Chekhov's Mistress:

“If you find Elbow’s music glum and depressing, you’re missing the point. Anyone who considers Elbow, Radiohead etc in any way miserable needs to spend some time finding the real beauty in this world of ours, for I fear that those folks are taking the whole thing on face value only. Let a little sadness into your lives and see how happy it can make you.”

- Simon Collison on Elbow’s “The Seldom Seen Kid”

“By the time I reached the ending…I could do nothing but breathlessly close the book and sit thinking…and thinking…

Dissertations could be written about this novel.”

- amcorrea on Steve Erickson’s Zeroville

Simon Augustine has written a fairly exhuastive guide to Writers and Poets on Film at GreenCine Daily:

“Portraying the writing process in the movies with excitement and insight is difficult to pull off, given that writing is such an interior, personal process, mostly done in isolation.”

“You may have to slow your body speed down a bit to catch Henry Thoreau’s wavelength, but once you do there is no denying the pure delight found in these words. No other writer — not even my beloved Henry James — crafts sentences sharper than those you’ll find in Walden.”

- Levi Asher

“I’ve long been much more excited by the subtly entwined elements of artistic prose and depictions of the human consciousness at work that typify so-called literary fiction than I am by hard-driving plots. Like many critics who champion popular fiction, Hornby seems to have a chip on his shoulder about it. I always wonder: if plot-driven work is so great, why all the insecurity about it?”
– James Tata

“There’s no reason to block the page up with weird little marks. If you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”

- Cormac McCarthy on Oprah

Chloë Schama in The New Republic: Five foreign authors whose domestic reputation exceeds their standing in the United States, and whose work has recently become available in English: Cesar Aira, Ersi Sotiropoulus, Peter Stamm, Tim Winton, and S. Yizhar. Along with a review of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and Amulet.

“When asked in 1968 how he could write about chairs and trees in so terrible an age, Herbert responded, “And what if the trees are unhappy?” In their stubbornness and vulnerability, Herbert’s objects — lamps, pens, trees, clouds — aim to awaken us to the myriad betrayals of the everyday and inconsequential.” (Washington Post via Cruelest Month)

comment Zbigniew Herbert

Reginald Shepard Shares his List of Most Influential Poetry Criticism Books. Generous of him and an interesting list.

Glyn Maxwell, whom I admired in a previous post, writes about poetry instead of poets. That’s why I always read him when I see his name. Here’s a quote from his recent Guardian piece on Derek Walcott’s latest book:

To write in received forms is not to render verse doggedly metric or singsong (to the modern ear that’s the province of light verse, or performance poetry); it is to carry in the new line the echo of the old. Just as the living creature brings nothing but the past to each moment, the poet brings nothing but poetry’s past to the white space he has to cross to stay alive.

comment Glyn Maxwell

My client Min Jin Lee told me about Narrative Magazine today (where she won the 2004 Narrative Prize). Not sure how I missed it, but it looks like a great journal. Tons of familiar names (and plenty of not-so familiar too) and it’s all free.

One movement I was a member of before I knew it! The Slow Reading Movement. See Lindsay Waters’ article in The Chronicle for Higher Education. There’s more to the piece than this, but I particularly liked this:

“The role of literature is to mess with time, to establish its own time, its own rhythm. A new agenda for literary studies should open up the time of reading, just as it opens up how the writer establishes his or her rhythm. Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don’t even muss up our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words.”

“There is a kind of success called ‘of esteem’ and it butters no parsnips. It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands…. I want to reach out, and would if it were a thing I could do by taking thought.”

Robert Frost quoted in “Dark Darker Darkest” The New Republic, Jan. 16

“To be poet laureate you have to have a program for spreading the word of poetry. I’m just willing to let it spread by itself.”

NYTimes

Birnbaum prints the full P&W interview with poet Donald Hall at Identity Theory:

“…we were tremendously full of poetry and there were few of us but we were intensely in love with it and that was what we were doing—that’s all we were doing. It was not something we did among other things.”

Chekhov’s Mistess

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