10 Jun 2009
The word nerd in me thinks this is pretty effing cool.
4 Jun 2009
(via prettysmart)
I have that Dylan poster. It is an original, I found it folded up and tucked inside one of my dad’s old Dylan vinyls. He had it hanging in his bedroom when he was young. I love that it has the crease marks from where it was folded. I had it hanging in my bedroom all through junior high and high school and when I graduated I bequeathed it to my little brother who still has it hanging in his bedroom. I hope one day we will pass it on to one of my kids or one of his.
30 May 2009
ljm:
I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone’s press agent…I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: Writers are always selling somebody out.
- Joan Didion
This is true. I try to keep my intentions pure, but this is true. Always squabbling away pieces of stories and conversations and secrets like a rodent, to use for later.
It so is. And it is scary that I always come across this quote when I am feeling confused about whether or not I should use some of those secrets, those conversations.
It is also scary how absolutely me the first part of the quote is. That pretty much sums up why I left journalism…phone calls are agonizing!
30 May 2009
So too must the language keep its feet and move with grace, disclosing one face first before allowing another, reserving certain signals until the end, when they will reverberate through the sentence like a shout down a street, and the vowels will open and close like held hands, and the consonants will moan like someone experiencing pleasure, and the reader will speed along a climbing clause, or sigh into a periodic stop full of satisfaction at this ultimate release of meaning: a little winter-love in a dark corner.
- William H. Gass
30 May 2009
I think to myself of all I have logged away and why I always feel as though nothing, even when written, remains fixed for too long before it starts to rise from the pages as if it had been but figuratively buried in paper and now aches for life again. I have never learned either to live things or else to let them go.
-André Aciman
30 May 2009
I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone’s press agent…I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: Writers are always selling somebody out.
- Joan Didion


