The Sound of Writing

The shadow of abstraction lifts from the writing. It is joined soon by the shadow of emotion. The shadows mix, penetrate one another, and obliterate everything, everything except the sound of writing.

Christopher Middleton, Loose Cannons: Selected Prose, ed. by August Kleinzahler (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), p. 84.

Nested Prose

 [...] and the prose is clotted with sentences like this one: “The elaboration of the demonstrative makes possible the comprehension of the singularity of the singular”. Linguists have a term for this kind of writing, where each abstraction is nested in another like so many Russian dolls: bad.

Stephen Brown, ‘Why so many notes?’, The Times Literary Supplement, 5672 (16 Dec 2011), p. 24.

Presbyopia and the Invention of Modern Handwriting

B.L. Ullman, Origin and Development of Humanistic Script (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1960), pp. 14-15:

Why so much attention to the complaints of two aging men of the fourteenth century? Because they explain what happened. It may at first sight seem strange that it was the clear script of the fourteenth-century humanists like Petrarch and Coluccio rather than the crabbed Gothic of France, Germany, and England that was the first to be reformed. It is not always the institution or individual most in need of reforming that actually gets reformed first. At any rate, it would seem that the difficulties of Coluccio in particular had something to do with the reform, as we shall see. Eyeglasses had been invented, it is true, but they were neither widely used nor very satisfactory. So we may say that presbyopia started the reform of handwriting. Thanks to the improvement of eyeglasses in modern times, we determine or need for them and their strength by the ability to read the telephone book. In 1400 it was easier to change handwriting than to change glasses.

Biography

Biography is the White Man's Graveyard for a working writer. The work expands to fill as much time and energy as one will give it.

Michael Swanwick, Hope-in-the-mist: the Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees (Upper Montclair, NJ: Temporary Culture, 2009), p. 52.

Churchill's Wiriting Process

Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 429:

The charge in its most literal sense is irrefutable. From at least this stage onwards Churchill never wrote out a book de novo. He depended on having his factual material not merely checked after he had written it, but as carefully prepared for him in advance as was the laying out of the instruments for a famous surgeon. When he transformed the basic material, by adding insights, comparisons, metaphors and flights of oratorical fancy, he mostly did so by dictation, normally the enemy of succinctness, and not by pen. Sometimes, as with many articles and with My Early Life, he would dictate the whole draft out of his head, and then very carefully correct it. He also acquired the odd habit of being unable to envisage the shape of a book without having it set up in printed proof at an early stage, and then hacking it about in a way that a modern publisher would regard as intolerably inflating his printing budget. Thus when, in February 1930, he was proposing to add about 40,000 new words to the 50,000 or more of My Early Life which he had already written (the number of literary balls he had in the air at that stage is staggering), he insisted that, at his own expense if necessary, the already written text must be set up in print – ‘until I see the existing material in type I cannot make progress’.13 Associated with this was his increasing desire to work standing up, for which purpose he acquired a sloping desk of appropriate height at the side of his Chartwell study. He needed the feel and look of printed proofs for his literary teeth, but he rarely worked at them seated at a writing table. It was nearly all done either upright or in bed.

Print and Handwriting

    Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye.
   Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2013), p. 12.

Daily Life

sic igitur vivitur; quotidie aliquid legitur aut scribitur...

This is how I live my life: every day I read or write something...

Cicero, Letters, 9.26.4. My translation.

Literary Delights

semper aut discere, aut docere, aut scribere dulce habui.

I always find learning, or teaching, or writing to be delightful.

Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (5.24). My translation.

The Labour of Writing

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, translated by Philip Gabriel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008; 2007), p. 79-80:

Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high. Most people, though, only see the surface reality of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study. If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems. The whole process—sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, labor going on inside you. Everybody uses their mind when they think. But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being; and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion.

Green in Nature and Literature

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature
and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together
and they tear each other to pieces.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (London: Wordsworth Classics, 2003; 1928), p. 7.

On Unsolicited Gifts of Books

Pietro Odi da Montopoli (1425-1463)

IV AD JOANNEM TORTELLIUM
Corrige quos misi versus et fuste domato;
   Corrigat et stultos cornea virga pedes.

IV TO GIOVANNI TORTELLI
Correct those who send you their verses and beat them with a stick:
    Correct their foolish feet with a cornel switch.

Maria Teresa Graziosi Acquaro, ‘Petri Odi Montopolitani. Carmina nunc primum e libris manu scriptis edita’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, XIX (1970), 7-113, (p. 54). My translation.

Notes:
The verb corrigere can mean 'chastise' as well as 'correct' or 'improve', there is a playful ambiguity concerning whom is being set right: the solicitous  poets or their verses.

The Artist’s Workplace

I have been drawing the Peanuts strip for almost 35 years now and, of course, have had many strangers visit my studio. They look at all the books in my room and at a beautiful glass-top desk, given to me by my wife as a wedding present, upon which I place the strips after they have been drawn. They then look at my drawing board and express amazement that this is the actual board at which I sit and draw the strips. I often wonder whether they think that it is there merely as an exhibit and that the real board, some mysterious object, is hidden away in another room.

Charles M. Schulz, My Life with Charlie Brown (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), p. 46.

A Book of Questions

 A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

Hilary Mantel, 'A question of belief', The Guardian, 28 Jan 2006.

