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2026
Goethe - Undated engraving in the National Portrait Gallery collection
Advice Given/Advice Taken. Or not.
While doing research for a current project I am immersed in “Conversations with Goethe”, an almost 700-page compendium of interview-like vignettes assembled in 1836 by Johann Peter Eckerman (1792 – 1854). He worked closely with the legendary poet, playwright, novelist, thinker, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) in the final years of his life.
Here are two wonderfully contradictory pieces of Goethe's "advice" for writers:
“…do people take any notice of what we old-timers say? Everyone thinks he knows best, with the result that many young writers lose their way, and many stay lost for a long time. But people should not be getting lost now; that’s what our generation was about – seeking and going astray; and what was the point of it all, if young people are just going down the same paths that we did? We’d never get anywhere like that! Our generation’s errors were not held against us, because we found no beaten paths to tread, but we must expect more of those who come after us. Instead of seeking and going astray all over again, they should be heeding the advice of us old folk and following the right path from the beginning. It’s not enough to take steps that will one day lead you to your destination; each step should be both a destination in itself, and a step along the way.” (1823)
“Giving advice is a curious thing, and when one has been round long enough to see how the most sensible enterprises fail, and the craziest ones often succeed, one I inclined to think twice before giving advice to anyone. Basically, it’s an admission of inadequacy on the part of the one asking for advice, and a mark of presumption on the part of the one giving it. One should only give advice about matters in which one will be personally involved. If somebody asks me for advice, I generally say that I am happy to give it, but only on condition that you promise not to take it.” (1831)
January 19
While doing research for a current project I am immersed in “Conversations with Goethe”, an almost 700-page compendium of interview-like vignettes assembled in 1836 by Johann Peter Eckerman (1792 – 1854). He worked closely with the legendary poet, playwright, novelist, thinker, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) in the final years of his life.
Here are two wonderfully contradictory pieces of Goethe's "advice" for writers:
“…do people take any notice of what we old-timers say? Everyone thinks he knows best, with the result that many young writers lose their way, and many stay lost for a long time. But people should not be getting lost now; that’s what our generation was about – seeking and going astray; and what was the point of it all, if young people are just going down the same paths that we did? We’d never get anywhere like that! Our generation’s errors were not held against us, because we found no beaten paths to tread, but we must expect more of those who come after us. Instead of seeking and going astray all over again, they should be heeding the advice of us old folk and following the right path from the beginning. It’s not enough to take steps that will one day lead you to your destination; each step should be both a destination in itself, and a step along the way.” (1823)
“Giving advice is a curious thing, and when one has been round long enough to see how the most sensible enterprises fail, and the craziest ones often succeed, one I inclined to think twice before giving advice to anyone. Basically, it’s an admission of inadequacy on the part of the one asking for advice, and a mark of presumption on the part of the one giving it. One should only give advice about matters in which one will be personally involved. If somebody asks me for advice, I generally say that I am happy to give it, but only on condition that you promise not to take it.” (1831)
January 19
"Tradition is not the worship of ashes...
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...but the preservation of fire."
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Gustav Mahler January 3 |
2025
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Nothing artificial about this intelligence
The British novelist Sarah Hall has added a "maker's mark" to the cover of her latest novel, Helm. Two simple words: "Human Written" are her confirmation that Artificial Intelligence was not invoked in the creation of this novel. Sarah Hall is very much aware that now this new work is "out there" it will take maybe 3 minutes for an AI program to scan and plunder what took her YEARS to write. This is the first use of a maker's mark on the cover of a work published by a major, international publisher. November 10 |
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Book of Lives
Margaret Atwood’s latest publication is a work of non-fiction entitled: Book of Lives – A Memoir of Sorts. Here’s an enigmatic advanced “clip” from it: “Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes. Though everything written must have passed through their minds, or mind, they are not the same.” Published by Penguin Random House and to be released in November. September 16 |
Penguin Random House
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 Janet Frame
(Janet Frame Literary Trust)
Janet Frame (1924 – 2014) on the complications of “horizontal” and “vertical” and “whirlpool" memory - "propelled by a force beneath”
In her biographical essay about the acclaimed New Zealand author Janet Frame, “Wouldn’t you like to be normal?” Lucie Elven identifies how Frame consistently wove autobiographical threads in her fiction. Her difficult complex mental health issues made her a very reluctant subject for would-be biographers. Writing her three-volume autobiography (To the Is-Land in 1982, An Angel at My Table in 1984, and The Envoy from Mirror City in 1985) was Janet Frame’s attempt “to have what she called ‘my say’.” Toward the end of her finely detailed essay, Elven includes this explanation from Janet Frame, explaining why she found writing from and about personal memory especially difficult. “Where in my earlier years time had been horizontal, progressive, day after day, year after year, with memories being a true personal history known by dates and specific years, or vertical, with events stacked one upon the other, ‘sacks on the mill and more on still, the adolescent time now becomes a whirlpool and so the memories do not arrange themselves to be observed and written about, they whirl, propelled by a force beneath, with different memories rising to the surface at different times and thus denying the existence of a ‘pure’ autobiography and confirming for each moment, a separate story accumulating to a million stories, all different and with some memories forever staying beneath the surface.” [my emphasis] “Wouldn’t you like to be normal?” Lucie Elven London Review of Books, May 8. 2025, p. 23-28. May 31 |
The Ethical Responsibility an Author When Dealing with Fiction that is Factual - and personal:
This is how French novelist Anthony Passeron deals with the issue of writing a novel about his own family - a family with secrets that have lingered for generations: "This [novel] is a last-ditch attempt to ensure that something survives. It is a mixture of memories, half-finished confessions and documented reconstructions. It is the fruit of their silence. I wanted to tell the story of what our family, like many others, lived through in total isolation. But how can I put their story into my words without robbing them of theirs? How can I speak on their behalf without my point of view, my preoccupations, replacing theirs? These questions long prevented me from starting to write this. Until I realized that only by writing could I make sure that my uncle’s story, my family’s story, did not disappear with them, with the village. To prove to them that [his uncle] Désiré’s life was inscribed into the chaos of the world, a maelstrom of facts, historical, geographical and social. And to help them to move beyond their grief, to step out from the solitude into which they had been plunged by sadness and shame." Anthony Passeron, Sleeping Children: A Novel, translated by Frank Wynne, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025 May 13 |
A. B. McKillop
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How Writers Find Themselves in the Stories They Tell – Fictional or Factual
"I have long wanted to write at least one book for no one’s purpose but my own – to satisfy my curiosity, to convey to others a sense of the chase of history and the exhilaration it involves. …I wanted to be free to invoke what now has almost been lost but what was once as common as it was essential in the writing of history: a vivid sense of place. Good history, as Barbara Tuchman has reminded us, is written by the ounce, through fidelity to the ‘telling detail.’ …I wanted to write a book with characters from whose lives the book’s dominant themes issued, strands of human experience played out inside their homes: strands of commitment and betrayal, accomplishment and frustration, community and isolation, love and indifference. And to do so in a way that engaged the reader at an emotional as well as an intellectual level, writing for the heartbeat. …Someone once asked André Maurois why he had chosen to write a life of Shelley. He answered that the poet mirrored his early emotions; ‘and it seemed to me indeed,’ he added, ‘that to tell the story of this life would be a way of liberating me from myself.’ …All true art, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler once said, is rooted in yearning. I believe this. …We need more often to reach within ourselves and liberate this force in the act of authorial creation. …Books written from such depths carry with them a clear sense of the authenticity of the author’s moral vision. …Great works of history, narrative or not, invariably convey the authenticity of publicly expressed yearning. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says, in his book After Virtue: ‘I can only answer the question, 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'" From A. B. McKilop's essay “Engaging History: Historians, Storytelling, and Self” in Thinkers and Dreamers: Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger, edited by Gerald Friesen and Doug Owram, University of Toronto Press, 2011. A.B. McKillop, is former Chancellor at Carleton University, biographer of Pierre Berton (2008), and author of The Spinster and the Prophet: Florence Deeks, H. G. Wells, and the Mystery of the Purloined Past (2000) which tells the story of Miss Florence Deeks and her charge of "literary piracy" against H.G. Wells in 1925. April 5 |
The Essential Tool for Writers: The Humble Notebook
In The Notebook – A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen writes:
Many people I interviewed for this book told me – when asked – that they kept their own private notebooks and diaries. One had filled dozens; several others wrote diaries intermittently, some just at difficult times in their life; and one told me of the distinction they – like Patricia Highsmith – make between an intimate, emotional journal and the creative, professional diary they kept in another notebook. A couple of interviewees admitted to holding onto their teenage diaries, despite being hugely embarrassed every time they open them. Another told me, movingly, of the notebook they kept which preserved their last conversations with a dying parent. When I asked to see these notebooks, as I occasionally did, all but one politely refused.
(p. 373)
Roland Allen, The Notebook – A History of Thinking on Paper, Biblioasis, 2024
March 21
In The Notebook – A History of Thinking on Paper, Roland Allen writes:
Many people I interviewed for this book told me – when asked – that they kept their own private notebooks and diaries. One had filled dozens; several others wrote diaries intermittently, some just at difficult times in their life; and one told me of the distinction they – like Patricia Highsmith – make between an intimate, emotional journal and the creative, professional diary they kept in another notebook. A couple of interviewees admitted to holding onto their teenage diaries, despite being hugely embarrassed every time they open them. Another told me, movingly, of the notebook they kept which preserved their last conversations with a dying parent. When I asked to see these notebooks, as I occasionally did, all but one politely refused.
