“I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards.”
Categories: Writing Tags: Don DeLillo · quotes for writers
Entries from November 2014
Reckless
A note by Philip Roth, written in a first edition of Portnoy’s Complaint, which he recently reread after 45 years.
Categories: Books · Writing Tags: Philip Roth
Poem of the day
The plane screamed low down lower Fifth Avenue,
lifted at the Arch, someone said, shaking the dog walkers
in Washington Square Park, drove for the north tower,
struck with a heavy thud, releasing a huge bright gush
of blackened fire, and vanished, leaving a hole
the size and shape a cartoon plane might make
if it had passed harmlessly through and were flying away now,
on the far side, back into the realm of the imaginary.
“When the Towers Fell” by Galway Kinnell. Read the whole poem here.
Hemingwrite
I’m intrigued by this new device, called the Hemingwrite. Currently under development, it is a sort of typewriter for the internet age, a simple plain-text word processor with wifi capability that allows it to sync documents with Google Docs and Evernote. That is a perfect combination. It lets jittery, easily distracted writers like me do the one thing we absolutely must — disconnect from the web — while still providing the benefits of cloud syncing and backup. I am not crazy about the over-the-top retro design, which feels self-conscious, but I hope the machine makes it into production, whatever its final design might be. I’d love to try one. For years I have used a variety of devices to shut myself off from the internet while writing: an old, pre-wifi ThinkPad, a simple keyboard device called an AlphaSmart Neo (now lamentably discontinued). This could be a useful tool for gadget-heads like me whose gadgets, alas, tend to get in the way.
Read more about the Hemingwrite here and here.
Categories: Writing Tags: writing tools