Not that I like to blame things on vodka, but…
Each one of us has a secret, and the man with one he can admit to is fortunate
I began each manuscript in a state of hope that curdled into disappointment, then boredom, annoyance, anger, then remorse for the anger that the writer didn’t deserve.
“Men!” Val had summed it up, flinging herself backward against the sofa cushions, her fizz of blond-ish hair making a sort of quivering halo around her outraged face. “Men! Men when they retire! Retirement, it’s like a bomb, it’s a killer! You might as well be on a terrorist hit-list as have a husband coming up to sixty-five!”
“Well, sixty-one, actually in our case,” Mildred interposed, but Val, understandably, brushed this aside. “Well-sixty-sixty-five-Whatever. It’s death to the marriage when it happens, that’s for sure. You might as well take out divorce papers in advance when you see the date coming. Husbands go mad, stark staring raving mad. All of them! It’s their real natures coming out at last. If they don’t do one one crazy thing, they do another.”
The Echoing Stones: Celia Fremlin
Bacon in Moscow by James Birch review – darkly funny account of art behind the iron curtain Guardian
“A writer writing a novel is like a serial killer who’s keeping a victim locked in the cellar. Every evening, he slides under the cellar door a tray with a little water and stale bread, just enough to keep his victim alive, anticipating the moment when he descends the cellar stairs to have his fun with her.”
Is ‘Wonder Boys’ The Very Best On-Screen Depiction Of An Author?
The film-maker is the first woman to be nominated twice for the best director Oscar – but thanks to her example, others will surely follow soon
Pattern, Perspective, and Trust: Barry Lopez on Storytelling
“It is through story… that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.”
The Animated Universe in Verse, Part 1: The Evolution of Life and the Birth of Ecology, with Emily Dickinson
How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.”
Two hundred million years ago, long before we walked the Earth, it was a world of cold-blooded creatures and dull color — a kind of terrestrial sea of brown and green. There were plants, but their reproduction was a tenuous game of chance — they released their pollen into the wind, into the water, against the staggering improbability that it might reach another member of their species. No algorithm, no swipe — just chance.
But then, in the Cretaceous period, flowers appeared and carpeted the world with astonishing rapidity — because, in some poetic sense, they invented love.
Once there were flowers, there were fruit — that transcendent alchemy of sunlight into sugar. Once there were fruit, plants could enlist the help of animals in a kind of trade: sweetness for a lift to a mate. Animals savored the sugars in fruit, converted them into energy and proteins, and a new world of warm-blooded mammals came alive.
Without flowers, there would be no us.
No poetry.
No science.
No music.
Darwin could not comprehend how flowers could emerge so suddenly and take over so completely. He called it an “abominable mystery.” But out of that mystery a new world was born, governed by greater complexity and interdependence and animal desire, with the bloom as its emblem of seduction.
In 1866, the young German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel — whose exquisite illustrations of single-celled underwater creatures had enchanted Darwin — gave that interdependence a name: He called it ecology, from the Greek oikos, or “house, and logia, or “the study of,” denoting the study of the relationship between organisms in the house of life.
A year earlier, in 1865, a young American poet — a keen observer of the house of life who made of it a temple of beauty — composed what is essentially a pre-ecological poem about ecology.
She had awakened to the interdependent splendor of the natural world as a teenager, when she composed a different kind of ecological poem: In a large album bound in green cloth, she painstakingly pressed, arranged, and labeled in her neat handwriting 424 wildflowers she had gathered from her native New England — some of them now endangered, some extinct
Writers came from all over France to rid themselves of the fruits of their failure. It was a sort of literary pilgrimage. There was a symbolic value in travelling hundreds of miles to put an end to the frustrations of not being published. Their words were erased like sins.