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