRTHDAY!!

The roof guys and painters were here all day. Yay for the house. Sounds like a big rat is gnawing on my house. Romeo is not happy about it. I am happy to get the house mended after waiting through the recession.

Mike the Roofer

Mike shows up showing me a photo on his phone
a red blob and a fleshy blob on a tray
with bloody needle-nose pliers.
"I took out a cyst"
"Oh my god, on yourself?"
"I watched YouTube and learned how to do it."
"I hope you sterilized the pliers first," I said.
"I've had this before at the doctors office but I didn't have
insurance, it cost me 14 K and
I don't have that kind of money. So I'm doing it myself."

Dream

Yay for deep sleep. I dreamed my brother Peter was vacuuming the surface of dusty colorful rain boots in a pile against a stone wall in Scotland.

Appetite

Every year at this time my appetite falls away. I have to remember to eat. Luckily running and swimming keep my appetite alive.

Article

Sleep is Medicine

I fall apart when I don't sleep. If I drink more than 2 ounces of coffee (at 4:AM) I am awake at 1:AM the following morning! My mother couldn't ever have caffeine in any form. I love caffeine in the form of coffee and tea but such is life. It doesn't love me!

On another note I slept so well last night I should be happy to avoid coffee and tea.

The Italian Proverb: Sleep is Medicine

Buddy Cianci

Article

The Way my Mind Works

There's a car out here with a huge dent in the passenger side door. It's a car we've never seen before. This is significant because I met a man yesterday morning at the intersection who had just experienced a hit and run. He described how the woman in a dark sedan ran the stop. He was driving the company van and slammed on his breaks not before smashing into her passenger door. She stopped for a moment and then vanished. It could be a coincidence but then again, maybe not.

“Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.”

10 Haruki Murakami quotes to get you running again

Leave a comment
February 15, 2018

Haven’t felt like running lately? The author best known for his eccentric brand of literature is your unlikely running motivation
By Catherine Orda | Lead photo from Patrick Fraser /Corbis Outline

The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has written over a dozen books—all of which are beloved, critically acclaimed bestsellers that have been translated into 50 languages. He is also a marathoner, ultramarathoner, and a triathlete. He loves running so much that he wants his tombstone to read:

Haruki Murakami

1949-20**

Writer (and Runner)

At Least He Never Walked

Best known for his surrealist plotlines and eccentric characters, Murakami has written about a wide variety of topics including long distance running, which has since made him an unlikely inspiration to runners. His 2007 memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running documents his experiences as a runner and a novelist, and how the two seemingly disparate fields often intersect.

This book—while reasonably lacking much of Murakami’s signature literary oddities, and written in a more straightforward, sparse style (similar to that of Raymond Carver, from whom the book’s title is derived)—is a compelling meditation on running as a way of living a purposeful life. Murakami is wise, funny, self-effacing, and wildly passionate about running and the many unexpected ways it ties in with a person’s inner life. So if ever you’re in need of inspiration, pick up and read this book. Here’s a sample of what you can learn from Murakami:

1. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”

2. “For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level.”

3. “All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.”

4. “I didn’t start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn’t become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run—simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.”

5. “I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”

6. “Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.”

7. “Muscles are like work animals that are quick on the uptake. If you carefully increase the load, step by step, they learn to take it. As long as you explain your expectations to them by actually showing them examples of the amount of work they have to endure, your muscles will comply and gradually get stronger.”

8. “I’m going to swim 0.93 miles, ride a bike 24.8 miles, then run a final 6.2 miles. And what’s all that supposed to prove? How is this any different from pouring water in an old pan with a tiny hole in the bottom?”

9. “I’m not going to lay off or quit just because I’m busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit.”

10. “I don’t think it’s merely willpower that makes you able to do something. The world isn’t that simple. To tell the truth, I don’t even think there’s that much correlation between my running every day and whether or not I have a strong will… I’ve been able to run for more than 20 years for a simple reason: It suits me.”

Infinitely Mutable

That you can learn to write better is one of our fundamental assumptions. No sensible person would deny the mystery of talent, or for that matter the mystery of inspiration. But if it is vain to deny these mysteries, it is useless to depend on them. No other art form is so infinitely mutable. Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

TRACY KIDDER

Slowing it Down

Writing is partly a kind of stupidity, like when people just live their lives and get on with it day by day. Writing is a way of slowing it down and thinking, What just happened? What did it mean? What was the point?
ZADIE SMITH

Nabokov

Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child’s scrawl on the fence, and the crank’s message in the market place.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Vain and Vicious

Article

"Donald Trump is one of the worst people his generation produced, a vain and vicious and relentlessly exploitive nullity. But there is something pitiable in watching him try to defend himself with the weapons he’s been given by the culture that created him. He opens his mouth to answer for what he’s done and finds that these silly, sordid questions are all he has."

