“When you’re reading, you’re writing.”

 —Mary Gordon

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 —from Colette:

“You, who are magic itself when you recount something, you muff most of your effect when you write… ‘A chorus of flatterers answered him’… ‘the conversation took a harsh turn’… ‘they began to judge him’… ‘mocking exclamations, derisory phrases’. Do you understand that in all that no word shows me, or makes me hear, what you are talking about?… For God’s sake no narrative! Touches, and detached colours; and there is no need for a conclusion, I don’t care whether you ask Proust’s pardon, I don’t care if Sardou had been ‘one of the kings of the contemporary theatre.’ Do you understand? … ‘a charming and delicate dinner’… ‘a conversation that wanders from one subject to another’, what does that tell me? Give me a decor, the diners, and even the dishes, otherwise it won’t work. And try, o my dear heart, to hide the fact that writing bores you stiff.”

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“But I don’t know what one should put in a book.”

“Neither do I, believe me,” said Colette. “I have only gathered a little light on what it is better to omit. Only paint what you have seen. Look for a long time at what pleases you, and for longer at that which hurts you. Try to be faithful to your first Continue reading »

Commonplace Book II

“But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple — or a green field — a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing — an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness — wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak — to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed. I remember the delicate, rumpled way into the woods, and the weight of the books in my pack. I remember the rambling, and the loafing — the wonderful days when, with Whitman, I tucked my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time.“

   —Mary Oliver, “My Friend Walt Whitman” in Blue Pastures

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   —Colette, excerpts from the short story, “Bella Vista”

“The sulphurous smell of the seaweed, the broken shells, the feeble waves which rose and fell with advancing or retreating gave me a sudden terrible longing for Brittany. I longed for its tides, for the great rollers off St. Malo which rush in from the ocean, imprisoning constellations of starfish and jellyfish and hermit crabs in the heart of each greenish wave. I longed for the swift incoming tide with its plumes of spray; the tide which revived the thirsty mussels and the little rock oysters and reopened the cups of the sea anemones. The Mediterranean is not the sea.” Continue reading »

Commonplace Book I

Main Entry: commonplace book

Function: noun

Date: 1578

: a book of memorabilia

“As Max W. Thomas puts it, ‘commonplace books are about memory, which takes both material and immaterial form; the commonplace book is like a record of what that memory might look like.’”

   —Paul Dyck “Reading and Writing the Commonplace: Literary Culture Then and Now” (Re)Soundings (Winter 1997)

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“What an overwhelming lesson to all artists! Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous, solution. Be brave, be brave!”

   —Isak Dinesen, from “The Deluge at Nordenay”

Continue reading »