Charlotte Brontë on Writing

I asked her whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in “Villette” was so exactly like what I had experienced, —vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, &c. She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything which had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling to sleep,—wondering what it was like or how it would be,—till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened. I cannot account for this psychologically; I only am sure that it was so, because she said it.

Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë,  ed. by Anne Taranto (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005; 1857), p. 507.

Writing a Biography

It was something of a Victorian custom for widows to write biographies of their eminent husbands. Perhaps a biographer’s devotion is a little like the devotion of a spouse. Writing a person’s life means living with them intimately, struggling to understand them, wondering how far they can be trusted, dealing with the ways they resist, annoy, disappoint, challenge and elude you. It means staying with them for their whole life, if not for your own — though such a close encounter with another person is bound to leave you changed, even as you move on.

Clare Carlisle, The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life (London: Penguin Books, 2023), p. 280.

Writing an Ideal Poem

Feel irritable these nights: I have an urge to do a poem, but can’t get it going. I suppose basically it isn’t a real poem. Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything – these are sort of ‘ideal’ poems that one feels ought to be written, but I don’t because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A ‘real’ poem is a pleasure to write. I have been trying this poem on and off for some time.

Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica, ed. by Anthony Thwaite (London: faber & faber, 2010), p. 269 [15 August 1960].

My Father Wrought

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 63:

   Almost thirty years ago, in a poem called ‘Follower’, I wrote about myself as a child dragging along behind my father when he was out ploughing. The poem began:
                     My father worked with a horse-plough,
and as unremarkable as this may have been as a line of verse, it was still the result of some revision. Originally I had written:
                     My father wrought with a horse-plough,
because until relatively recently that verb was the common one in the speech of mid-Ulster. Country people used the word ‘wrought’ naturally and almost exclusively when they talked about a person labouring with certain tools or animals, and it always carried a sense of wholehearted commitment to the task. You wrought with horses or with a scythe or with a plough; and you might also have wrought at hay or at flax or at bricklaying. So the word implied solidarity with speakers of the South Derry vernacular and a readiness to stand one’s linguistic ground: why, then, did I end up going for the more pallid and expected alternative ‘worked’?
   The answer is, I suppose, because I thought twice. And once you think twice about a local usage you have been displaced from it, and your right to it has been contested by the official linguistic censor with whom another part of you is secretly in league. You have been translated from the land of unselfconsciousness to the suburbs of the mot juste.

Stick to Writing about Eels

Francesco Berni (1497/8-1535)

Provai un tratto a scrivere elegante,
in prosa e in versi, e fecine parecchi,
et ebbi voglia anch’io d’esser gigante;
 
ma messer Cinzio mi tirò gli orecchi,
e disse:—Bernia, fa’ pur dell’Anguille,
ché questo è  il proprio umor dove tu pecchi:
arte non è da te cantar d’Achille
 
I tried once to write with elegance, making several attempts at prose and verse, and I even longed to be a giant,

but Mr. Cinzio pulled my ears, and said: ‘Berni: you keep writing about eels, because that is the proper subject  for you to mess about with: it is not your art to sing of Achilles.’

Francesco Berni, Rime, ed. by Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1969), pp. 152-53 (LV. Capitolo al cardinale [Ippolito] de’ Medici, 37-43). My translation. Emended prova to read prosa in line 38.

 ‘You are old,’ said the youth, ‘one would hardly suppose
    That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
    What made you so awfully clever?’

‘I have answered three questions, and that is enough,’
    Said his father; ‘don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
    Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!’

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (New York: Random House, 1946), p. 55. Illustration by John Tenniel; coloured by Fritz Kredel.

Humour and Horror

Chelsea Davis, 'Kelly Link Makes Fairy Tales Even Weirder Than You Remember' [An Interview with Kelly Link], Electronic Literature, 29-March-2023:

KL: Horror and fairy tales are two of my favorite forms of narrative, and those are both genres where rules loom large. Don’t smell wolfsbane. Be kind to animals. Don’t invite strangers over the threshold. Don’t step on a crack. Don’t be greedy, don’t say thank you to fairies, but do listen to birds, but don’t blow on a whistle that you find on the beach, but always be polite to old ladies. I love rules that feel nonsensical and fraught with weight at the same time. I love when rules are inverted. The introduction of a rule tells the reader that story is going to follow, and hopefully the consequences will in some way be surprising or fresh.

[...]

KL: Humor and horror are both doors into story for me—and inside a story, they’re paths to understanding or rearranging situations in which otherwise I (and perhaps the reader) might be overwhelmed in the most uninteresting ways. I reach for humor consciously because I have to reach for most things consciously when I write. And now I’m wondering if that might be an interesting rule to set for myself—to set aside even small bits of comedy. Argh.

Link here.

Poetry and Urban Life

August Kleinzahler interviewed by William Corbett, ‘The Art of Poetry No. 93’, The Paris Review, 182 (2007):

Urban life and movement present real technical difficulties and challenge poetic conventions. Urban life is dense and fast and requires flexible structures that can incorporate speed and information. It’s tough to come up with a coherent, interesting structure. Most simply avoid the problem or take refuge in some rote “avant-garde” gesture like fridge-magnet indeterminism, i.e. spilling the language all over the floor and stomping on it like a three-year-old child.