(Al's Ho Fiesta) a comment on David Roth's article
9/27/19 11:27am

I find myself thinking that President Trump is not merely one of the worst people his generation produced, but the embodiment of the collective id of that generation. Thin-skinned, venal, looking for someone else to blame and so very, very scared of changes.
Old white boomers, especially ones in suburbia, grew up in a time of American exceptionalism, largely excluded from having to see people of other races. The 1950's were a time of great middle-class wealth. Then, as they got older, they lived through the civil rights era, likely living among parents who were angry at that. They lived through Vietnam, and a massive recession, and society that grew more progressive. They were less special, grasping for a return for feeling dominant in the world. As they became the main working class, we got the excesses and supreme self-importance of Wall Street in the 80's.
It’s not entirely surprising that these people, seething with anger about a world they lost because, hint hint, it actually was incredibly racist, sexist, and generally shitty to anyone who didn’t conform to their own self-image, would turn out to be petty, shitty, and generally selfish as hell as they aged out and again saw their power being “stolen” from them.
Of course, not “all” boomers, but that’s why I think it’s best to think of Trump as their collective id. He is the worst of his generation because he has all the impulses, the neediness, the selfishness, the insecurity about change...and was given a huge amount of money and a freedom from consequences that convinced him that he is right. But underneath it all is that sense of loss, of insecurity about any change that might be more inclusive. It’s why he needs to be ostentatiously wealthy, ostentatiously powerful. It’s why his skin is so thin, why he clings to the notion that he and like-minded people are special and deserve the excesses they crave.
He is the id of aging Boomers, desperate cling to their outsized power, and crazed at the idea of sharing with anyone. Plenty in his generation aren’t like him (I guess they’re the ego/superego), but he is the embodiment of the shitty people, their greatest weaknesses, vices, and shitty impulses.

Natty Nigerians

Natty Nigerians

Why an “Uber for tailors” is gaining ground in Lagos

Tech may help the stylish avoid sartorial sorrow

Gravity Biking

'We live for gravity biking': deadly sport is way of life in Medellín

The risky hillside pastime – which sees people hurtle down steep inclines on weighted bikes at up to 77 mph – is providing kids in downtrodden areas of Colombia’s second city with an escape from their troubles

by Joe Parkin Daniels in Medellín

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”
― Wallace Stevens

“Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”
― Wallace Stevens

“I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

“It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The imperfect is our paradise.”
― Wallace Stevens

“We live in an old chaos of the sun.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”
― Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

“The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.”
― Wallace Stevens

“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.”
― Wallace Stevens

“I am what is around me.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.”
― Wallace Stevens, Transport to Summer


“The mind can never be satisfied.”
― Wallace Stevens

“One must read poetry with one's nerves.”
― Wallace Stevens

“The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.”
― Wallace Stevens

If We were All Alike

“The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.”
― Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Today is the birthday of Modernist poet Wallace Stevens (books by this author), born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). His collections include Ideas of Order (1936), Owl’s Clover (1936), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), Parts of a World (1942), Transport to Summer (1947), The Auroras of Autumn (1950), Opus Posthumous (1957), and The Palm at the End of the Mind (1972).

Stevens went to Harvard and wanted to study literature, but his father wanted him to be a lawyer.

Stevens moved to New York and took a job with the New York Tribune. He loved to explore the city, and enjoyed his work, but really wanted to be a poet. His father still disapproved of Stevens’ literary aspirations so, in 1901, Wallace Stevens finally caved to the pressure and went to law school. He passed the bar in 1905 and practiced law at various New York firms for more than a decade.

In 1909, after a lengthy courtship, he married Elsie Kachel. She was an uneducated country girl, and his parents considered her “lower class.” They refused to come to the wedding, and Stevens never spoke to his father again.

In 1916, Stevens moved to Hartford and took a job as an insurance lawyer with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He worked there for the rest of his life, eventually becoming the company’s vice president. His colleague Manning W. Heard said of Stevens, “He was at the time, and for many years before his death, the dean of surety-claims men in the whole country.” And Charles O’Dowd, an underwriter at the company, said, “His [business] letters were as clear as his poetry was obtuse.”

