August 24, 2008
Unqualified belief
“Once knowledge is recognised as conditional, it becomes harder to use as an apology for violence. Unqualified belief in one’s own truth system is deadly. It is not from uncertainty about one’s own judgements, but from unswerving forms of conviction, unamenable to any flicker of doubt, that the world has most to fear.” –Jacqueline Rose, “The Iron Rule” (LRB 31.07.08)
August 19, 2008
Shape and boundary
“The main part, though, is sensation and touch; the understanding, too, of beginning and end. Shape and boundary. Of one stitch, one row after another: how a scarf, a life, a person proceeds. For the time being she is still practicing the arts of casting on, holding a steady tension, attempting to purl and not losing or gaining stitches row by row. She likes the need for paying attention. ‘Then there is how to end well,’ she has mentioned. ‘Cast off, it is called.'” –Joan Barfoot, Exit Lines
August 12, 2008
The Moment is Stayed
“Harriet is sure she can smell the books burning in the library. She thinks she can smell the pages turning to ash, all the pages she has pored through, the paper thick and slightly damp, the edges of the pages brown with foxing and sometimes sticky to the touch. She used to pride herself on all the information she knew. For some reason it was a comfort, all this knowledge she could unravel with a breath. Now that still contemplation she had in the library seems completely unreal.
Maybe reading was just to make Harriet feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your actual life.
A bomb falls nearby and they duck down further behind the wall. Jeremy holds his hands over Harriet’s head, as if he is holding an umbrella for her, as if what falls is simply rain.”
–Helen Humphreys, Coventry (August 22)
August 8, 2008
No difference between stories and real life
“I am a writer and I have been accused of merely writing autobiography in my stories, as if that were somehow easier to do than making everything up. Before I went to meet Lawrence, agitated as I was, it crossed my mind that I would find some way of writing about seeing him after so many years– the things we say to each other, what has become of us– some peripheral telling of lies maybe, or an extension of the fact that will take the encounter from the banal to the cosmic, that will find a universal chord, because that is what good writers do, the ones who know there is no difference among autobiography, biography, fiction or non-fiction, between stories and real life.” –Sharon Butala, “Postmodernism”
July 3, 2008
Isn't it splendid…
“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me glad to be alive– it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there? But am I talking too much? People are always telling me I do. Would you rather I didn’t talk? If you say so I’ll stop. I can stop when I make up my mind to do it, although it’s difficult.” –L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
June 27, 2008
Hunger eats civilization
“[It’s] the same around the world. What look like ethnic problems are really economic issues. If you look closely at these conflicts around the world, they come down to poverty and economics and resources. The more poverty, the worse the war. Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that’s why they can say they’re so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!” –Marjane Satrapi, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
June 24, 2008
The world is more wonderful
“The world is more wonderful than any of us have dared to guess, as all great poets have been telling us since the invention of poetry. To discover these truths, we don’t need to scale Mount Everest or white-water raft the Colorado or take up skydiving. We need only to go for walks.” –Sharon Butala, The Perfection of the Morning
June 19, 2008
On "Show, Don't Tell"
“I think, frankly, it’s a bit like behaviorism or something. I really wonder how much of it carries over from science, I mean really crude science as understood in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century– that there’s something illusory about thought and that in fact it’s behaviour that counts, and only behavior, when in fact people’s brains are buzzing all the time. People are to an incredible degree constituted of what they never say, perhaps never consciously think. Behaviour is conventionalized and circumstantial. In many cases, the behaviour that in fact would express what someone thinks or feels is frustrated, cannot occur. Here we are, basically organized to carry this big brain around, and it’s absolutely bizarre to act as if what goes on there is not part of the story.” –Marilynne Robinson, The Believe Book of Writers Talking to Writers
June 13, 2008
Their own body bags
Nathan Whitlock writes that requiring self-addressed stamped envelopes to accompany literary journal submissions is “kind of like making soldiers go into battle carrying their own body bags”.
June 12, 2008
But what if we suppose
“But what if we just suppose for a moment that the author knows what she is doing. That this book exists not just so we can pick it into pieces, but rather because its author wanted it precisely this way. What do you think the author was attempting to accomplish? And then how might you come to understand whatever baffled you about the work, what didn’t sit quite right? How to bridge the gap between the author’s agenda and our own. What can we give to this book in order that we can take away from it everything that we possibly can?”
