Couldn't agree with you more re: Mark Knopfler. I wasn't super-familiar with his work after Dire Straits, but my late husband Steve was NUTTY about MK and turned me on to all his other stuff. We both absolutely adored his album with Chet Atkins, among other things. Never double-checked this, but Steve said that Atkins was the very first person to release an album of Beatles covers (in March 1966) when all his peers were calling them just a flash in the pan.
I think that’s what’s to like about MK and Chet Atkins. They’re both guitarists playing (or who played) the best of the best licks, but also always had their ears to the ground for other great music and musical ideas.
Writing about the process of writing IS writing. Otherwise, we'd banish literary critique and review, the archiving of successive drafts of manuscripts and poems, even journaling. (Yes, some people would banish these things!) I hadn't considered before that what makes certain characters flat or unconvincing on the page (even minor characters, who have their parts to play in the narrative) might be a lack of motivation.
“...it's not really the job of an author to comment on matters outside the text. I believe in short that the author is dead and that their life should not be read into a text etc. etc. But also I simply will not shut up.”
Interesting! As someone who grew up reading a number of dead authors who were the subjects of encyclopedia entries, literary texts, and biographies (as well as living author celebrities such as Truman Capote), my book life has always existed within the duality that Green discusses. I believe that reading through both my own experiences and that of the author has enlarged literature for me. Considering the author is more than gossip or fandom. It can encourage the reader to think about the historical, political, and social contexts within which books are made. Anyone who writes now lives within this creative duality. Even the rare contemporary author who shuts up beyond the confines of the book jacket (Anne Tyler comes to mind) can't escape it.
Right on, Angele! I sometimes have difficulty explaining what I think John Gardner means when he writes, "There are no exercises." I just went to a William Kentridge show in Prague. His quote sticks with me, "The studio is a safe space for stupidity." My notes on writing take place in that safe space. At the same time, I'm still playing for keeps, not just performing an exercise, even if the writing is stupid, delete-able, erasable, crumple-up-in-a-ball-able.
I love the Kentridge quote; it puts me in mind of a favorite poem. I think of a young Jack Gilbert vaulting the hedges around the Cathedral of Learning in those hopeful years after the Second World War.
Couldn't agree with you more re: Mark Knopfler. I wasn't super-familiar with his work after Dire Straits, but my late husband Steve was NUTTY about MK and turned me on to all his other stuff. We both absolutely adored his album with Chet Atkins, among other things. Never double-checked this, but Steve said that Atkins was the very first person to release an album of Beatles covers (in March 1966) when all his peers were calling them just a flash in the pan.
I think that’s what’s to like about MK and Chet Atkins. They’re both guitarists playing (or who played) the best of the best licks, but also always had their ears to the ground for other great music and musical ideas.
Writing about the process of writing IS writing. Otherwise, we'd banish literary critique and review, the archiving of successive drafts of manuscripts and poems, even journaling. (Yes, some people would banish these things!) I hadn't considered before that what makes certain characters flat or unconvincing on the page (even minor characters, who have their parts to play in the narrative) might be a lack of motivation.
I thought of your comment when I came across this video by John Green's meditation on Roland Barthes and Michael Chabon.
https://youtu.be/BrMoSosin-4?si=mtTChCeSstCsmjNA
It's worth a watch. Says Green...
“...it's not really the job of an author to comment on matters outside the text. I believe in short that the author is dead and that their life should not be read into a text etc. etc. But also I simply will not shut up.”
Interesting! As someone who grew up reading a number of dead authors who were the subjects of encyclopedia entries, literary texts, and biographies (as well as living author celebrities such as Truman Capote), my book life has always existed within the duality that Green discusses. I believe that reading through both my own experiences and that of the author has enlarged literature for me. Considering the author is more than gossip or fandom. It can encourage the reader to think about the historical, political, and social contexts within which books are made. Anyone who writes now lives within this creative duality. Even the rare contemporary author who shuts up beyond the confines of the book jacket (Anne Tyler comes to mind) can't escape it.
Right on, Angele! I sometimes have difficulty explaining what I think John Gardner means when he writes, "There are no exercises." I just went to a William Kentridge show in Prague. His quote sticks with me, "The studio is a safe space for stupidity." My notes on writing take place in that safe space. At the same time, I'm still playing for keeps, not just performing an exercise, even if the writing is stupid, delete-able, erasable, crumple-up-in-a-ball-able.
I love the Kentridge quote; it puts me in mind of a favorite poem. I think of a young Jack Gilbert vaulting the hedges around the Cathedral of Learning in those hopeful years after the Second World War.
FAILING AND FLYING
Jack Gilbert (1925 – 2012)
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.