Stevens walked two miles to and from work every day, and that was when he wrote most of his poetry. “I write best when I can concentrate,” he said, “and do that best while walking.” He would carry slips of paper in his pockets, and jot down notes, which he would later give to his secretary to type up for him. He published his first book, Harmonium (1923), when he was 44.

Writer's Almanac

Benefits of Black Coffee

Article

Emily Zamourka

Article

Kimberly Reyes: Back Home

"When I do find time to write, it’s like I’m back to myself. I’m back home." Happy bookbirthday to Kimberly Reyes, whose debut poetry collection, Running to Stand Still, is out today from @Omnidawn
. http://at.pw.org/2o8XJbG

Where, when, and how often do you write?
Honestly, not nearly enough. I’m in that loop of applying for fellowships, scholarships, and grants so that I can write, but then the next application cycle comes around and I need to be applying again instead of writing. I also might have some undiagnosed case of ADHD or maybe we are all just a bit frazzled with the state of the world today, but it’s not always easy to sit and focus. When I do find time to write, it’s like I’m back to myself. I’m back home. And that currently happens once a week or so. When I lived in San Francisco I lived in a heavenly cottage that had a half room with a loft and a big, garden-facing window so I would use that space as an office and write there. Now, as a Fulbright fellow in Cork, Ireland, I usually write upstairs in my bedroom, on my bed, using my nightstand as a desk, staring at the rain, and I feel just as productive.

What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry?
The networking, marketing machine. I talk about how socially awkward I can be all the time and I’m certainly not the only writer with that affliction and I just think the publishing community I know isn’t very tolerant of that. So many of our favorite writers were absolute recluses and we loved them for that, yet they wouldn’t be published nowadays. I like having my reclusive moments, and while it may not be good for my career it’s certainly good for my writing.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I think it was: Don’t read writers you don’t like. I can’t actually remember who said that but that sentiment was transformative for me because we are taught, especially in MFA culture, to slog through writing we don’t necessarily feel because it’s a good exercise in reading and expanding our horizons. But there’s way too much stuff out there to be moved by and to enjoy instead of wasting time with a backlog of books you loathe. It’s important to challenge yourself and to branch out, but life’s too short and there aren’t enough hours in the day for that kind of pain.

Tease It

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
JULIAN BARNES

From the Soul

Write from the soul, not from some notion about what you think the marketplace wants. The market is fickle; the soul is eternal.
JEFFREY CARVER

Another Country

When one’s not writing poems — and I’m not at the moment — you wonder how you ever did it. It’s like another country you can’t reach.
MAY SARTON

Mysterious Hysteria

My prescription for writer’s block is to face the fact that there is no such thing…. Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It’s a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.

THOMAS MALLON

Success

Success is a day when you get your work done. That's what you can control. Focus on working consistently and being the best writer you can.
Aaron Hamburger

Aaron Hamburger is the author of the story collection THE VIEW FROM STALIN'S HEAD (Rome Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters), and the novels FAITH FOR BEGINNERS (a Lambda Literary Award nominee), and NIRVANA IS HERE. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Crazyhorse, Tin House, Subtropics, Poets & Writers, Boulevard, and O, the Oprah Magazine. He has taught writing at Columbia University, the George Washington University and the Stonecoast MFA Program.

On the Line

A screenwriter has to be able to put it on the line. I didn’t have another agenda. I didn’t do something because I thought it was going to make me rich. I didn’t do something because I thought it was going to make me loved. I didn’t do something because I thought it was going to be hip. I did the best I could and put out something that I believed in.

JOHN MILIUS

Have the Nerve

I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Paddy Chayefsky

The best thing that can happen is for the theme to be nice and clear from the beginning. Doesn’t always happen. You think you have a theme and you then start telling the story. Pretty soon the characters take over and the story takes over and you realize your theme isn’t being executed by the story, so you start changing the theme.

PADDY CHAYEFSKY

We Need this Poem Right Now

Champion the Enemy’s Need


by Kim Stafford


Ask about your enemy’s wounds and scars.
Seek his hidden cause of trouble.
Feed your enemy’s children.
Learn their word for home.

Repair their well.
Learn their sorrow’s history.
Trace their lineage of the good.
Ask them for a song.

Make tea. Break bread.



Kim Stafford, “Champion the Enemy’s Need” from Wild Honey, Tough Salt. Copyright © 2019 by Kim Stafford. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Red Hen Press, www.redhen.org.
-Writer's Almanac

Always be Trying

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the #language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.
JOHN BERRYMAN