Tag: writing

A Wealth of Words by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., City Journal WInter 2013

~ Mark

There’s a positive correlation between a student’s vocabulary size in grade 12, the likelihood that she will graduate from college, and her future level of income. The reason is clear: vocabulary size is a convenient proxy for a whole range of educational attainments and abilities—not just skill in reading, writing, listening, and speaking but also general knowledge of science, history, and the arts. If we want to reduce economic inequality in America, a good place to start is the language-arts classroom.

A Wealth of Words by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., City Journal WInter 2013

~ Mark

Everybody talks about the writer’s feeling and the writer’s expression and the writer’s experience, and, you know, I don’t give a fuck how the writer feels. I want a fucking book that I can be in love with. I want a book that I’ll reread seventeen times. That’s what I want.

Mary Karr. I usually finish reading before I tumble, but I couldn’t help it this time. (via)

When Bram Met Walt | Humanities

~ Mark

When he was twenty-two, Bram Stoker read and fell in love with Walt Whitman’s poetry, finding solace and joy between the covers of Leaves of Grass. And, like many fans, he wanted the connection that he felt to Whitman to be real. Late one night, cloaked in the comfort of darkness, Stoker poured his soul out to Whitman in a shockingly honest letter that described himself and his disposition. That letter, when Stoker finally mustered the courage to mail it, would begin an unexpected literary friendship that lasted until Whitman’s death.

When Bram Met Walt | Humanities

The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

~ Mark

After watching THX 1138, I started reading about co-writer Walter Murch. I love how he separates his film editing from his film writing:

When I write a script, I lie down–because that’s the opposite of standing up. I stand up to edit, so I lie down to write. I take a little tape recorder and, without being aware of it, go into a light hypnotic trance. I pretend the film is finished and I’m simply describing what was happening. I start out chronologically but then skip around. Anything that occurs to me, I say into the recorder. Because I’m lying down, because my eyes are closed, because I’m not looking at anything, and the ideas are being captured only by this silent scribe–the tape recorder–there’s nothing for me to criticize. It’s just coming out.

That is my way of disarming the editorial side. Putting myself in a situation that is opposite as possible to how I edit–both physically and mentally. To encourage those ideas to come out of the woods like little animals and drink at the pool safely, without feeling that the falcon is going to come down and tear them apart.

So simple, so obvious: if you want to get some ideas out without reflexive self-editing, choose your medium and environment so it’s hard to edit. Use a tape recorder, separate digital vs. analog desks, Sharpies, index cards…

The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

Los Angeles Review of Books – What Would DFW Do: Maria Bustillos, Eric Been, And Mike Goetzman On “Both Flesh And Not” And All Things Foster Wallace

~ Mark

Perhaps we ought to be a little more understanding of the compromises involved in creating art, and that getting bent out of shape once certain liberties are exposed (when just a minute ago we were so thoroughly enthralled!) seems a reaction based more on our uneasiness with our own vulnerability and credulousness than any serious authorial wrongdoing.

Los Angeles Review of Books – What Would DFW Do: Maria Bustillos, Eric Been, And Mike Goetzman On “Both Flesh And Not” And All Things Foster Wallace

Random! Postmodern Bio Blurbs » 3:AM Magazine

~ Mark

Gone are the golden days when an author’s bio blurb read like an obituary. Date and place of birth, occupation, current abode, names and dates of publications, year of death (if applicable): this was, apparently, all an educated public really needed to know about their writers to be able to ‘place’ their work. And as staid and conventional as that may now seem, there’s a lot to be said for this approach.

Random! Postmodern Bio Blurbs » 3:AM Magazine

Chiasmus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

~ Mark

the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the clauses display inverted parallelism.

So they’re mirrored (like the shape of the letter X… Greek letter chi… chiasmus…). Think ABCCBA, or ABCDEDCBA, or whatever. This is really common in the Bible, e.g. Isaiah 6:10:

A “Make the heart of this people fat,
B and make their ears heavy,
C and shut their eyes;
C lest they see with their eyes,
B and hear with their ears,
A and understand with their heart, and convert [return], and be healed.”

And in songwriting, e.g. Snoop’s Gin and Juice:

I got my mind on my money, my money on my mind.

Or the wisdom of Stephen Stills:

If you can’t be with the one you love, honey / Love the one you’re with.

You also see chiastic structure for an entire work, like the Song of Songs or Paradise Lost.

Man, I really like words.

Chiasmus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

~ Mark

You can never be both a writer and a politician – at least not a good writer. A writer must always tell the truth as he sees it, and a politician must never give the game away. Now, these are two opposing forces.

NPR Fresh Air remembers Gore Vidal with excerpts from two Terry Gross interviews (via explore-blog)
~ Mark

Forms, styles, structures–whatever word you prefer–should change like skirt lengths. They have to; otherwise we make a rule, a religion of one form; we say, “This form here, this is what reality is like,” and it pleases us to say that (…) because it means we don’t have to read anymore, or think, or feel.

Zadie Smith, in an essay on George Eliot and the Victorians and the evolution of the novel and such.
~ Mark

The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et cetera. It’s a fortunate rereader who knows half a dozen novels this way in their lifetime. I know one, Pnin, having read it half a dozen times. When you enter a beloved novel many times, you can come to feel that you possess it, that nobody else has ever lived there. You try not to notice the party of impatient tourists trooping through the kitchen (Pnin a minor scenic attraction en route to the canyon Lolita), or that shuffling academic army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard (or a series of squirrels, depending on their methodology). Even the architect’s claim on his creation seems secondary to your wonderful way of living in it.

Zadie Smith, opening an essay on two opposing philosophies of the reader-writer relationship, pitting Barthes vs. Nabokov. Collected in Changing My Mind, which I recommend. I’ll probably post some more quotes from this book in the near future.
~ Mark

What we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to. As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

From The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton. (via carpentrix)