(p. 373)
Roland Allen, The Notebook – A History of Thinking on Paper, Biblioasis, 2024
March 21
Ira Wells on Book Banning
The freedom to read is under attack…
Book bans are as old as the book itself…
…Where book banning once largely involved the legal and disciplinary apparatus of the state, the new censorship consensus works through both state actors and a constellation of special interest groups operating inside and outside of institutions. Their target is libraries…
…One reason why book banners so frequently attack historical fictions … is that the banners are fighting for control of our collective past. At the same time, in seeking control over the narratives that children will carry into adulthood, the banners are fighting for their vision of the future.
Essential reading as the snow continues to fall.
Ira Wells, On Book Banning, Biblioasis, 2025
March 1
The freedom to read is under attack…
Book bans are as old as the book itself…
…Where book banning once largely involved the legal and disciplinary apparatus of the state, the new censorship consensus works through both state actors and a constellation of special interest groups operating inside and outside of institutions. Their target is libraries…
…One reason why book banners so frequently attack historical fictions … is that the banners are fighting for control of our collective past. At the same time, in seeking control over the narratives that children will carry into adulthood, the banners are fighting for their vision of the future.
Essential reading as the snow continues to fall.
Ira Wells, On Book Banning, Biblioasis, 2025
March 1
David Lodge
1935 - 2025
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When writers get tense – advice from the novelist David Lodge:
This excerpt is from a NOVEL in which the author has written a page from a JOURNAL that is being kept by his main character, who is a writer of television DRAMAS. It’s reflection that about the craft of writing that is a lesson about writing according to the conventions of a specific form. “…in drama or film, everything is happening now. That’s why stage directions are always in the present tense. Even when one character is telling another character about something that happened in the past, the telling is happening in the present, as far as the audience is concerned. Whereas, when you are writing something in a book, it all belongs to the past; even if you write, ‘I am writing, I am writing,’ over and over again, the act of writing is finished with, out of sight, by the time somebody reads the result. A journal is halfway between the two forms. It’s like talking silently to yourself. It’s a mixture of monologue and autobiography. You can write a lot of stuff in the present tense, like: ‘The plane trees outside my window are in leaf.…’ But really that’s just a fancy way of saying, “I am writing, I am writing…’ It’s not getting you anywhere. As soon as you start to tell a story in writing, whether it's a fictional story or the story of your life, it’s natural to use the past tense, because you are describing things that have already happened. The special thing about a journal is that the writer doesn’t know where the story is going, doesn’t know where it ends; so it seems to exist in a kind of continuous present even though the individual incidents may be described in the past tense. Novels are written after the fact, or they pretend to be. The novelist may not have know how the story would end when [they] began, but it always looks as if [they] did to the reader. I know there are novels written entirely in the present tense …[which] doesn’t seem natural to the medium … they read like scripts. Autobiography is always written after the fact. It’s a past-tense form.” From the novel Therapy, by David Lodge (1935 - 2025), published by Penguin, 1996, (p. 285-6) February 15 |
When is a sentence too long?
Some "electric fluid" text from David Thompson’s 1795 journal: Hitherto I have said little on the Aurora Borealis of the northern countries; at Hudson’s Bay they are northwestward and only occasionally brilliant. [Here at] Rein Deer’s Lake, as the winter came on, especially in the months of February and March, the whole heavens were in a bright glow. We seemed to be at the centre of its action, from the horizon in every direction from north to south, from east to west, the Aurora was equally bright, sometimes, indeed often, with a tremulous motion in immense sheets, slightly tinged with the colours of the Rainbow, would roll, from horizon to horizon, sometimes there would be a stillness of two minutes; the dogs howled with fear, and the brightness was often such, that with only their light I could see to shoot an owl at twenty yards; in the rapid motions of the Aurora, we were all persuaded we heard them, reason told me I did not, but it was cool reason against sense. My men were positive they did hear the rapid motions of the aurora, this was the eye deceiving the ear; I had my men blindfolded in turns, and then enquired of them, if they had heard the rapid motions of the Aurora. They soon became sensible they did not, yet so powerful was the illusion of the eye on the ear, that they still believed they hear the Aurora. What is the cause that this place seems to be in the centre of the most vivid brightness and extension of the Aurora; from whence this immense extent of electric fluid, how is it formed whither does it go. Questions without an answer. Although the sentence in bold contains 115 words Thompson manages to make it work with an astounding sequence of 14 carefully punctuated segments. An editor’s eye might insist it’s too long, but the reader’s ear can carry it right through to the end. This extract is from p. 152 of the Champlain Society’s recently published 2-volume set: The Writings of David Thompson, edited by William E. Moreau. January 27 |
Starting the Year in Style – The Writing Kind
From Samuel Johnson’s 1735 Dictionary:
Style: Manner of writing in regard to language.
Happy
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet, and so sweet a style.
William Shakespeare
Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of stile (sic).
Thomas More
Let some lord but own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens, and the style refines.
Alexander Pope
From the 2003 Oxford Style Manual:
Each element in a book or other publication follows a style, though conscious or unconscious choice, and publishers tend to have a point of view about what that style might entail… The experience of those who apply these preferences in editing, designing, and printing works for a given publishing house often combine to establish a set of principles proven to work for that publisher. These principles-passed down, adjusted, and refined over time-evolve naturally into what is commonly referred to as house style. While a house style is distinct from the commonly accepted rules of grammar, spelling, and usage-which are for the most part inviolable in good writing-it will draw upon them, and editors will apply both in carrying out their task. (p. 30-31)
January 1
From Samuel Johnson’s 1735 Dictionary:
Style: Manner of writing in regard to language.
Happy
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet, and so sweet a style.
William Shakespeare
Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of stile (sic).
Thomas More
Let some lord but own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens, and the style refines.
Alexander Pope
From the 2003 Oxford Style Manual:
Each element in a book or other publication follows a style, though conscious or unconscious choice, and publishers tend to have a point of view about what that style might entail… The experience of those who apply these preferences in editing, designing, and printing works for a given publishing house often combine to establish a set of principles proven to work for that publisher. These principles-passed down, adjusted, and refined over time-evolve naturally into what is commonly referred to as house style. While a house style is distinct from the commonly accepted rules of grammar, spelling, and usage-which are for the most part inviolable in good writing-it will draw upon them, and editors will apply both in carrying out their task. (p. 30-31)
January 1
2024
Ending the Year in Style - The Writing Kind
From the Oxford Essential Guide to Writing: …while we speak of errors in style, we don’t speak of “bad styles.” On the other hand, we understand “style” to include many ways of writing, each appropriate for some purposes, less so for others. There is no one style, some ideal manner of writing at which all of us should aim. Style is flexible, capable of almost endless variation. But one thing style is not: it is not a superficial fanciness brushed over the basic ideas. Rather than the gilding, style is the deep essence of writing.” Thomas S. Kane, 2003. December 29  The young Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig
Part 2: Thanks to Books - "our truest and most silent companions" Austrian-born Stefan Zweig (1881 -1942) was one of the foremost authors of the early twentieth century. His fiction and biographies were deeply influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud. In 1937 he write this about the value of a book: There they are, waiting and silent. They neither urge, nor call, nor press their claims. Mutely they are ranged along the wall. They seem to be asleep, yet from each one a name looks at you like an open eye. If you look their way or reach a hand toward them they do not call out, nor are they insistent. They make no demands. They wait until advances are made to them; then for the first time they open up. First, when there is quiet about us, peace within us; then we are ready for them. Some evening on returning from a tiresome round of duties, some day when we are weary of humanity, or in the morning when clouded and heavy with dream-laden sleep,—only then are we ready for books. You would like to hold a parley and yet be alone. You would like to dream, but in music. With the pleasurable presentiment of a pleasant experiment you go to the bookcase: a hundred eyes, a hundred names silently and patiently meet your searching glance as a slave in a seraglio looks to their master, humbly awaiting the call and yet blissful to be chosen. And then, as the finger gropes about on the piano to find the key for a hidden melody, gently it yields to the hand, this dumb white thing, this closed violin—in it all the voices of God are locked up. You open up a book, you read a line, a verse; but it does not ring clear at the moment. Disappointed, you put it back almost roughly, until you find the right book for the moment. Then suddenly you are seized, you breathe rapidly and as you carry it away to the lamp, The Book, the happily chosen volume glows, dazzles with an inner light. Magic has been done; from delicate clouds of dreams there stalks forth phantasmagoria. Broad vistas open up and your vanishing senses are lost in space. Somewhere a clock ticks. But it does not penetrate in this self-circumscribed time. Here the hours are measured by another unit. There are books which traveled through many centuries before their word came to our lips; there are new books, just born yesterday, just yesterday begotten out of the confusion and necessity of a youth, but they speak magic languages and one like the other soothes and quickens our breathing. While they excite they also comfort; while they seduce they also soothe the open mind. Gradually you sink down into them; there come repose, vision and a calm suspense in their melody in a world beyond this world. Leisure hours, carrying us away from the tumult of the day; books, truest and most silent companions, how can we thank you for your ever present readiness, for this eternal lifting, elevating influence of your presence! What have you not been in the darkest days of the soul’s solitude, in military hospitals and army camps, in prisons and on beds of pain! You who have always been on the watch, have given us dreams and fragments of tranquillity in moments of unrest and torture. God’s gentle magnet, you have always been able to draw out the soul into its own sphere if it were lost in everyday routine. You have always, in all periods of gloom, widened the inner heaven within us to something greater. Little fragments of eternity, quietly ranged along the plain wall, you stand there unpretentiously in our home. Yet when the hand frees you, when the heart touches you, you break though the everyday ordinariness of prose; your words lead us as in a fiery chariot up from pettiness into the eternal. STEFAN ZWEIG The Old-Book Peddler and Other Tales for Bibliophiles, Translated by THEODORE W. KOCH 1937, Northwestern University, The Charles Deering Library Evanston, Illinois November 26  Stefan Zweig, courtesy of Deutsche Welle
In 1937, when people said the era of the book was over:
Austrian-born Stefan Zweig (1881 -1942) was one of the foremost authors of the early twentieth century. His fiction and biographies were deeply influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud. This is the first of 2 excerpts from his 1937 collection, The Old-Book Peddler and Other Tales for Bibliophiles, Translated by Theodore Koch of the Charles Deering Library at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. In this extract he is reacting to critics who, 87 years ago, suggested that the time of the book had come to an end and that “technical developments are now to the fore.” They say that the phonograph, the cinema and the radio are more precise and more convenient means of conveying language and thought, and have already begun to replace books; that the rôle of books in the history of civilization will soon be a thing of the past. This is a narrow view, a stunted way of thinking! What miracle has technical skill ever accomplished that surpasses or even equals the marvelous effect of books through thousands of years! Chemistry has not produced an explosive with such far-reaching power, sufficient to shake the world; it has not made steel plates or reinforced concrete that can outlast this small bundle of printed sheets. No electric lamp gives out such light as proceeds from many a thin pamphlet, and no power current created by technical skill equals that which fills the soul when it comes in contact with a book. Ageless and indestructible, changeless through the centuries, storage batteries of the highest potency in the smallest and most usable form, books have nothing to fear from technical developments, for is not technical skill learned and improved by means of books, and by nothing else? Everywhere, not merely in our own times, books are the alpha and omega of all knowledge, the beginning of every science. The more intimately we associate with books the more profoundly we experience the unity of life, for our personality is multiplied; we see not only with our own eyes but with the countless eyes of the soul, and by their sublime help we travel with loving sympathy through the whole world. November 21  A view of the Vatican from the 1493 Nuremburg Chronicle
Fewer Publishers = More Control over Writers
– An Early Example of the Impact on Writers Concentration in the Publishing Industry A Lesson in how to control publishers and authors from the Documents of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512- 1517) Session 10, May 4th 1515, under the leadership of Pope Leo X (1513 – 1521) On printing books The skill of book-printing has been invented, or rather improved and perfected, with God's assistance, particularly in our time. Without doubt it has brought many benefits to men and women since, at small expense, it is possible to possess a great number of books. …some printers have the boldness to print and sell to the public, books … containing errors opposed to the faith as well as pernicious views contrary to the Christian religion and to the reputation of prominent persons of rank. The readers are not edified. …we have judged that our care must be exercised over the printing of books, precisely so that thorns do not grow up with the good seed or poisons become mixed with medicines. ... We therefore establish and ordain that henceforth, for all future time, no one may dare to print or have printed any book or other writing of whatever kind in Rome or in any other cities and dioceses, without the book or writings having first been closely examined, at Rome by our vicar and the master of the sacred palace, in other cities and dioceses by the bishop or some other person who knows about the printing of books and writings of this kind and who has been delegated to this office by the bishop in question, and also by the inquisitor of heresy for the city or diocese where the said printing is to take place, and unless the books or writings have been approved by a warrant signed in their own hand, which must be given, under pain of excommunication, freely and without delay. …In addition to the printed books being seized and publicly burnt, payment of a hundred ducats to the fabric of the basilica of the prince of the apostles in Rome, without hope of relief, and suspension for a whole year from the possibility of engaging in printing, there is to be imposed upon anyone presuming to act otherwise the sentence of excommunication. Finally, if the offender’s contumacy increases, he is to be punished with all the sanctions of the law, by his bishop or by our vicar, in such a way that others will have no incentive to try to follow his example. October 31 
Learn from a Mentor
Receiving her 44th rejection letter from a publisher could have been the end of Katie Ward’s writing career. When a friend offered to put her in touch with published novelist she knew, her world changed. The novelist she eventually met was none other than Hilary Mantel. For the next 15 years, Mantel was her caring mentor. To mark the 2nd anniversary of Hilary Mantels death, Katie Ward has written a piece for The Guardian in which she includes the 7 most important pieces of wisdom she learned from Mantel. Her article elaborates these 7 writing principles:
Katie Ward: “Hillary Mantel was my mentor” www.theguardian.com/books/2024/sep/19/hilary-mantel-mentor-seven-things-she-taught-me-writing-and-life September 19 
A Perilous Trade
In The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing, Michael Castleman paints a broad-stroke panorama of the perilous trade of writing and publishing. Piracy, agents, take-overs, remainders, technology, copyright, contracts, digitization, ancient past practices that still inform current conditions. Overall, this is not the happiest of sagas, but he loads the book with little nuggets of possibility and surprising success stories. He offers these two important predictions as he concludes his journey: “Long-form reading is resilient. Nothing can kill books. As technology evolves, new innovations are bound to seize the public imagination and prompt renewed predictions of books’ demise. But repeatedly, new technologies have not killed book reading. Nothing ever has, and all evidence suggests nothing ever will…. A huge swath of the population loves to read and won’t stop, no matter what new widgets software engineers dream up. Authors will continue to write. …. Human beings are creative. Countless millions love to write. We writers yearn to express ourselves in words, and to do that, we’re willing to make sacrifices…Yes, the book business is bittersweet. It always has been and looks like it always will be…” (p. 253-4) Michael Castleman, The Untold Story of Book: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing, The Unnamed Press, 2024. September 18 |
What Pope Francis says about literature, writing, and reading:
Literature … has to do, in one way or another, with our deepest desires in this life, for on a profound level literature engages our concrete existence, with its innate tensions, desires and meaningful experiences...
Literature … sensitizes us to the relationship between forms of expression and meaning. It offers a training in discernment...
Literature … teaches us how to look and see, to discern and explore the reality of individuals and situations as a mystery charged with a surplus of meaning that can only be partially understood through categories, explanatory schemes, linear dynamics of causes and effects, means and ends.
In reading, we immerse ourselves in the thoughts, concerns, tragedies, dangers and fears of characters who in the end overcome life’s challenges. Perhaps too, in following a story to the end, we gain insights that will later prove helpful in our own lives...
In reading we discover that our feelings are not simply our own, they are universal, and so even the most destitute person does not feel alone...
In reading about violence, narrowness or frailty on the part of others, we have an opportunity to reflect on our own experiences of these realities. By opening up to the reader a broader view of the grandeur and misery of human experience, literature teaches us patience in trying to understanding others, humility in approaching complex situations, meekness in our judgement of individuals and sensitivity to our human condition.
From: LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS ON THE ROLE OF LITERATURE IN FORMATION, based on a talk to priests in training, July 17, 2024.
Photo courtesy: Vatican website.
August 26
Literature … has to do, in one way or another, with our deepest desires in this life, for on a profound level literature engages our concrete existence, with its innate tensions, desires and meaningful experiences...
Literature … sensitizes us to the relationship between forms of expression and meaning. It offers a training in discernment...
Literature … teaches us how to look and see, to discern and explore the reality of individuals and situations as a mystery charged with a surplus of meaning that can only be partially understood through categories, explanatory schemes, linear dynamics of causes and effects, means and ends.
In reading, we immerse ourselves in the thoughts, concerns, tragedies, dangers and fears of characters who in the end overcome life’s challenges. Perhaps too, in following a story to the end, we gain insights that will later prove helpful in our own lives...
In reading we discover that our feelings are not simply our own, they are universal, and so even the most destitute person does not feel alone...
In reading about violence, narrowness or frailty on the part of others, we have an opportunity to reflect on our own experiences of these realities. By opening up to the reader a broader view of the grandeur and misery of human experience, literature teaches us patience in trying to understanding others, humility in approaching complex situations, meekness in our judgement of individuals and sensitivity to our human condition.
From: LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS ON THE ROLE OF LITERATURE IN FORMATION, based on a talk to priests in training, July 17, 2024.
Photo courtesy: Vatican website.
August 26
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In writing: Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts….
“The French novelist André Gide once wrote: “I alter facts in such a way that they resemble the truth more than reality.” Shakespeare observed similarly: “The most truthful poetry is the most feigning.” That busied me for a long time. The simplest instance is Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s in Rome. The face of Jesus, just taken down from the cross, is the face of a thirty-three-year old man, but the face of his mother is the face of a seventeen-year-old girl. Was Michelangelo lying to us? Did he wish to deceive us? Disseminate fake news? As an artist, he behaved perfectly straightforwardly by showing us the deepest truth of the true people. What the truth is is something none of us knows anyway, not even the philosophers or mathematicians or the people in Rome. I never see the truth as a fixed star on the horizon but always as an activity, a search, an approximation.” Film director and opera director Werner Herzog, Every man for Himself and God Against All – A Memoir, Penguin Press/Random House, New York, 2023 (p. 285-6) March 1 |
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On Writing: A Challenge to the Reader
drabble
In The Corset and the Jellyfish – A Conundrum of Drabbles, celebrated author and illustrator Nick Bantock assembles 100 “drabbles” of no more than a hundred words, each drabble is accompanied by an enigmatic icon. Bantock suggests there is, perhaps, a missing drabble and that the reader “is being asked to create an additional one-hundred-word story by selecting a single word … from each of the tales.” Bantock’s book also contains other forms of illustration – as in a demonstration of how to write an effective opening line:
Nick Bantock, The Corset and the Jellyfish – A Conundrum of Drabbles, Tachyon Publications, 2023 February 19 |
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On Writing: The Art of Translation
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The French translator, Mireille Gansel, is the daughter of Jewish refugees who escaped the Nazis when they moved to France. Hungarian, Yiddish, and German were the languages spoken at home. Born in 1947, she is one of the major figures in literary translation. In her book, Translation as Transhumance (English translation by Ros Schwartz), she explains the evening when, as a young child, her father read a letter in Hungarian and tripped up on a word when translating it into French for her. It was the moment she discovered that working with language would become her life-long vocation:
One evening is particular stands out in my memory, when for the first time I experienced viscerally, without yet realizing its significance, what ‘translation’ would come to mean for me. It all happened with the utmost simplicity, as is often the case when something is important. He initially translated a word used by his brother or one of his sisters as ‘beloved,’ stumbled over the next word and repeated this -- actually rather ordinary -- adjective once, stumbled again, and then repeated it a second time. That triggered something in me. I dared to interrupt him. I asked: “But in Hungarian, is it the same word?” He repeated evasively: “It means the same thing!” Undeterred, I pressed him: “But what are the words in Hungarian?” Then, one by one, he enumerated, almost with embarrassment, or at least with a certain reticence, as though there were something immodest about it, the four magic words which I have never forgotten: drágám, kedvesem, aranyoskám, édesem. Fascinated, I relentlessly pestered him, begging him to translate for me what each word meant. Drágám, my darling; kedvesem, my beloved; and two other words whose sensual literalness I would never forget: aranyoskám, my little golden girl; édesem, my sweet. That evening I discovered that words, like trees, had roots whose magic my father had revealed to me: arany, gold; édes, sweet; each of these terms enriched by a lovingly enveloping possessiveness. All of a sudden, the blueprint of my native French glowed from within.
