The best new movies carry intimations of permanence along with their novelty and very quickly start to seem as if they had been around all along. — A. O. Scott, “Screen Memories” in last week’s Times Magazine That odd feeling you get when you first run into great artworks — they “very quickly start to [...]
Entries from November 2009
Title Trouble
November 25, 2009
I remember the moment I came up with the title “Mission Flats” for my first novel. It was late, long past midnight. The house was quiet. I lay in bed unable to sleep, which is common for me. (I am a chronic insomniac.) I had been playing around with the word “mission” for the title. [...]
Categories: Writing
Tags: bookthree · Mission Flats · The Strangler
“This Is Where I Leave You”
November 20, 2009
This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper is a terrific novel. The emotionally repressed Foxman family of Westchester County gathers to sit shiva for their dead father, and over the course of a week the four siblings and materfamilias work through a lifetime of suburban traumas, grudges, and neuroses. A comedy of manners [...]
Categories: Book Reviews
Tags: must reads
Cormac McCarthy: “My Perfect Day”
November 15, 2009
“Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [my son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My [...]
Categories: Writers · Writing
Tags: Cormac McCarthy · writing life
F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Swimming under water”
November 10, 2009
“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, from an undated letter to his daughter Scottie, reprinted in The Crack-Up (1945)
Categories: Writing
Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald · quotes for writers
Ted Kooser: “Daddy Longlegs”
November 9, 2009
Here, on fine long legs springy as steel, a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill that skims along over the basement floor wrapped up in a simple obsession. Eight legs reach out like the master ribs of a web in which some thought is caught dead center in its own small world, a [...]
Categories: Poetry
Tags: poems · Ted Kooser
“Productivity Stems From Passion”
November 6, 2009
A poster by graphic designer Frank Chimero. Writers (and other creatives), take note.
Categories: Creative Process · Productivity · Writing
Tags: Frank Chimero · writing tips
Book 3 Update: The Final Push
November 5, 2009
Toward the end, writing a novel is a race against the clock. Deadlines that once seemed absurdly far off suddenly loom into view. The story itself demands that you write faster, too, with more urgency, so that the reader will feel the acceleration and she will be pulled along with you to the finish. That [...]
Categories: Writing
Tags: bookthree · My Books · writing life
Walt Whitman for Levi’s
November 3, 2009
I was struck by this ad for Levi’s jeans, which features a few stanzas from Walt Whitman’s poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” If you dislike the spot, I understand. The bullshit factor is high even by advertising standards: half-naked slackers as “new American pioneers,” hawking these surpassingly American jeans that are actually made overseas, using a [...]
Categories: Poetry
Tags: advertising · Poetry · Walt Whitman
