Incineration intervention

Saturday, May 2, 2020

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

Friday, May 1, 2020

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

Honor among thieves

Thursday, April 30, 2020

“There’s no honor among thieves… except for us, of course!”
—Saul Goodman, Breaking Bad

In the latest edition of Nick Cave’s brilliant newsletter, The Red Hand Files, he discusses stealing like an artist:

Theft is the engine of progress, and should be encouraged, even celebrated, provided the stolen idea has been advanced in some way. To advance an idea is to steal something from someone and make it so cool and covetable that someone then steals it from you. In this way, modern music progresses, collecting ideas, and mutating and transforming as it goes.

But a word of caution, if you steal an idea and demean or diminish it, you are committing a dire crime for which you will pay a terrible price — whatever talents you may have will, in time, abandon you. If you steal, you must honour the action, further the idea, or be damned.

Emphasis mine. (My friend said he was going to post that above his desk.)

By the way, this is also what T.S. Eliot told us 100 years ago in The Sacred Wood:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

We’re all thieves — the trick is to steal with intention, skill, and honor.

Language made special

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

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.

Nobody knows anything

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

My friend Alan Jacobs, writing about “the seductions of prediction,” ends with William Goldman’s great line, “Nobody knows anything.”

The line could describe almost everything in life, but here it is in its filmmaking context:

…the single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry:

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

If there is a Roman numeral I to this book, that’s it…

Again, for emphasis—

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess—and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.

That’s from the “Studio Executives” chapter of Goldman’s book, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting. (Designer Michael Beirut called the book “one of my favorite non-design books that is really about design,” and writes that Goldman was “one of the best writers ever on the day-in, day-out struggles faced by anyone attempting to create good work in a hostile environment.”)

* * *

On our walk this morning, my wife was telling me about the difference between risk and uncertainty that Arthur Brooks brings up in his piece about how to stay calm in the pandemic.

“Uncertainty involves unknown possible outcomes and thus unknowable probabilities,” he writes. “Risk involves known possible outcomes and probabilities that we can estimate.”

Our problem, Brooks says, is that we try to convert uncertainty into risk by bombarding ourselves with information. But, as everybody with half a functioning brainstem knows, looking to social media for help right now is a futile exercise in “wallowing in uncertainty.” (I love that phrase.)

What does Brooks suggest? The same thing that works when there’s not a pandemic going on:

Start by acknowledging that you do not know what is going to happen in this crisis. Next, distinguish between what can and can’t be known right now, and thus recognize that gorging on all the available information will not really resolve your knowledge deficit—you won’t be able to turn uncertainty into risk by spending more hours watching CNN, because the certainty you seek is not attainable. Finally, resolve that while you don’t know what will happen next week or next month, you do know that you are alive and well right now, and refuse to waste the gift of this day. (One more practical suggestion: Limit your consumption of news to half an hour in the morning, and stay off social media except to talk to friends. No cheating!)

I would go farther than Brooks and suggest not starting your morning with the news at all. (I have been reading poetry while lazing about on the couch.)

I’m also sticking with Laurie Anderson’s advice, which begins chapter one of Keep Going:

The world may end. You’re right. But that’s not a reason to be scared. None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it. You know? What are you working for, posterity? We don’t know if there is any posterity.

(Emphasis mine.)