Those four words opened up another world, another language that would one day be born within my own language -- and the conviction that no word that speaks of what is human is untranslatable.
Translation as Transhumance, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2017.
February 7
One evening is particular stands out in my memory, when for the first time I experienced viscerally, without yet realizing its significance, what ‘translation’ would come to mean for me. It all happened with the utmost simplicity, as is often the case when something is important. He initially translated a word used by his brother or one of his sisters as ‘beloved,’ stumbled over the next word and repeated this -- actually rather ordinary -- adjective once, stumbled again, and then repeated it a second time. That triggered something in me. I dared to interrupt him. I asked: “But in Hungarian, is it the same word?” He repeated evasively: “It means the same thing!” Undeterred, I pressed him: “But what are the words in Hungarian?” Then, one by one, he enumerated, almost with embarrassment, or at least with a certain reticence, as though there were something immodest about it, the four magic words which I have never forgotten: drágám, kedvesem, aranyoskám, édesem. Fascinated, I relentlessly pestered him, begging him to translate for me what each word meant. Drágám, my darling; kedvesem, my beloved; and two other words whose sensual literalness I would never forget: aranyoskám, my little golden girl; édesem, my sweet. That evening I discovered that words, like trees, had roots whose magic my father had revealed to me: arany, gold; édes, sweet; each of these terms enriched by a lovingly enveloping possessiveness. All of a sudden, the blueprint of my native French glowed from within.
Those four words opened up another world, another language that would one day be born within my own language -- and the conviction that no word that speaks of what is human is untranslatable.
Translation as Transhumance, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2017.
February 7
2023
Hilary Mantel's publicity photograph for the Reith Lecture Series, 2017 - BBC Radio 4
On Writing: Wisdom from Hilary Mantel
In 2017, the acclaimed British novelist Hilary Mantel (1952 – 2022) gave that year’s Reith Lectures for the BBC. In a series of five linked and remarkable presentations, she talked about the art of writing historical fiction. Her insights into the writing process are the result of years of honing her craft in a series of formidable novels: Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies, Beyond Black, The Mirror and the Light, A Place of Greater Safety.
Here are just three important insights into the process of writing that she included in her lectures:
The raw materials of fiction
“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past - it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.”
“An event you choose to tell may not be dramatic in itself. Your scene may be as simple as a woman writing a letter, when a man comes in and interrupts her. But when two people are talking in a room, they have a hinterland, and you must suggest it. To that one moment, you bring a sense of every moment that led us there, everything that has brought your woman to this hour, this room, this desk. The multitude of life choices. The motives, conscious or unconscious. The wishes, dreams and desires, all held invisibly within the body whose actions you describe. They hover over the text like guardian angels.”
Writing history/writing fiction
“The task of historical fiction is to take the past out of the archive and relocate it in a body.”
“Landscapes, streetscapes, objects, are dead in themselves. They only come alive through the senses of your character, though his perceptions, his opinions, his point of view. There are no special tricks to make exposition work. There are only different levels of skill, in the author…. You cannot give a complete account. A complete thing is an exhausted thing. You are looking for the one detail that lights up the page: one line, to perturb or challenge the reader, make him feel acknowledged, and yet estranged.”
The hard work of writing
“…you educate yourself towards you characters and that’s why it takes such a long time. That’s what all the hours, days, years in libraries are about. It’s about growing knowledge, knowledge and another sensibility that will stand beside the one you started out with, the one that’s native to you.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing, till you try to do it. As capacity increases, so does ambition. But when it comes getting the words on the page, you can only work breath by breath, line by line.”
“In time I understood one thing: that you don’t become a novelist to become a spinner of entertaining lies: you become a novelist so you can tell the truth.”
These five lectures:
October 19
In 2017, the acclaimed British novelist Hilary Mantel (1952 – 2022) gave that year’s Reith Lectures for the BBC. In a series of five linked and remarkable presentations, she talked about the art of writing historical fiction. Her insights into the writing process are the result of years of honing her craft in a series of formidable novels: Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies, Beyond Black, The Mirror and the Light, A Place of Greater Safety.
Here are just three important insights into the process of writing that she included in her lectures:
The raw materials of fiction
“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past - it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.”
“An event you choose to tell may not be dramatic in itself. Your scene may be as simple as a woman writing a letter, when a man comes in and interrupts her. But when two people are talking in a room, they have a hinterland, and you must suggest it. To that one moment, you bring a sense of every moment that led us there, everything that has brought your woman to this hour, this room, this desk. The multitude of life choices. The motives, conscious or unconscious. The wishes, dreams and desires, all held invisibly within the body whose actions you describe. They hover over the text like guardian angels.”
Writing history/writing fiction
“The task of historical fiction is to take the past out of the archive and relocate it in a body.”
“Landscapes, streetscapes, objects, are dead in themselves. They only come alive through the senses of your character, though his perceptions, his opinions, his point of view. There are no special tricks to make exposition work. There are only different levels of skill, in the author…. You cannot give a complete account. A complete thing is an exhausted thing. You are looking for the one detail that lights up the page: one line, to perturb or challenge the reader, make him feel acknowledged, and yet estranged.”
The hard work of writing
“…you educate yourself towards you characters and that’s why it takes such a long time. That’s what all the hours, days, years in libraries are about. It’s about growing knowledge, knowledge and another sensibility that will stand beside the one you started out with, the one that’s native to you.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing, till you try to do it. As capacity increases, so does ambition. But when it comes getting the words on the page, you can only work breath by breath, line by line.”
“In time I understood one thing: that you don’t become a novelist to become a spinner of entertaining lies: you become a novelist so you can tell the truth.”
These five lectures:
- The Day is for the Living
- The Iron Maiden
- Silence Grips the Town
- Can These Bones Live?
- Adaptation
October 19
No recovery in sight for publishing industries
A new report by Megan McMaster from Statistics Canada has a mix of good and bad news for Canada’s cultural sector.
First the good news: “Nationally, there was strong revenue and salary growth in 2022 across most of the industries, except the publishing industries, which continued to see declining revenues. The strongest revenue growth was seen in the promoters (presenters) of performing arts, sports and similar events industry group (+145.8%), while the largest decline was in newspaper publishers (-2.7%).”
And then the bad news: “No recovery in sight for publishing industries. The newspaper, book and periodical publishing industries did not experience the same post-pandemic bounce back in 2022 as the rest of the culture, arts, entertainment and recreation industries, with revenues contracting across all three industries. The publishing industries continued to face challenges in 2022, including the rising cost of paper, competition for readers and advertising dollars, and pressures to operate in a more digital environment. Of these publishing industries, the largest revenue decline was observed in newspaper publishers (-2.7%), followed by book publishers (-2.6%) and periodical publishers (-0.8%).
Across Canada, only two regions (Quebec and the Atlantic provinces) saw revenue growth in these industries (see Chart 2). Book publishers in Quebec had modest revenue growth of 3.5% in 2022, while revenue declines were observed in the other publishing industries, with newspaper publishers down 5.8% and periodical publishers relatively flat (-0.3%). In the Atlantic region, the revenues of periodical publishers (+12.2%) and book publishers (+7.4%) grew in 2022, but not for newspaper publishers (3.4%).”
“Return to life after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic: A look at culture, arts, entertainment and recreation services in 2022.”
Release date: August 22, 2023
September 4
A new report by Megan McMaster from Statistics Canada has a mix of good and bad news for Canada’s cultural sector.
First the good news: “Nationally, there was strong revenue and salary growth in 2022 across most of the industries, except the publishing industries, which continued to see declining revenues. The strongest revenue growth was seen in the promoters (presenters) of performing arts, sports and similar events industry group (+145.8%), while the largest decline was in newspaper publishers (-2.7%).”
And then the bad news: “No recovery in sight for publishing industries. The newspaper, book and periodical publishing industries did not experience the same post-pandemic bounce back in 2022 as the rest of the culture, arts, entertainment and recreation industries, with revenues contracting across all three industries. The publishing industries continued to face challenges in 2022, including the rising cost of paper, competition for readers and advertising dollars, and pressures to operate in a more digital environment. Of these publishing industries, the largest revenue decline was observed in newspaper publishers (-2.7%), followed by book publishers (-2.6%) and periodical publishers (-0.8%).
