May 30, 2008
The Unattestable
“As I consider our modern lives, I feel that, due to the growing uncertainty of the world, people anxiously want to believe themselves on top of things, in control. Especially in the United States just now, at the height of world power, there is an impulse to settle on what is attestable, to pronounce and explain; to exclude mystery, imagination, the intuitive powers of individual existence. What about the inattestable, that informs all that matters to us? What about the accidental nature of our life? The salient events of private life are always tinged with the accidental. If I hadn’t gone to a party that Muriel Spark gave down the road here in the Beaux Arts Hotel, I would never have met Francis Steegmuller.” –Shirley Hazzard, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
May 27, 2008
Revolution is a Daily Task
“Even now you will hear, from female critics as well as male, a regular complaint, a bleat – and I call it a bleat as one who, like Gray, knows nothing of sheep farming – that even today women writers play safe with small, domestic novels. They have forgotten that grand truth we learned, or relearned, at the close of the 20th century: the personal is political. The domestic novel need not be small, or tame. Homes are very unsafe places to linger. The crime statistics will tell you the streets are safer. Everything, even warfare, happens first in the kitchen, in the nursery, in the cradle, and no one grows up without a coup d’état against the powers that be; revolution is a daily task, a common story, the narrative that drives all others.” –Hilary Mantel, “Author, author”
May 22, 2008
An attentive reader
“It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be. That music is a physical force. Not only do you write books physically, but you read books physically as well. There’s something about the rhythms of the language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies. An attentive reader is finding meaning in the book that can’t be articulated, finding them in his or her body. I think this is what so many people don’t understand about fiction. Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don’t understand prose. They’re so used to reading journalism– clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information. Facts… just the surfaces of things.” –Paul Auster, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
May 19, 2008
Sally J.
I continue to be obsessed with Fine Lines by Lizzie Skurnick, but my obsession was mammoth this week as she reread Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, which is one of my favourite books ever. I last read it when I was 24, and enjoyed it more than I ever had. It’s a fascinating book, which I’ve forever linked with Ann Marie McDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies in terms of point of view, dramatic tension, and certain thematic concerns. Sally J. certainly meets my requirement for children’s books worthy of adult rereads: that it becomes a whole new book when you encounter it again, this change providing elusive insight into your childhood perspective. In this book especially, Judy Blume writes from way way up over her readers’ heads, and they end up constructing her world in the same misconstrued (and wonderful) way they approach their own.
I am also excited because Lizzie Skurnick is writing about The Girl With the Silver Eyes next week. I used to love this book, in hope that pharmaceutical-induced mysticism was the key to my social ostracism but alas, my eyes were brown. Further excitement: that Skurnick promises Norma Klein to come (and it is common knowledge that we love Norma Klein here at Pickle Me This).
May 17, 2008
Always being taken for a librarian
“I had always assumed that a certain sense of identity would be strong enough within me to communicate itself to others. I now saw this assumption was false. Tout simplement, in a tarts’ bar, I looked like a tart. I tried to cheer myself up by thinking that after all this was a very good thing for an actress. But it was depressing, anyway. Not so much the thing of looking like a prostitute. I mean, except for the inconvenience of the moment, I found that rather thrilling, but the whole episode was forcing me to remember something that I’m always trying to forget and that is, that in a library as well, I’m always being taken for a librarian. No kidding. My last Christmas in New York, I had an English paper to write over the vacation, and there was this public library I used to go to, and no matter where I sat, people were always coming up to me and asking me where such and such a book was. They were furious too, when I didn’t know. It was eerie I began to feel that I actually was a librarian. The wood growing into my soul and stuff. I suppose I am rather an intellectual.” –Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado
May 14, 2008
Born full grown, or make room for a hero
“For a writer those things are what you start with. You wouldn’t have started a story without that awareness– that’s what made you begin. That’s what makes a character, projects a plot. Because you write from the inside. You can’t start with how people look and speak and behave and come to know how they feel. You must know exactly what’s in their hearts and minds before they ever set visible foot on the stage. You must know all, then not tell it all, or not tell too much at once: simply the right thing at the right moment. And the same character would be written completely differently in a novel as opposed to a short story. In a story you don’t go into character in order to develop him. He was born full grown, and he’s present there to perform his part in the story. He’s subservient to his function, and he doesn’t exist outside it. But in a novel, he may. So you may have to allow for his growth and maybe hold him down and not tell everything you know, or else let him have his full sway– make room for a hero, even, in more spacious premises.” —Eudora Welty, The Paris Review Interviews, II
May 4, 2008
Read it four times
Interviewer: Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they have read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?
Faulkner: Read it four times.
(From The Paris Review Interviews, II)
April 30, 2008
Anything at all
“‘What are you reading?’
‘A pile of things. Books on stuff, you know how there’s always a new one, on tomatoes or love songs or the secret history of buttonholes.’ He grinned at her. ‘I’m waiting for the book on books on stuff to be published. Perhaps I should write it, I’ve read enough of them. Ask me anything you want to know about coriander. Anything at all.'”
–Emily Perkins, The New Girl
April 24, 2008
A Big Education
“A man and a woman’s relationship was always primary. Women, your own friends, were always secondary relationships when the man was not there. Because of this, there’s that whole cadre of women who don’t like women and prefer men. We had to be taught to like one another. Ms. Magazine was founded on the premise that we really have to stop complaining about one another, hating, fighting one another, and joining men in their condemnation of ourselves– a typical example of what dominated people do. That is a big education.” –Toni Morrison, The Paris Review Interviews, II
April 22, 2008
Criticism Starts
“Criticism starts– it has to start– with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems. You must fall in love with what we used to call “imaginative literature.” And when you are in love that way, with or without provocation from good teachers, you will pass on to encounter what used to be called the sublime.” –Harold Bloom, The Paris Review Interviews, II
