Things to keep in mind:
The secret of fantasies.
And yet fantasies only make sense in relation to the nightmares they’re suppressing. I’m not saying The Queen’s Gambit has incredible wallpaper because it wants to make you forget about The Yellow Wallpaper (though it does have incredible, eye-catching wallpaper and there are reasons why Charlotte Perkins Gilman picked that trope). But take a show like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: without the specter of Woody Allen, #MeToo, and the pervasive sexism of stand-up comedy, since forever, the premise of a magical perfect lady comedian in the ’60s wouldn’t even make sense. It wouldn’t satisfy; without something it was struggling to absorb, digest, dissolve, and defuse, you’d simply wonder—as I’ve been wondering, falling asleep to Emily in Paris—what exactly is this show is trying to do? Why is it here?
—posted 1265 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the sentence.
The axiom is that the mark of poetic intelligence or vocation is passion for language, which is thought to mean delirious response to language’s smallest communicative unit: to the word. The poet is supposed to be the person who can’t get enough of words like “incarnadine.” This was not my experience. From the time, at four or five or six, I first started reading poems, first thought of the poets I read as my companions, my predecessors—from the beginning I preferred the simplest vocabulary. What fascinated me were the possibilities of context. What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise; such language, in being generic, is likely to contain the greatest and most dramatic variety of meaning within individual words. I liked scale, but I liked it invisible. I loved those poems that seemed so small on the page but that swelled in the mind; I didn’t like the windy, dwindling kind. Not surprisingly, the sort of sentence I was drawn to, which reflected these tastes and native habit of mind, was paradox, which has the added advantage of nicely rescuing the dogmatic nature from a too moralizing rhetoric.
—posted 1273 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of a beautiful house.
The thing about a beautiful house is to make it untidy every day. I wake up in the morning and I see the mess and I love it. That’s the way that I like to live.
—posted 1281 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of information.
Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.
—posted 1298 days ago
Eleventy.
The first draft of no. 34, “ – up and stand.” is now done! Three cheers and the rest, huzzah. Sixteen thousand, three hundred ten words, and the usual caveats in re: the cutting and the molding to be done.
The last time I finished the first draft of the opening chapter of a new volume, it was no. 23, and it originally came in sixteen thousand and thirty-six, trimmed to a svelte fourteen thousand, seven hundred thirty; but more to the point, the last time I finished the first draft of the opening chapter of a new volume, it was October of 2014. —Before that, it was 2011.
Considering how much further there is to go, I need to pick the pace back up.
At least it can be said that, after a couple of false starts in May and June, this one was written through two and a half months or so, and the majority of it in September, with all of [gestures] this going on, so. There’s that.
—posted 1302 days ago
(Originally posted on the Patreon.)
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of surprise.
That was a big lesson from Peter Shaffer. We went to see a play once about the mad queen of Spain and in the first act there were two rapes, an evisceration, a fire and something horrifying with a child, I don’t remember. And at the end of the first act I said, “This is so much my kind of thing. Why am I bored?” He said, “There’s no surprise.” And I thought, “Put that on your bathroom mirror.” Surprise: if it’s in the lyric, the unexpected word, the unexpected note, the unexpected incident. The unexpected, the unexpected, that’s what theater is about. If you had to patent one thing in the theater, it’s surprise.
—posted 1305 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of verisimilitude.
Even such fantasies as The Silver Stallion, and Domnei, and The High Place I put among the realistic books. What gives them their peculiar tartness is the very fidelity of their realism. Their gaudy heroes, in the last analysis, chase dragons precisely as stockbrokers play golf. Is Jurgen, even when before the great God Pan, superbly real? Then it is because he remains a Rotarian in the depths of that terrible grove. Is Manuel? Then it is because what he hopes and suffers and achieves in Poictesme is substantially identical with what Felix Kennaston hopes and suffers and achieves in Lichfield.
—posted 1313 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of covers.
And one of the things a lot of people miss about Yes, I think, is that it was just a covers band. And we started out just doing covers of lots of songs of the day, big Beatles songs, typically, Crosby and Stills, and I don’t know, Fifth Dimension, and even some West Side Story probably. And we learned to play those; we didn’t have a shared repertoire. A lot of the bands—like, say, Black Sabbath or something like that—came from the same street in Birmingham, or from Detroit, or somewhere. And we weren’t like that at all; we came from all different cultures and parts of the UK, so we didn’t share a common music culture, a kind of rhythm & blues-based thing. We needed to take something and then change it, and it was through changing things that we came to know ourselves.
—posted 1322 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret of what we know.
Any of the early steps in its spread could have been either accidental or deliberate, but I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren’t actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things—what would we know then that we don’t already know?
—posted 1330 days ago
Things to keep in mind:
The secret the city will tell us.
The city will tell us
What it is we lack
It knows for a fact
What it is we lack
We’ve chosen to live here
We want things to be clear
The city will tell us
What it is we lack lack lack
—posted 1340 days ago