Across Canada, only two regions (Quebec and the Atlantic provinces) saw revenue growth in these industries (see Chart 2). Book publishers in Quebec had modest revenue growth of 3.5% in 2022, while revenue declines were observed in the other publishing industries, with newspaper publishers down 5.8% and periodical publishers relatively flat (-0.3%). In the Atlantic region, the revenues of periodical publishers (+12.2%) and book publishers (+7.4%) grew in 2022, but not for newspaper publishers (3.4%).”
“Return to life after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic: A look at culture, arts, entertainment and recreation services in 2022.”
Release date: August 22, 2023
September 4
photo by Michelle Valberg - https://www.charlottegray.ca
Serious Trouble for Canadian Non-fiction Writing and Publishing
Writing in The Globe and Mail, acclaimed historian Charlotte Gray outlines a dangerous situation for authors of non-fiction.
"[Forty years ago] A non-fiction writer could cover research costs and make a decent living from a combination of publishers’ advances, grants from federal and local arts councils and spinoff articles.
Today, in the words of author and lawyer Mark Bourrie, “it’s horrible out there.” Bourrie has written several well-received books on Canadian history, including the Charles Taylor Prize winner Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, which required months of intense research in libraries and archives plus travel to significant sites. He would like to write more. “But I can only support myself because I practise law.”
…History is just one category within the larger genre of deeply researched non-fiction that struggles to survive in Canada today. Other types of non-fiction by Canadian writers that require several years of research, including popular science, climatology, biography, business writing and essays, are slowly disappearing from bookstores. These days, our publishers’ non-fiction lists are dominated by personal memoirs – books that may be well-written and illuminating, but rarely involve archives, research trips or fact-checking.
…Part of the reason is the precipitous decline of our publishing industry. In the 1980s, there was a healthy publishing ecosystem, with several sturdy Canadian publishers plus a readership eager to buy its products
…Today, most of those Canadian publishers have either closed or been swallowed by the multinational publisher Random House (now Penguin Random House.)
...What can halt this gradual slide into homegrown ignorance about Canadian politics, scientific achievements and history? Granting councils can reconsider the damage to non-fiction writers who want to explore this country’s culture in depth. …The federal government can offer more protections, through subsidies and regulations, for Canadian independent publishers. Provincial education departments can kindle an interest in this country by building more time for Canadian content into their curricula. Without such interventions, argues Bourrie, “we’ll soon be culturally integrated with the United States, and we’ll have lost our own history.”
Excerpted from "The slow, painful demise of Canadian Fiction" by Charlotte Gray,
published in the The Globe and Mail, August 12, 2023
Writing in The Globe and Mail, acclaimed historian Charlotte Gray outlines a dangerous situation for authors of non-fiction.
"[Forty years ago] A non-fiction writer could cover research costs and make a decent living from a combination of publishers’ advances, grants from federal and local arts councils and spinoff articles.
Today, in the words of author and lawyer Mark Bourrie, “it’s horrible out there.” Bourrie has written several well-received books on Canadian history, including the Charles Taylor Prize winner Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, which required months of intense research in libraries and archives plus travel to significant sites. He would like to write more. “But I can only support myself because I practise law.”
…History is just one category within the larger genre of deeply researched non-fiction that struggles to survive in Canada today. Other types of non-fiction by Canadian writers that require several years of research, including popular science, climatology, biography, business writing and essays, are slowly disappearing from bookstores. These days, our publishers’ non-fiction lists are dominated by personal memoirs – books that may be well-written and illuminating, but rarely involve archives, research trips or fact-checking.
…Part of the reason is the precipitous decline of our publishing industry. In the 1980s, there was a healthy publishing ecosystem, with several sturdy Canadian publishers plus a readership eager to buy its products
…Today, most of those Canadian publishers have either closed or been swallowed by the multinational publisher Random House (now Penguin Random House.)
...What can halt this gradual slide into homegrown ignorance about Canadian politics, scientific achievements and history? Granting councils can reconsider the damage to non-fiction writers who want to explore this country’s culture in depth. …The federal government can offer more protections, through subsidies and regulations, for Canadian independent publishers. Provincial education departments can kindle an interest in this country by building more time for Canadian content into their curricula. Without such interventions, argues Bourrie, “we’ll soon be culturally integrated with the United States, and we’ll have lost our own history.”
Excerpted from "The slow, painful demise of Canadian Fiction" by Charlotte Gray,
published in the The Globe and Mail, August 12, 2023
And then there are financial setbacks for writers:
On the Road to Write When I was the commissioning editor at Novalis, every month I would receive a different proposal for what was essentially the same book: the story of a writer’s experience of “doing the Camino” as they attempted or completed their pilgrimage from (usually) somewhere in France to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Retracing the steps of millions of pilgrims through the centuries, this journey has always served as a way of seeking answers to vital questions. What makes Mary Colwell’s book about her pilgrimage so compelling is that she completed her journey under markedly different circumstances: it was winter 2022, and all of Europe, like North America, was under severe lockdown. It was cold, and instead of being one of the usual 300,000 pilgrims who make this journey each year, she was, for the most part, quite alone. In this excerpt, she explains the link this journey has with writing and story telling: “So many souls gather on this line through the land and each one has a unique story to tell. The physical Camino is the skeleton, the bare bones on which to hang the flesh of a tale. The villages, towns and cities, the mountains forests, wine regions, agricultural plains and upland farms form the universal chapter headings, the same story arc of a walk of 500 miles across northern Spain, but innumerable different adventures emerge. Each journey comprises a unique set of characters with an intricate, infinite web of back stories. It is this particularity that makes the Camino live in a million different hearts in a million different ways, and all of them begin by walking. When people say it is the journeying involved in pilgrimage that matters as much as the destination, it is because the time spent en route is the creative space that allows the invisible to get to work. The combination of walking, someone’s personal history and the stories both old and new that are ever-present, all form a potent solution where feelings, hunches and notions begin to crystalise. They fill a void normally crowded out with daily life, getting stronger and more substantial as each day passes. It cannot be instantaneous, it is an unfolding, developing process, like a mother of pearl accreting around a stone. Insight is born in the gap between experiencing and recognition, between an inkling and an understanding.” Mary Colwell, The Gathering Place – A Winter Pilgrimage Through Changing Times, Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2023, p. 132. July 1 |
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People and their Books: Sarah Bakewell # 2 – Anton Chekhov (1860 -1904) and Vasily Grossman (1905- 1964)
In her book, Humanly Possible – Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, former library curator and now acclaimed author, Sarah Bakewell, presents a series of vignettes about the relationship people have with books. In this excerpt, Bakewell links the Russian short-story writer and playwright, Anton Chekhov, with the Ukrainian chemical engineer and creative writer, Vasily Grossman. “[Chekhov’s] short stories, especially, are humanistic in the close attention they pay to events (or quiet non-events) from people’s everyday lives: moments of love or heartbreak, journeys, deaths, boring days. His views on religion and morality were also those of a humanistic: he disliked dogma and was skeptical about supernatural beliefs. As one twentieth-century admirer of Chekhov wrote: He said – and no on had said this before, not even Tolstoy – that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you understand? Human beings! He said something no one in Russia had ever said. He said that first of all we are human beings – and only secondly are be bishops, Russians, shopkeepers, Tartars, workers …Chekhov said: let’s put God – and all these grand progressive ideas – to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive too the individual man. These words area actually spoken by a fictional character, in a scene from the novel Life and Fat by the Jewish Ukrainian writer, Vasily Grossman…Like Chekhov, Grossman was a scientist as well as a creative writer: he began in a career as a chemical engineer. Then he took up fiction, much of it light and comic at first. And journalism during the Second World War, especially by filing reports from the battle front in Stalingrad. In the 1950s he worked on Life and Fate…. [The novel] plunges us into the very worst that the twentieth century had to offer: war, mass murder, cold, hunger, betrayal, racist persecution in both Nazi-occupied territory and the Soviet Union – in short, human grief and suffering on a staggering scale. … But through all of this, Grossman imbues the narrative with his humanistic sensibility, putting individuals at the centre, never ideas or ideals.” Bakewell then outline’s Grossman’s difficult and often perilous journey in getting his book into print: “It was immediately hailed as a twentieth-century masterwork, comparable to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or to an interlinked series of Chekhov stories. Part of its fascination was its own story; one of survival against the odds. Like so many works by our humanists in earlier times, it had been saved by ingenuity, concealment, rescue, and reduplication. And as Petrarch and Bocaccio and the early humanist printers knew, nothing is so good for rescuing a book as making lots of copies of it.” Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible – Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, Alfred Knopf Canada / Penguin Random House, 2023, pp. 360-2 June 24 |
Anton Chekhov
Vasily Grossman
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People and their Books: Sarah Bakewell #1 - Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
In her book Humanly Possible – Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, former library curator and now acclaimed author, Sarah Bakewell, presents a series of vignettes about the relationship people have with books.
Here she presents the example of French essayist Michel de Montaigne:
“Michel did know his classics intimately, and his love for his favourite authors was profound. He built up his own book collection and housed them on shelves built to fit the round interior of his tower. He also had that tower’s ceiling beams painted with quotations, so that he could look up and see them at any time…In pride of place was Terrence’s Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto: “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me.” …
Yet Montaigne trashes all the humanistic pieties on the subject of reading. As soon as he gets bored with a book, he says he flings it aside…
Instead, he likes books when they enhance life and when they expand his understanding of the many people who have lived in the past. Biographies and histories are good, because they show the human being “more alive and entire than in any other place – the diversity and truth of his inner qualities in the mass and in the detail, the variety of ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him.”
