In his book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey explores Philip Roth. Roth is full of insight. His comments on writing, taken from Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker, stuck with me. “Writing isn’t hard work, it’s a nightmare,” Roth said in 1987. “Coal mining is hard work. This is a nightmare. … There’s [...]
Literature
Mason Currey's recently published Daily Rituals: How Artists Work mentioned the routines, quirks, and rituals of plenty of creative minds—novelists, painters, poets, philosophers, filmmakers, and scientists—but he missed one of my favourites, Susan Sontag. She brought us insight such as, Three Steps to Refuting Any Argument, Aphorisms and the Commodification of Wisdom, and Common Sense [...]
In his book, Daily Rituals, Mason Currey dug into Hemmingway’s 1958 Paris Review interview: When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and [...]
David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech “This is water,” also known as “The Truth With A Whole Lot Of Rhetorical Bullshit Pared Away,” is remembered as one of the best commencement speeches of all time. After DFW’s tragic death the speech, thanks to some new attention, took on a life of its own in the [...]
And so we became friends. This happened in October. The better I got to know Nagasawa, the stranger he seemed. I had met a lot of strange people in my day, but none as strange as Nagasawa. He was a far more voracious reader than I, but he made it a rule never to touch [...]
A brilliant passage from Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood on talent. There just happen to be people like that. They’re blessed with this marvelous talent, but they can’t make the effort to systematize it. They end up squandering it in little bits and pieces. I’ve seen my share of people like that. At first you think [...]
Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible [...]
A list from GQ: The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen Because: Let’s be real, he wrote two of the very best books (Freedom’s the other) of the millennium—or, if you’re guzzling haterade, at least the two best books on, among other things, family, anti-anxiety drugs, marriage, fate, songbirds, and Minnesota. The Human Stain — Philip Roth [...]
