Austin Kleon

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Incineration intervention

Stacy Schiff tells us this story about the first time the manuscript for Lolita was saved from incineration in her biography of Véra Nabokov:

She stepped outside to find her husband had set a fire in the galvanized can next to the back steps and was beginning to feed his papers to it. Appalled, she fished the few sheets she could from the flames. Her husband began to protest. ‘Get away from there!’ Véra commanded, an order Vladimir obeyed as she stomped on the pages she had retrieved. “We are keeping this,” she announced.

Her husband tried to burn his manuscript several other times and was thwarted only by her interventions. Schiff continues:

Plenty of manuscripts have burned, among them early drafts of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dead Souls. A three-person brigade intervened to save A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man from the flames; in Pale Fire, Kinbote looks on as John Shade indulges in a little backyard auto-da-fé. That Lolita did not meet with the same fate, in the context and climate in which Nabokov was composing in the early 1950s, is testimony to Véra’s ability to—as her husband had it—keep grim common sense from the door, shoot it dead when it approached. She feared that the memory of the unfinished work would haunt him forever.

“Without my wife,” her husband said, “I wouldn’t have written a single novel.”

The calm of collage

A collage by Luc Sante

So, it ain’t just me: several writers have turned to making collages during the quarantine.

Here’s Luc Sante:

I enjoy the challenge of making something that can be consumed by the eyes with no thought involved, and at the same time introduce a thought that lies just on the edge of meaning, preserving maximum ambiguity. Collage-making suits the moment; it is a meditative practice that requires the regular exercise of fine motor skills. It imposes calm.

Here’s a great video of Donald Margulies in his basement studio:

I find that during this bizarre time that we’re living in globally, I’m not able to write. I’m just not able to focus and put words together in any satisfying way. I’ve found tremendous solace and release in collage.

Here’s a collage from Sam Anderson, who says he’s been making collages for a long time, a form of “art therapy.”

One thing all three of these writers have in common is Instagram! They all post regularly there: @luxante @tsimmes & @shamblanderson.

Nobody says it better than Lynda: “Sometimes we are so confused and sad that all we can do is glue one thing to another.”

Filed under: collage

Language made special

I like this description of poetry from John Carey in his book, A Little History of Poetry.

I’ve been thinking about another thing I love about poetry: its ability to change meaning, depending on the time and place and the person reading it. A poem that seems ho-hum one moment, seems perfect the next.

For example, here is a blackout I made in 2016:

I had completely forgotten that one. I shivered a little when I read it. (Burroughs thought writing could be a kind of time travel or crystal ball reading.)

Here’s another blackout I came across that was cut from the final manuscript of Keep Going, made in 2013, but made quite new on day 50 of our family’s quarantine:

And finally, via this morning’s POME newsletter, here is a page from Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit:

I also like how the demand for poetry changes depending on the times we’re in: You think you don’t need it… until you do.

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