Of his own work, Sarah Bakewell adds:
“the Essays return constantly to the classic humanistic themes of moral judgment, courtesy, education, virtue, politics, elegant writing, rhetoric, the beauties of books and texts, and the question of whether we are excellent or despicable. But, pondering each of these themes with a skeptical and questioning eye, he dismantles them. Once they are lying around him in pieces, he reassembles them in a more interesting, more disconcerting, and more thought-provoking spirit than before.”
Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible – Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, Alfred Knopf Canada /Penguin Random House, 2023, pp. 157-8.
June 20
In her book Humanly Possible – Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, former library curator and now acclaimed author, Sarah Bakewell, presents a series of vignettes about the relationship people have with books.
Here she presents the example of French essayist Michel de Montaigne:
“Michel did know his classics intimately, and his love for his favourite authors was profound. He built up his own book collection and housed them on shelves built to fit the round interior of his tower. He also had that tower’s ceiling beams painted with quotations, so that he could look up and see them at any time…In pride of place was Terrence’s Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto: “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me.” …
Yet Montaigne trashes all the humanistic pieties on the subject of reading. As soon as he gets bored with a book, he says he flings it aside…
Instead, he likes books when they enhance life and when they expand his understanding of the many people who have lived in the past. Biographies and histories are good, because they show the human being “more alive and entire than in any other place – the diversity and truth of his inner qualities in the mass and in the detail, the variety of ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him.”
Of his own work, Sarah Bakewell adds:
“the Essays return constantly to the classic humanistic themes of moral judgment, courtesy, education, virtue, politics, elegant writing, rhetoric, the beauties of books and texts, and the question of whether we are excellent or despicable. But, pondering each of these themes with a skeptical and questioning eye, he dismantles them. Once they are lying around him in pieces, he reassembles them in a more interesting, more disconcerting, and more thought-provoking spirit than before.”
Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible – Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, Alfred Knopf Canada /Penguin Random House, 2023, pp. 157-8.
June 20
How This Leads to That: Joining the Dots After a Time of Plague,
In his monumental work The Earth Transformed - An Untold Story, Oxford University’s global historian, Peter Frankopan joins the dots between some remarkable post-pandemic events in history. This one links the Black Death with autoimmune diseases, a shortage of scribes, and the invention of the printing press.
"…many of those who survived the plague may have done so because they were carrying a genetic mutation that served to offer a layer of protection to the immune system. Ironically, this mutation, known as ERAP2, is now associated with several autoimmune disorders, such as Crohn ‘s disease, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis: in other words, alleles that protected against Black Death confer raised risk for diseases for people alive today.
…The aftermath of plague also saw new fashions, diets and attitudes toward luxury goods, partly as a result of the emergence of competitive consumption, partly because smaller populations meant goods cost less, and partly because of the euphoria of having dodged death’s call. Protein availability not only soared in Europe because there were fewer people to feed, but as farmers and herders were forced to find new markets for their livestock – opening up what one historian has called an international meat trade. It has been argues too that the deaths of so many copyists during the pandemic led to the fall of the price of paper −something that spurred literacy levels and perhaps even helped prompt the print revolution of Johannes Gutenberg and others."
Peter Frankopan: The Earth Transformed – An Untold History, Alfred Knopf, 2003, p. 313-4
June 4
In his monumental work The Earth Transformed - An Untold Story, Oxford University’s global historian, Peter Frankopan joins the dots between some remarkable post-pandemic events in history. This one links the Black Death with autoimmune diseases, a shortage of scribes, and the invention of the printing press.
"…many of those who survived the plague may have done so because they were carrying a genetic mutation that served to offer a layer of protection to the immune system. Ironically, this mutation, known as ERAP2, is now associated with several autoimmune disorders, such as Crohn ‘s disease, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis: in other words, alleles that protected against Black Death confer raised risk for diseases for people alive today.
…The aftermath of plague also saw new fashions, diets and attitudes toward luxury goods, partly as a result of the emergence of competitive consumption, partly because smaller populations meant goods cost less, and partly because of the euphoria of having dodged death’s call. Protein availability not only soared in Europe because there were fewer people to feed, but as farmers and herders were forced to find new markets for their livestock – opening up what one historian has called an international meat trade. It has been argues too that the deaths of so many copyists during the pandemic led to the fall of the price of paper −something that spurred literacy levels and perhaps even helped prompt the print revolution of Johannes Gutenberg and others."
Peter Frankopan: The Earth Transformed – An Untold History, Alfred Knopf, 2003, p. 313-4
June 4
The Politics of Printing: Thomas Newcomb and Marchemont Nedham
Last week, as the Coronation events concluded, my thoughts turned to that convulsive time in British history when there was no monarch. In 1649, King Charles I was tried and executed for treason and “the most extraordinary and experimental decade in Britain’s history” began when “a conservative people tried a revolution.”
Marchemont Nedham was at the centre, looking for ways to control public information. At a time when newspapers had not yet been invented, he was “the irrepressible newspaperman and puppet master of propaganda.” In the years before writing Paradise Lost, John Milton also vetted material to ensure it was correctly supportive of the new crownless order of government. This was a new form of mass communication: broadsheets and newspapers, designed to spread official and often not-so-official versions of the truth. Did the execution of the king also mean the end of the monarchy? The country was divided; the members of the Commonwealth government were worried.
In her fascinating portrait of this tense and turbulent political decade, British historian Ann Keay includes a vignette about the printing process in the late seventeenth century, the production and distribution network that Marchemont Nedham relied on. In his pressroom on Thames Street in London, the printer Thomas Newcomb has just received the latest edition of Mercurius Politicus, from Marchemont Nedham, the author and publisher. This is what he does with it:
“In the age of the hand printing press the business of producing weekly over a thousand issues of a sixteen-page publication was a demanding physical operation. Each pair of pages of type, locked into place in an iron frame, was placed, face-up, on a block of stone set into a sliding carriage. The pressmen applied on to the upturned letters by dabbing them with a soft leather inking ball. A wooden frame containing a large sheet of paper was then lowered onto the letters and this whole assemblage slid on wooden rails into the press itself. By means of a handle, the pressmen lowered a block of perfectly flat wood or stone known as the ‘platen’ onto the paper from above, so pressing it down onto the inked letters. Raising the platen and drawing the carriage back, they opened the frame, and peeled the freshly printed paper off the metal type. This was handed over to their colleagues who draped each one over the latticework of wooden rails suspended from the printing house ceiling.
The pressmen worked into the night heaving down the platen, drawing the carriage back and forth, peeling off page after page, and replacing the paper and ink with each impression. The room rang with the creak and clatter of the press, governed by the rhythmic movements of the pressmen, who like oarsmen, kept ‘a constant and methodical posture and gesture in every action of pulling and beating which in a train of work becomes habitual.’ By Thursday morning they had finished. Thousands of dry pages hung from the rails, and the air was thick with the caustic tang of the hot lye into which the ink-clogged letters were plunged for cleaning. By now the work of cutting, compiling and folding the sheets into individual issues was well underway. From Thames Street the completed copies of Politicus were carried forth.”
Anna Keay, The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown (William Collins, 2022), p. 133-4.
May 11
Last week, as the Coronation events concluded, my thoughts turned to that convulsive time in British history when there was no monarch. In 1649, King Charles I was tried and executed for treason and “the most extraordinary and experimental decade in Britain’s history” began when “a conservative people tried a revolution.”
Marchemont Nedham was at the centre, looking for ways to control public information. At a time when newspapers had not yet been invented, he was “the irrepressible newspaperman and puppet master of propaganda.” In the years before writing Paradise Lost, John Milton also vetted material to ensure it was correctly supportive of the new crownless order of government. This was a new form of mass communication: broadsheets and newspapers, designed to spread official and often not-so-official versions of the truth. Did the execution of the king also mean the end of the monarchy? The country was divided; the members of the Commonwealth government were worried.
In her fascinating portrait of this tense and turbulent political decade, British historian Ann Keay includes a vignette about the printing process in the late seventeenth century, the production and distribution network that Marchemont Nedham relied on. In his pressroom on Thames Street in London, the printer Thomas Newcomb has just received the latest edition of Mercurius Politicus, from Marchemont Nedham, the author and publisher. This is what he does with it:
“In the age of the hand printing press the business of producing weekly over a thousand issues of a sixteen-page publication was a demanding physical operation. Each pair of pages of type, locked into place in an iron frame, was placed, face-up, on a block of stone set into a sliding carriage. The pressmen applied on to the upturned letters by dabbing them with a soft leather inking ball. A wooden frame containing a large sheet of paper was then lowered onto the letters and this whole assemblage slid on wooden rails into the press itself. By means of a handle, the pressmen lowered a block of perfectly flat wood or stone known as the ‘platen’ onto the paper from above, so pressing it down onto the inked letters. Raising the platen and drawing the carriage back, they opened the frame, and peeled the freshly printed paper off the metal type. This was handed over to their colleagues who draped each one over the latticework of wooden rails suspended from the printing house ceiling.
The pressmen worked into the night heaving down the platen, drawing the carriage back and forth, peeling off page after page, and replacing the paper and ink with each impression. The room rang with the creak and clatter of the press, governed by the rhythmic movements of the pressmen, who like oarsmen, kept ‘a constant and methodical posture and gesture in every action of pulling and beating which in a train of work becomes habitual.’ By Thursday morning they had finished. Thousands of dry pages hung from the rails, and the air was thick with the caustic tang of the hot lye into which the ink-clogged letters were plunged for cleaning. By now the work of cutting, compiling and folding the sheets into individual issues was well underway. From Thames Street the completed copies of Politicus were carried forth.”
Anna Keay, The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown (William Collins, 2022), p. 133-4.
