I came across this poem by Grant Clauser today. I like it very much.
Author: Chris Cocca
A Few Thoughts on the Writing Process
If you’re a writer and have been writing for a while, you know the experience of pouring yourself into something and coming to a point, eventually, of feeling like it’s ready. Then you come back to it a few months later and revision is much easier. Things you thought were perfect now seem a little clanky, and something (time, distance, rest, other pursuits, other work, good reading) has given you the ability to make them right. You tighten things up, make hard (even emotional) cuts, and now you know it’s ready. This happens two or three more times. That’s the process, isn’t it? It seems to be for me.
The only way I know to become a better writer is to keep writing, keep reading, and keep building in some opportunities for distance. Stay intellectually curious. Study the mechanics of your art. Listen to great lectures. Get feedback. Keep going.
I come back to these words often:
“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you’ll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.” (Ernest Hemingway)
Or, as Ann Hood says, “blow it up.” I come back to those words, too.
Introduction to Literary Theory with Paul Fry
Spent a lot of time in the car today. Found this on Open Yale Courses and listened to the first lecture. I highly recommend it for both personal and professional reasons.
“In this first lecture, Professor Paul Fry explores the course’s title in three parts. The relationship between theory and philosophy, the question of what literature is and does, and what constitutes an introduction are interrogated. The professor then situates the emergence of literary theory in the history of modern criticism and, through an analysis of major thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, provides antecedents for twentieth-century theoretical developments.“
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/01-introduction/id341652579?i=1000063753360
Green Fields of Home: Giamatti, Baseball, and the Immigrant Experience
I lived in New Haven for three years in the early 2000s. Many things from that time have stuck with me. One vivid memory is Randall Balmer paraphrasing Bart Giamatti’s insight about baseball and the immigrant experience both being quests for home.
In this piece from 2011, Lia Petridis Maiello talks to Lawrence Baldassaro about his book on the concept.
I was reminded today about the card Donruss put out in 1990 when Giamatti passed, and of his great “Green Fields of the Mind.” I knew the brilliant actor, Paul, was his son, but I never really realized how young Bart was when he died. I was 10 in 1990, which means I’m 40 now. 51 probably seemed ancient to me not that long ago.
Related: Everything I Know About Postmodernism I Learned from the Phillies, a piece of mine at Hobart.
Volare: Italian Americans in Popular Music
I was listening to Dean Martin last night, and I got to thinking about putting together some sort of superlative list of Italian-American figures in American popular music. Below are my current Sweet Sixteen. Who would you add in order to fill out a proper field of sixty-four?
Joe Satriani
Jon Bon Jovi
Gwen Stefani
Steven Tyler
Frank Zappa
Tony Bennett
Jim Croce
Louis Prima
Madonna
Dean Martin
Lady Gaga
Frankie Valli
Frank Sinatra
Mario Lanza
Henry Mancini
Bruce Springsteen
Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique For Modern Prose”
From a letter Jack Kerouac wrote to Donald Allen in 1958, here’s the wonderful “Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials.”
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
- Submissive to everything, open, listening
- Try never get drunk outside yr own house
- Be in love with yr life
- Something that you feel will find its own form
- Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
- Blow as deep as you want to blow
- Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
- The unspeakable visions of the individual
- No time for poetry but exactly what is
- Visionary tics shivering in the chest
- In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
- Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
- Like Proust be an old teahead of time
- Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
- The jewel centre of interest is the eye within the eye
- Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
- Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
- Accept loss forever
- Believe in the holy contour of life
- Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
- Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
- Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
- No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
- Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
- In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
- Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
- You’re a Genius all the time
- Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
As Ever,
Jack
Jack Kerouac, “Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials,” letter to Donald Allen (1958), published in Heaven & Other Poems, Grey Fox Press, 1958, 1977, 1983. Reprinted in Evergreen Review, Spring 1959.
Gary Carter Looking Fly, 1984
You don’t have to be a Mets fan (why would you ever be?) to love Gary Carter. This is from the 1984 press conference welcoming him to New York. Montreal would never be the same.
Chris Cocca 