I spent a good bit of time (a Good Bit– read: more than one hour) trying to improve my blog today. My dear friend Lynne recently re-did hers (complete with family photo: family in matching outfits and looking characteristically themselves while walking down a street somewhere in Shanghai (I’m thinking she should and may use […]
Read moreSo much in writing depends upon the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from […]
Read moreIt comes today from William Faulkner. I think that, when it comes to writing, this guy knew a thing or two. “Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” And “A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.” Now […]
Read moreO Reader. I doubt that any of you come here anymore, but just in the least little chance of a case that you do, I think some explanation is in order. School is out, which means days and days of wide open space for me, time like I never know it during the school year. […]
Read more“All ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self….So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost. “Still, there is something that any artist is in pursuit of, and is answerable […]
Read moreThoughts of writing come less and less frequently these days. This is not surprising, I suppose, with All The Rest that is going on. I don’t expect to do much writing in the school year. But with that lack a fear comes, I think– a fear not unfamiliar and not un-overcome in the past, not […]
Read moreOne of the Best Last Lines Ever: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Read moreI’m in California. Is that even right? Morally, I mean. It must be, as there are people all around me, most notably my dear friends Paul and Tracey and their girls, by whose invitation I made my way to this Really Outrageously Beautiful place. They, and others, are here, and don’t seem to sense any […]
Read moreSometimes I am envious. There, I’ve said it. I am envious of my artist friends. Yes, I am. All of them, I think. And this is because in my perception of things (an important phrase, that), they produce art that they can finish. Complete. Accomplish. End. I have painter friends and poet friends and singer-song-writer […]
Read moreI think this is a wonderful idea. Just wonderful. I would like to belong to it. In my mind, I do. But the truth of the matter is that, despite my Best Intentions, I haven’t the time to do all the things I want to do. Still, I’m glad to know they’re out there. (Thanks […]
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