May 11
Writing with purpose: to upend established order and upset hierarchies
"…my commitment to writing … does not consist of writing ‘for’ a category of readers, but in writing ‘from’ my experience as a woman and an immigrant of the interior; and from my longer and longer memory of the years I have lived, and from the present, an endless provider of the images and words of others. This commitment through which I pledge myself in writing is supported by the belief, which has become a certainty, that a book can contribute to change in private life, help to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed, and enable beings to reimagine themselves. When the unspeakable is brought to light, it is political.
…In the bringing to light of the social unspeakable, of those internalized power relations linked to class and/or race, and gender too, felt only by the people who directly experience their impact, the possibility of individual but also collective emancipation emerges. To decipher the real world by stripping it of the visions and values that language, all language, carries within it is to upend its established order, upset its hierarchies."
Annie Ernaux, from her Nobel Prize Lecture in Stockholm, December, 2022.
Each Nobel prize has a “motivation” and in Annie Ernaux’s case, it was awarded “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”
Illustration by Niklas Elmehed - Nobel Prize Outreach
April 28
"…my commitment to writing … does not consist of writing ‘for’ a category of readers, but in writing ‘from’ my experience as a woman and an immigrant of the interior; and from my longer and longer memory of the years I have lived, and from the present, an endless provider of the images and words of others. This commitment through which I pledge myself in writing is supported by the belief, which has become a certainty, that a book can contribute to change in private life, help to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed, and enable beings to reimagine themselves. When the unspeakable is brought to light, it is political.
…In the bringing to light of the social unspeakable, of those internalized power relations linked to class and/or race, and gender too, felt only by the people who directly experience their impact, the possibility of individual but also collective emancipation emerges. To decipher the real world by stripping it of the visions and values that language, all language, carries within it is to upend its established order, upset its hierarchies."
Annie Ernaux, from her Nobel Prize Lecture in Stockholm, December, 2022.
Each Nobel prize has a “motivation” and in Annie Ernaux’s case, it was awarded “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”
Illustration by Niklas Elmehed - Nobel Prize Outreach
April 28
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Writing and Rejection: Scaling Adversity
“Jack London kept his letters of rejection impaled on a spindle, and eventually the pile rose to four feet, around six-hundred rejections. Marcel Proust and Beatrix Potter had to self-publish. It took Agatha Christie five years to find her way into print. There are a thousand examples - Twilight was rejected fourteen times, The Diary of Anne Frank fifteen times, A Wrinkle in Time twenty six, Gone with the Wind thirty-eight, and so on. These stories are supposed to be inspiring or a testament to the idiocy of the literary gate keepers or something. What I find strange is that anyone finds it strange that there is so much rejection. The average telemarketer has to make eighteen calls before finding someone willing to talk with him or her.” From: On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche, Biblioasis, 2023 (p. 22-3). April 18 Acknowledgements 1: A "Thank you" to debt and gratitude
For many years now, whenever I open a new book I go straight to the acknowledgments page, if there is one. It’s a little like not leaving a cinema until I have seen who did the catering or if they still use the category of “best boy.” In his 2004 novel, Hannah Coulter, the poet and novelist Wendell Berry writes this in his Acknowledgments: "Maybe I believed once that some day I would be able to write a novel by myself, and probably I thought I would be glad when that day came. It has never come. This novel, my seventh, has put me more in need of help than any of the previous six. And so my practice of this art has led, not to independence, but to debt and to gratitude – a better fate." April 1 |
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Autobiography as Original Sin
In the posthumously published book about memory and photography, the American author Janet Malcolm (1934-2021) gives this warning about the harmful impact of personal memories on writing: My mind is filled with lovely plotless memories of [her father]. The memories with a plot are, of course, the ones that commit the original sin of autobiography, which gives it its vitality if not its raison d’être. They are the memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification –- and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them “Who asked you to tarnish my image with your miserable little hurts?” the dead person might reasonably ask. (p.32) Memory is not a journalist’s tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly. Memory does not render characters. Memory has no regard for the reader. If an autobiography is to be minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue…its passion for the tedious. (p. 154) Janet Malcolm, Still Pictures – On Photography and Memory, Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan, 2023. March 24 
A book with an accurate title
Atlas of the Invisible by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti is intended to change the way we see the world. It shows data concerning highly complex issues (climate change, natural disasters, population trends, etc.,) and presents them in richly visual maps and charts. The authors want to make visible “the invisible patterns” we rarely see. Their book is beautifully laid out and the print quality is superb. They assembled their book during the interruptions of COVID-19. In their introduction they write, “In visualizing data we, we transform it into information, which equips those in position to protect us…For centuries, atlases depicted what people could see: roads, rivers, mountains. Today we need graphics to reveal the patterns that shape our lives.” They describe their book as “an ode to the unseen, to a world of information that cannot be conveyed through text or numbers alone. In the years to come, our hope is that patterns we’ve made visible will inform how you view the choice between business as usual and rebuilding a better world.” Slightly adjusted, they could be describing the goal of all good writing: to depict observed and unnoticed circumstances that can bring new awareness to readers, as authors dig deep into the details of matters invisible or unvisited. When underlying patterns are finally identified, choices and options become clearer. This is true in works of fiction and non-fiction alike. As the great novelist George Eliot concludes about her character Dorothea in Middlemarch (1871-2), even things that are invisible have a power over us all. “Certainly [the] determining acts of her life were ... the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. … Her full nature, like [a] river…spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” March 18 |
Atlas of the Invisible - Maps and Graphics that Will Change How You See the World, James Cheshire & Oliver Uberti, W. W. Norton, 2021.
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Detail from a Jan van der Straet engraving in the Wellcome Collection: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/gepksmnb
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Small presses are thriving even as “big” presses try to become ever bigger.
A recent article in the UK celebrated no fewer than 48 successful "small" publishers. Their success is based on “grassroots bookmaking” according to Philip Jones, chair of the The Bookseller’s publishing awards. “These publishers are reaping the rewards from dedicated and often inspirational publishing, hands-on author care and community building.” One of the finalists, Kevin Duffy, of Bluemoose Books in the north of England describes the work as “Tough, every week is a battle … [but] independent bookshops are telling us that readers are saying they’re not finding anything different, and independent bookshops are pointing to smaller independent publishers. I think that’s one of the reasons why independent presses are being shortlisted and winning literary prizes, because we are taking risks the bigger publishers aren’t.” Penny Thomas, of Firefly Press in Wales says that ever-increasing competition for contracts and sales “means sales have to grow fast for indie publishers to survive. Small presses, including those based outside of London, do definitely publish big books, but with relatively diminutive marketing budgets we are always fighting to be seen in the trade and to get those books out to readers…. We are realistic enough to know that we have to stay at the very top of our game and publish outstanding books.” Britain’s Small Press of the Year winner will be announced in May. February 25 |
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Writing Biography or Autobiography: Is it all a matter of perception?
As Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience professor Anil Seth explains, this is where things get really tricky. How to explain choices, motivations, and unique life-stories? “Every time science has displaced us from the centre of things, it has given back far more in return. The Copernican revolution gave us a universe – one which astronomical discoveries of the last hundred years have expanded far beyond the limits of human imagination. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection gave us a family, a connection to all other living species and an appreciation of deep time and of the power of evolutionary design. And now the science of consciousness … is breaching the last remaining bastion of human exceptionalism – and presumed specialness of our conscious minds – and showing this, too, to be deeply inscribed into the wider patterns of nature. Everything in conscious experience is a perception of sorts, and every perception is a kind of controlled – or controlling – hallucination. What excites me most about this way of thinking is how far it may take us. Experiences of free will are perceptions. The flow of time is a perception. Perhaps even the three-dimensional structure of our experienced world and the sense that the contents of perceptual experience are objectively real – these may be aspects of perception too.” From: Being You – A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth, Dutton/Penguin Random House, 2021, p.282 February 11 |
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Writer and Editor – Poetry
Speaking in an interview of two editors that she has worked with, Evelyn Lau explains the creative input she values:
"…both have been really good about making extremely minor adjustment, down to, as I say, a punctuation mark; that might be the only thing that they would suggest changing in a poem. But, of course, by the time the manuscript has landed on their desk, I’ve gone through it so many times that I don’t want huge intervention. That would be just horrible. But they’ve both been really sensitive about, just making really slight but important suggestions where, one thing that changed in a poem can really change the entire poem. So I am looking for somebody with that sort of eye, that is very close and not ham-handed at all. I guess that would be the term, right? As a poet you don’t want someone coming in and misunderstanding what you do. But even prose editors can misunderstand, especially if your prose is poetic and at the forefront of their thoughts is something like, is the grammar correct? [Laughs.] Well it may not be entirely correct, but once you correct the grammar, it completely throws off the rhythm. So you want someone who can understand the artistry that you are trying to do."
From: John Vardon In Conversation - The Constant Clamour for Words: A Conversation with Evelyn Lau. The New Quarterly – Canadian Writers & Writing, Number 165, Winter 2003, p. 41.
www.tnq.ca
February 6
Speaking in an interview of two editors that she has worked with, Evelyn Lau explains the creative input she values:
"…both have been really good about making extremely minor adjustment, down to, as I say, a punctuation mark; that might be the only thing that they would suggest changing in a poem. But, of course, by the time the manuscript has landed on their desk, I’ve gone through it so many times that I don’t want huge intervention. That would be just horrible. But they’ve both been really sensitive about, just making really slight but important suggestions where, one thing that changed in a poem can really change the entire poem. So I am looking for somebody with that sort of eye, that is very close and not ham-handed at all. I guess that would be the term, right? As a poet you don’t want someone coming in and misunderstanding what you do. But even prose editors can misunderstand, especially if your prose is poetic and at the forefront of their thoughts is something like, is the grammar correct? [Laughs.] Well it may not be entirely correct, but once you correct the grammar, it completely throws off the rhythm. So you want someone who can understand the artistry that you are trying to do."
