just a reader.

June 8, 2004

Stevie, too, often speaks directly to us, just as easily as she speaks to others on stage, simply by looking at us. [....] In the film, the "us" is of course the camera. This is hardly a new device, but in serious work, it's always a bit risky. It can smell of false naiveté, treating the technology of production and the pastness of the film as if they didn't exist—a risk that doesn't apply in the relatively untechnological, present-tense theater.

But that risk never bothers Stevie, and not just because the writing is limber and the address to the audience uncoy. It's because the presence of the audience is taken absolutely for granted. That acceptance is no mere dramaturgic device: it involves metaphysical truth about Stevie herself. It's as if our presence had always been part of the woman's life. What the audience was in the theater, what the camera is here, is the witness that every artist needs to perceive all his secrets whole, secrets that even his nearest and dearest cannot wholly see. His art is the externalizing of only some of those secrets: but all of them need witness. (Somewhere Auden said that, when he arrives in Heaven, God will walk toward him speaking lines of the poems he never wrote.) Stevie says firmly that she is an agnostic. This is relevant to the method of the play and the film. A devout believer wouldn't need to address us so much, she would have a witness of all her secrets.

Stanley Kauffmann, "Stevie," Field of View.

June 7, 2004

Wouldst thou divert thyself from melancholy?
Wouldst thou be pleasant, yet be far from folly?
Wouldst thou read riddles, and their explanation,
Or else be drowned in thy contemplation?
Dost thou love picking meat? Or wouldst thou see
A man i' th' clouds and hear him speak to thee?
Wouldst thou be in a dream and yet not sleep?
Or wouldst thou in a moment laugh and weep?
Wouldst thou lose thyself and catch no harm?
And find thyself again without a charm?
Wouldst read thyself and read thou knowest not what
And yet know whether thou art blest or not,
By reading the same lines? O then come hither,
And lay my book, thy head and heart together.

John Bunyan, "The Author's Apology for His Book," The Pilgrim's Progress.

June 5, 2004

...I used to dream, perhaps beguiled by the examples of Sir Walter Raleigh and Jawaharlal Nehru, of the pleasures of solitary confinement. It seemed that nothing could do as much for a man as a good long jail sentence.

To have all of one's physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, on one's mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings, of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard's steps in the corridor to assure and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing doors down the cellblock and know that one needn't be concerned, one still had months to serve—who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?

Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety.

June 4, 2004

It was not unnatural, with the example of her mother before her eyes, that Elizabeth should have a healthy loathing of Art. In fact, any excess of intellect—‘braininess’ was her word for it—tended to belong in her eyes, to the ‘beastly’. Real people, she felt, decent people—people who shot grouse, went to Ascot, yachted at Cowes—were not brainy. They didn't go in for this nonsense of writing books and fooling with paint brushes; and all these highbrow ideas—Socialism and all that. ‘Highbrow’ was a bitter word in her vocabulary. And when it happened, as it did once or twice, that she met a veritable artist who was willing to work penniless all his life rather than sell himself to a bank or an insurance company, she despised him far more than she despised the dabblers of her mother's circle. That a man should turn deliberately away from all that was good and decent, sacrifice himself for a futility that led nowhere, was shameful, degrading, evil. She dreaded spinsterhood, but she would have endured it a thousand lifetimes through rather than marry such a man.

George Orwell, Burmese Days.

June 3, 2004

In another, later piece Wilson had expressed his astonishment that he had endured where so many of his contemporaries from the twenties had failed to do so, gone to madness, to alcohol, to causes betrayed, and it gave me a very real warmth to know that a man could live with truth so long and survive. He was, he knew, an anachronism. He did not drive, he could not "abide" the radio, and leafing through the weekly picture magazines, he could not recognize their contents as reflecting a single aspect of the America he knew; so that, in his own word, he felt himself "stranded" from his country. Often, when driving by, I repressed an overpowering urge to slam on the brakes, to disembark, to proceed blithely to the door, to knock boldly, and, on his opening to my knock, to shout, "Eddie, baby! I too am stranded!" Because Wilson elsewhere had said that literary idolaters fell somewhere between blubbering ninnies and acutely frustrated maidens, I never did stop.

Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes.

June 2, 2004

Fitted with painful tightness into an old wooden armchair, before a worm-eaten oak table in an upstairs room of a four-roomed cottage with a roof of moss-grown tiles, Michaelis was writing night and day in a shaky, slanting hand that Autobiography of a Prisoner which was to be like a book of Revelation in the history of mankind. The conditions of confined space, seclusion, and solitude in a small four-roomed cottage were favourable to his inspiration. It was like being in prison, except that one was never disturbed for the odious purpose of taking exercise according to the tyrannical regulations of his old home in the penitentiary. He could not tell whether the sun still shone on the earth or not. The perspiration of the literary labour dropped from his brow. A delightful enthusiasm urged him on. It was the liberation of his inner life, the letting out of his soul into the wide world. And the zeal of his guileless vanity (first awakened by the offer of five hundred pounds from a publisher) seemed something predestined and holy.

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent.

June 1, 2004

With his belief that all that was good in English literature ended with the seventeenth century, his imaginations of heaven must be materialist — like Bunyan's. He laughed good-humouredly at his projection of a hereafter. It was probably done with. Along with cricket. There would be no more parades of that sort. Probably they would play some beastly yelping game. . . . Like baseball or Association football. . . . And heaven? . . . Oh, it would be a revival meeting on a Welsh hillside. Or Chatauqua, wherever that was. . . . And God? A Real Estate Agent, with Marxist views. . . . He hoped to be out of it before the cessation of hostilities, in which case he might be just in time for the last train to the old heaven. . . .

Ford Madox Ford, "No More Parades," Parade's End.

May 31, 2004

"Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion. Never. I'm a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? But let me tell you first what you won't be asked. You won't be asked if you were working on a wonderful, moving piece of writing when you died. You won't be asked if it was long or short, sad or funny, published or unpublished. You won't be asked if you were in good or bad form while you were working on it. You won't even be asked if it was the one piece of writing you would have been working on if you had known your time would be up when it was finished—I think only poor Sören K. will get asked that. I'm so sure you'll get asked only two questions. Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won't even underline that. It's too important to be underlined."

J.D. Salinger, "Seymour—An Introduction," Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction.

May 29, 2004

Tom Wolfe ate the world and vomited lava. Dickens dined at a different table every hour of his life. Molière, tasting society, turned to pick up his scalpel, as did Pope and Shaw. Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating. Have you given up this primary business as obsolete in your own writing? What fun you are missing, then. The fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of loving and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard. Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto. With them, traveling to the grave, I intend to slap some dummox's behind, pat a pretty girl's coiffure, wave to a tad up a persimmon tree.

Anyone wants to join me; there's plenty of room in Coxie's Army.

Ray Bradbury, Zen and the Art of Writing.

May 28, 2004

Much of the art of our own time is an art of symbol which is in danger of becoming etherealized quite out of this world. I suppose that one reason for this is discouragement with ourselves as human beings, due to the current confusion and distress in the world, or a sense of our unimportance in the face of the incredible extension of our natural horizons. It is also a yearning to speak a universal language. Sometimes an abstract work achieves this aim, but we remain human beings just the same, and living subjects still hold warmth and immediacy for us.

Contemporary artists are most frequently concerned with change and movement, just as our philosphers are concerned with relative values. In the words of Francis Thompson: 'To all swift things for swiftness did I sue; clung to the whistling mane of every wind.' But cannot quiet and serenity be recognized as well as movement? And cannot the validity of relative values be accepted without rejecting those absolute values realized by the great mystics and artists alike in a still moment of overpowering grace? We know that we are creatures, limited by time and space, but we also know that truth, beauty and tenderness are aspects of the absolute.

Sylvia Shaw Judson, The Quiet Eye: A Way of Looking At Pictures.