Today’s One-Liner (#95)
I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work. –Natalie Goldberg, Writing down the Bones
Category: Writing
Today’s One-Liner (#89)
My job has been to spread the writing gospel. –Natalie Goldberg, The True Secret of Writing Sao Paulo; photo by Mev, September 1990
Genres
[Alexander Kluge’s two books] are sobering inventories of a catastrophe, cool, dry and therefore more gripping. A card index of all imaginable inhumanities. Kluge’s books consist of excerpts from diaries, telegrams, official reports, sermons of…
Writing Bliss Class: Fall 2024-Winter 2025
Recently my friend Lindsay Wolff inquired if I was doing a writing class this fall. Giving it some thought, I decided to offer the following just because I thought it could be (1) a fun …
Look Within
In a sense, everything Proust wrote was a rehearsal for the Search, but the important point—made clear by his many anguished doubts about whether or not he was a novelist—is that until he found the…
Saints, Mystics, and the Neighbor Next Door: A Class in Inspiration and Imitation
[T]oday it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent.—Simone Weil, Waiting for God For [Dorothy] Day,…
Pass It on
In English, I send my articles out via e-mail. It’s one of the best ways, and certainly the easiest, to publish political writing in this country. Send it to your friends and let the friends,…
Writing and Reading Inter-Are/2
Johnson made such chains of learned reference in his writing, and his written works are the outgrowth of the kind of reading Johnson did, in which fragments of writing can be distributed under preexisting topics…
Today’s One-Liner (#30)
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. –Joan Didion, The White Album
Today’s One-Liner (#25)
It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. –Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook,” in Slouching towards Bethlehem Sao Paulo,…