From: John Vardon In Conversation - The Constant Clamour for Words: A Conversation with Evelyn Lau. The New Quarterly – Canadian Writers & Writing, Number 165, Winter 2003, p. 41.
www.tnq.ca
February 6
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“The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand.”
Robertson Davies, What’s Bred in the Bone In a Guardian article on British novelist Alex Preston, who’s composing his next novel entirely in longhand, the interviewer himself says that using a pen and notebook keeps him in touch with the craft of writing. “It’s a deep-felt, uninterrupted connection between thought and language which technology seems to short circuit.” Canadian journalist, Andrew Coyne agrees: “Text on a computer is definitely corrigible: We commit to nothing, either in words or sentence structure…Handwriting, to the contrary, forces us to make an investment. It inclines us thus to compose the sentence in our heads first – and the other sort of sentence you can compose and keep in your head is likely to be shorter and clearer than otherwise.” Military historian Nathan Greenfield says part of the joy of using a fountain pen is that it’s a beautiful object, but also that it gives him a feel for language. …With a pen and ink you’re your own software. And, an added bonus, there’s no metadata; no one tracks your notebooks.” Ted Bishop: The Social Life of Ink - Culture, Wonder, and Our Relationship with the Written Word, Viking/Penguin, 2014, p. 298-9. January 29 |
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Thinking about editing and corrections and lots of paper
“The printing process involves more than just reformatting a manuscript with the goal of generating a large number of copies to circulate through time and space. It also encompasses a text’s transition into a sphere of error correction and heightened claims to truth. Printing involves press proofs, preliminary corrections, and thorough reviews. The inevitability of printing errors is not eliminated by the ability to print an improved, revised edition of a book, but it is kept in check. … Modern authors are their own editors even before they approve their manuscripts for publication. When Erasmus of Rotterdam described the printed book as an object that permitted, and demanded, a theoretically endless sequence of corrections and revisions, he was not referring to printing alone. Correcting misprints is the job of the printer and typesetter, but factual errors or imperfect verses are corrected in the manuscript itself. In other words, this is the job of the author. In a letter from 1651, Guez de Balzac wrote that in the course of abridging, editing, and reworking a single satire he has used up ‘une demy rame de papier,’ or half a ream. Taken literally, this would have been 250 sheets of paper.” Lothar Müller: White Magic – The Age of Paper, translated by Jessica Spengler, Polity Press, 2014. January 24 |
From the Office of Correction: A Guide to Proofing from the 17th Century
In 1677 in England, Jospeh Moxon (1627 - 1691) published a how-to guide for printers. Here are the pages from his Mechanik Exercsies, Or The Doctrine of Handy-Works in which he explains how a printer needs to "proof" a page before the final printing stage. He reminds would-be printers/editors that they are financially responsible for errors: "For if by neglect a Heap is spoiled, he is obliged to make Reparation."
To browse this remarkably detailed how-to guide to printing, here is a link to its page on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/mechanickexercis00moxo/
January 13
In 1677 in England, Jospeh Moxon (1627 - 1691) published a how-to guide for printers. Here are the pages from his Mechanik Exercsies, Or The Doctrine of Handy-Works in which he explains how a printer needs to "proof" a page before the final printing stage. He reminds would-be printers/editors that they are financially responsible for errors: "For if by neglect a Heap is spoiled, he is obliged to make Reparation."
To browse this remarkably detailed how-to guide to printing, here is a link to its page on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/mechanickexercis00moxo/
January 13
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Craft: Editing
"I always wanted to be unseen and unheard, which is what editors should be."
In an interview with National Public Radio's Terry Gross, the American editor Robert Gottlieb stresses "service" as the central role of the editor. Famous for editing works by John le Carré, Joseph Heller, and Toni Morrison, he said, "I feel as an editor, it's my job to make the case that I need to make and then it's his job to eventually agree or disagree. You know, I never cease explaining or telling young people who want to be editors, it's a service job. Our job is to serve the word, serve the author, serve the text. It's not our book, it's not my book. It's his book or her book. But it's a very gratifying job. And I love the editing process. I love it as an editor. And since I've done a lot of writing myself, to my astonishment, I love being edited because it's the process that I like. I don't care whether I'm the editor or the editee. It's fun and it's interesting to see how you can make something that you believe is good even better."
Here's a link to the NPR's Fresh Air interview: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/03/1146641641/robert-gottlieb-caro-power-broker-turn-every-page-lizzie-gottlieb
January 8
"I always wanted to be unseen and unheard, which is what editors should be."
In an interview with National Public Radio's Terry Gross, the American editor Robert Gottlieb stresses "service" as the central role of the editor. Famous for editing works by John le Carré, Joseph Heller, and Toni Morrison, he said, "I feel as an editor, it's my job to make the case that I need to make and then it's his job to eventually agree or disagree. You know, I never cease explaining or telling young people who want to be editors, it's a service job. Our job is to serve the word, serve the author, serve the text. It's not our book, it's not my book. It's his book or her book. But it's a very gratifying job. And I love the editing process. I love it as an editor. And since I've done a lot of writing myself, to my astonishment, I love being edited because it's the process that I like. I don't care whether I'm the editor or the editee. It's fun and it's interesting to see how you can make something that you believe is good even better."
Here's a link to the NPR's Fresh Air interview: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/03/1146641641/robert-gottlieb-caro-power-broker-turn-every-page-lizzie-gottlieb
January 8
Craft: Anne Campbell on Writing
The Deck God
I sit on my deck today
circling in on God
from behind my studio watch grass reach up; shoots
rest on one another leaning forward they bend
in places where elk nest lay their great goodies down
today
beginning is
full of cloud but warmed beyond hope touched
by this gift my soul is making (concrete) words whole
(#8: Banff Poems in Soul to Touch, Hagios Press, Regina, 2009, p.66.)
Anne Campbell (1938 - 2022), writer and long-time arts and
cultural heritage advocate passed away peacefully on October 20th, 2022,
(January 7) in the Palliative Care Unit, Pasqua Hospital, Regina.
The Deck God
I sit on my deck today
circling in on God
from behind my studio watch grass reach up; shoots
rest on one another leaning forward they bend
in places where elk nest lay their great goodies down
today
beginning is
full of cloud but warmed beyond hope touched
by this gift my soul is making (concrete) words whole
(#8: Banff Poems in Soul to Touch, Hagios Press, Regina, 2009, p.66.)
Anne Campbell (1938 - 2022), writer and long-time arts and
cultural heritage advocate passed away peacefully on October 20th, 2022,
(January 7) in the Palliative Care Unit, Pasqua Hospital, Regina.
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Craft: Setting the tone before a scene of conflict
"The shadows are lengthening. Across the stripped crests of the elms, beyond the curtain of a row of poplars, white house fronts and blue roofs sparkle in the level light. Hardly anyone is about. Jean can hear the creak of wheels ploughing through the mud of a sunken road, but the cart itself is invisible. Etched upon the horizon, a grey horse and a bay are drawing a plough across a gently undulating expanse of stubble, the soft brown clods rising soundlessley beside the gleaming share. A belated puddle shines amongst the tree-trunks, where, overhead, abandoned nests crouch like big black spiders in their web of leafless boughs. The ploughman has reached the end of the field; slowly he swings his horses round and starts a new furrow. The grey horse, now coming toward Jean, conceals both the plough and the bay horse, and seems to be advancing by itself. The wind drops. The creak of cart-wheels has died away. The dead leaves cease rustling. All is still..." From Jean Barois, the 1913 novel by the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, Roger Martin du Gard. First English edition translated by Suart Gilbert and published by the Viking Press in 1949. (p. 77) January 5 |
Winter Shades of White
A new year. A clean white page...
"Under a dark sky walking by the river... all was sad-coloured and the colour caught the eye, red and blue and stones in the river beaches brought out by patches of white-blue snow, that is, snow quite white and dead but yet it seems as if some blue or lilac screen masked it somewhere between it and the eye: I have often noticed it. The swells and hillocks of the river sands and fields were sketched and gilded out by frill upon frill of snow...Where the snow lies as in a field the demasking of white light and silvery shade may be watched indeed till brightness and glare is all lost in a perplexity of shadow and in the whitest of things the senes of white is lost, but at a shorter gaze I see two degrees in it - the darker, facing the sky, and the lighter in the tiny cliffs or scarps where the snow is broken or raised into ridges, these catching the sun perhaps or at all event directly hitting the eye and gilded with an arch brightness, like the sweat in the moist hollow between the the eyebrows and the eyelids on a hot day..."
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Journal entry, Winter, 1872.
The Major Works, Oxford World's Classics, 1986, p. 214.
January 1
A new year. A clean white page...
"Under a dark sky walking by the river... all was sad-coloured and the colour caught the eye, red and blue and stones in the river beaches brought out by patches of white-blue snow, that is, snow quite white and dead but yet it seems as if some blue or lilac screen masked it somewhere between it and the eye: I have often noticed it. The swells and hillocks of the river sands and fields were sketched and gilded out by frill upon frill of snow...Where the snow lies as in a field the demasking of white light and silvery shade may be watched indeed till brightness and glare is all lost in a perplexity of shadow and in the whitest of things the senes of white is lost, but at a shorter gaze I see two degrees in it - the darker, facing the sky, and the lighter in the tiny cliffs or scarps where the snow is broken or raised into ridges, these catching the sun perhaps or at all event directly hitting the eye and gilded with an arch brightness, like the sweat in the moist hollow between the the eyebrows and the eyelids on a hot day..."
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Journal entry, Winter, 1872.
The Major Works, Oxford World's Classics, 1986, p. 214.
January 1