Harry Mathews, from 20 Lines a Day (Dalkey Archive Press, 1988), a book that developed from a daily writing exercise:
Writing well is so hard — that’s why it’s fun to go for.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
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Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Who are we as a country?”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
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Words to live by
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
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favorite posts
- Against “deep reading”
- Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
- At the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel
- Being wrong about beauty
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- Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
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- What I hear in “Walk Away Renee”
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
comments: 9
One of the editors of Christopher Smart's poems claims that "Jubilate Agno" was written at the rate of one or two lines a day, which certainly suggests a high level of discipline on the part of someone whose mind was supposedly disordered. It's also not what you'd expect to be the case reading the poem (if it is "a poem").
No, not at all. It seems to have great momentum.
Virgil is said to have written at the rate of three lines a day.
Mathews’s lines in this work are prose, following Stendahl, “twenty lines a day, genius or not.”
As it happens, I'm actually a big Harry Mathews fan. And the weird thing is I was just thinking about that book a couple of days ago. I don't now how these things move about underground and suddenly surface, but they do seem to.
Go figure!
I can’t claim to know his work that well — more the poetry. I’ve had 20 Lines on a shelf for years and somehow thought to take it down.
You’re not a Gilbert Sorrentino fan too, are you?
No, I've never read GS, except maybe a page here and there in literary magazines and such.
I like HM's sestina beginning "Tina and Seth met in the midst of an overcrowded militarism." If you ever want to try his fiction, The Conversions is a good place to start.
I like Raymond Roussel, so I probably will. Thanks, Chris.
You'll get at least one gag, then, that flew over my head the first few times I read it.
Okay, I’ll see.
Riding mower in the yard -- that's why it's to gopher.
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