Testaments to the Boom Times to Come (Posts tagged writing)

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
currentboat
scarlok

“How many thousands have I spent on perfume and alcohol, cigarettes and Turkish baths, disappointing trips and third-class movies; how many months in silent bars or parks, expecting, in a chair with a book not reading, or waiting in line, waiting in line? Who will tell me it’s a loss when I know life must be for pleasure? The parks were balanced by museums, the baths by oceans, bars by composition, and the dreaming chair by books finished. Nothing is waste that makes a memory.”

—   Ned Rorem, The Paris Diary & The New York Diary: 1951-1961    
(via exhaled-spirals)

writing Ned Rorem inspiration station
minipliny
swordatsunset

Some interesting notes I took on what my professor said re: Moby Dick

-Moby Dick is about how to live with things much bigger than ourselves

-Moby Dick explores spaces between gargantuan objects

-novels, more than other genres, regard a self unknown to other selves, and can bring you beyond your own habituations

-Moby Dick is like Melville saying 'I think I can't be alone, but I'm not sure' and reaching out towards the reader to say 'I'm alone in this forever, unless you listen'

swordatsunset

Other interesting things:

-The central conflict is of bigness: we’re not just small, we’re brief

-A force might be behind the whale, guiding it through the story. Behind the mask, a face is pressing through. What is the unseen face if not a god?

-And, regarding the unseen face: this is a voyage dedicated to the destruction if God, whether within the whale or as a force of it

-The Ahab story asks at what point do you stop proclaiming the inexorable self?

-Melville would’ve loved to keep writing Moby Dick forever, only blocked by the need to get paid. He viewed finishing a story and presenting it as a failure, or weakness. He would’ve rather gone on forever and kept unraveling himself.

-and regarding that: there’s nothing in sentences that demands an end; the period allows you to rest, and between the capital letter and period there is an infinite space of possibility.

-Ishmael is the embodied first person narrator, and I almost think that he puts himself away

this professor.. Moby Dick Herman Melville writing
starlingshrike
typodescript: “savagedefectives: “patricia lockwood ” [ID text: A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame of refret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I espcially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember...
savagedefectives

patricia lockwood

typodescript

[ID text: A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame of refret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I espcially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn’t have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words. end ID[

Patricia Lockwood poetry writing art
lipstickmata
firstfullmoon

“EVERY year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch-black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness. The can of kerosene is brought up from the cellar and left in the hall, and the flashlight is hung up on its peg beside the door.”

— Tove Jansson, The Summer Book, tr. by Thomas Teal (Sort Of Books, 2003)

Tove Jansson writing August
pineapple-split
chamerionwrites

That last post does drive home that one of the reasons some people who dislike tragic fiction feel so vehemently about it is because they believe that a sad ending is some kind of punishment or condemnation of the characters and their choices. Which - yeah, if I felt that way I’d probably dislike tragedy too!

That’s not how tragedy works, though, is the thing. There is no win-state. Traditionally speaking the audience goes in knowing that there is no win-state, already aware of the story’s destination but here to see the journey. (Maybe there’s something to be said here about fate, and modernity, and how our experience of certain stories subtly changes when we don’t understand fate as a very real force. Maybe there’s also something to be said about a kind of cultural bootstraps individualism and belief in the power of personal choices.)

Tragedy is about making choices when there is no correct choice - when all you have left is your agency to choose. Tragedy is a maze with one exit, where the story is how you get there. Tragedy is humanity as the beautiful wild creature with its leg in a trap, gnawing it off to be free, and the audience caught in terrible awe at so much furious alive-ness in a story made of death.

And obviously it’s valid for that not to be some people’s cup of tea. I can see why it wouldn’t be! But I do get sort of curious sometimes at how fundamentally differently different people seem to experience sad stories, and I think the idea that sad endings are an implicit condemnation of the characters explains some of it.

oh man this sure captures a big part of it huh! I don't know if this is quite as in vogue anymore but I'm suddenly remembering how much I used to see people upset that the writing of something was ''mistreating'' a character as it was often phrased I feel like this might all come from the same place where some audiences have this separation between character and narrative in a way in order to have this sense that the narrative is either harming or rewarding the characters who exist independently of it as opposed to experiencing characters and narrative as all part of the story whole storytelling writing
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