like traffic signs

driveby #2. blurred.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Punctuation, he said, was like traffic signs, too much of it distracted you from the road on which you travelled, and if you wondered, Wouldn’t writing be rather confusing without it, he would say No, it was like the constant wash and turn of the sea, sounding even more sibilant in Portuguese than in English, or like a journey taken by a traveller, every step linked to the next and every end to a beginning, or like the press of time, no sooner coming than going, never stopping in the present, which consequently never existed.

From the Economists' obituary for José Saramago, Portugal’s Nobel laureate in literature.

one-to-one

Illus: One to One via GoesAry

In a studio, where the pickup is close to the piano, you can achieve a very similar effect to that which the listener enjoys at home. The relationship of the piano to a microphone which is, let’s say, eight feet away is very similar to the relationship between the listener at home and his speakers. There’s a one-to-one aspect in both situations. But no such relationship exists when one is sitting on a stage, like the Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow, and projecting a Bach Partita to the first row of seats and to the top balcony simultaneously.

So the result was that the record made in the summer of 1957 [just after Gould concluded a far-reaching European tour] is a very glib, facile effort, because a series of little party tricks which just don’t need to be there had been added to the piece. Now the interesting thing is that, at the same time, I also recorded the Sixth Partita, which I had played very rarely in public. I did play it once in the Soviet Union, and, I think, maybe once or twice in Canada and the States prior to that tour, but no more. Then I recorded it, and that’s a good recording. No party tricks.

Pianist Glen Gould in an 1975 interview in Toronto, reprinted by the inimitable Lapham's Quarterly.

I read Gould's account of why he preferred to record in a studio compared to performing to an audience a little while back, and it's rattled around in my brain relentlessly, alongside William Gibson's observation (as cited by mrtn) that blogging while trying to write a novel is like "boiling water with the lid off".

The collected cacophony of these two is probably why I haven't blogged the stories that are shouting for my attention now, the hard ones, the ones that have been sleeping a long time and now seem ready to run. But it is why I booked a room of my own, as a birthday present to myself, where for four days I plan to write.

With the lid on.

It won't be enough, but it will be a start.

Video: Glen Gould plays J.S.Bach's Partita #2

anatomy lesson

I don’t wish to touch hearts. I don’t even want to affect minds very much. What I really want to produce is that little sob in the spine of the artist-reader.

Vladimir Nabokov as quoted by Arthur Krystal in yesterday's New York Times Book Review.

nada.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should have no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. — Strunk & White

Write nothing that is not necessary.

on composition

The power is within — the question is how to reach it and use it.

Increase of power always comes with exercise. If one uses a little of his appreciative faculty in simple ways, proceeding on gradually to the more difficult problems, he is in the line of natural growth.

Arthur Dow in Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers. Originally published in 1920.

I picked up Arthur Dow's book a couple weeks back at the Georgia O'Keefe Museum in Santa Fe. I heard about it a few days before that in Las Vegas where the Bellagio was running a sweet, small and prohibitively expensive exhibit (Vegas, Baby) featuring American Modern Masters, including O'Keefe.

In the short video that ran in a room alongside the exhibit I learned that O'Keefe almost gave up painting because her education at the Chicago Art Institute focused on rote repetition, and she grew tired of copying naturalistic masterworks.

Then she read Dow's teaching on Line, Notan, Color and Composition and everything changed. Abstraction was hers.

I'm fascinated by stories like this. Something similar, I'm told, happened to Jack London after he read Herbert Spencer's Philosophy of Style. Both artists found something they needed that was vital for their practice, vital for their motivation, vital for driving them to get it done -- in the pages of a book.

Maybe it was as simple as this: They found their teacher. And it was time.

what writing does not involve

Writing a book, at least the kind of book that I write, on complete world knowledge, does not involve going outside.

John Hodgman on writing his book (this one on Molemen), as interviewed on Boing Boing TV by Xeni, and featuring the brilliant illustrations of Ape Lad.

speaking of raymond carver

LATE FRAGMENT
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

— Raymond Carver

Found in the December 2006 issue of The Sun Magazine, in Instead of Dying by Tess Gallagher, about her final years with Carver.

In the piece Gallagher gave intimations of the actions that she's now taking -- and really shaking up a few folks by doing so -- to restore Carver's original intention behind the short stories that were published -- heavily edited -- in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The book, if it comes to pass, will be published as Beginners.

Plenty of folks are hoping it won't come to pass -- the New York Times reported on the controversy yesterday in The Real Carter: Expansive or Minimal?


(And two points to mrtn, who saw right through the set up.)

change & grow

A girlfriend of mine tells the story of Annie Dillard coming to teach a course at her university. How she desperately wanted to gain admission to her class. How, failing that, she landed a gig as Annie Dillard's nanny for the summer.

Even better: She'd have the master at hand, could learn from her, share coffee and wisdom at the kitchen table, snatch up the crumbs as they fell.

And then: arriving she found Dillard and her husband in the early stages of their divorce, and Dillard was soon gone from the house.

The job didn't pan out as she hoped, and given her story I've always thought of Dillard as somone remote and far away. Untouchable. Inaccessible.

That changed this morning when I heard Dillard give an interview on NPR. She sounded grizzled, curmudgeonly, wise. Not icy at all, but warm like a dame waking up over a cup of coffee, darkly humorous and as old as the hills.

This was that kitchen table. At last. (You can listen to it here -- skip to the end for the good stuff »)