“The stars from space appear to be very much the same as on a cold winter night in the mountains of New Mexico.”
–Frank Borman, of Las Cruces, who circled the moon on Apollo 8
“I will never again do something which I do not feel fully with my heart. I know it will be difficult, but I longer want to feel contradiction in my life.”
–Miuccia Prada
“Workshop is productive in insisting that you look at your flaws and hold your work to a high standard, but I think it serves its purpose and then you have to move on.”
“I learned not to look away at the moment when I should be paying the most attention. The closer I got to the heart of a scene, to the really difficult material to write, the emotionally challenging stuff or the exchange in which the conflict is made most explicit, the more I’d look for a way out of writing it. This was out of fear, obviously, because you don’t want to run up against your limitations in craft, intelligence or heart. It’s much easier to duck the really vital material, but it kills what you’re writing to do so, kills it instantly.”
“A conversation that dwells only in what hasn’t been accomplished and doesn’t try to see what is fighting toward the surface for breath is an impoverished conversation indeed.”
–Matthew Thomas, NY times Sunday Book Review, September 6, 2014
“She had been working on her manuscript with a blue pencil, deleting adjectives that were not in the predicate form, compressing sentences, paring the dialogue down to the bone until there wasn’t a rattle in a single line.” — James Lee Burke, Light of the World
Has anybody here seen my old friend Michael?
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He wasn’t really perfect, but it seems the good die young.
You know, I just looked around and he was gone.
Has anybody here seen my old friend Trayvon?
Can you tell me where he’s gone?
He never did nothing wrong, but it seems the good die young.
You know, I just looked around and he was gone.
Has anybody here seen Michael and Trayvon?
Can you tell me where they’ve gone?
I thought I saw them walking over the hill
With Abraham, Martin and John.
Have you seen the television ads for the Koch Brothers enterprises? Do they remind anybody besides me of the ads for Dick Roman Enterprises? Leviathans among us, for sure.
It was the sixties. San Pedro, California. I was married to Paul at the time, and we lived across the street from Paul’s parents, high on a hill with a wide view of the L.A. Harbor. My mother-in-law had immigrated from Russia and spoke fluent Russian, so whenever there was a Russian ship in the harbor, the harbormaster would hire her to translate for the captain. That was how Paul and I came to visit on a Russian ship. We had lunch with the crew, a greasy borscht. They gave me a red star pin for the Russian Revolution, and another pin that said 1918-1968. After lunch, they showed us around the ship and we got to visit in the crew quarters. A bunch of Russian sailors crowded with us into a little cabin with tiered bunk beds. We all huddled around a tape recorder. They inserted a tape, and we listened to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles, sung in Bulgarian. We all danced around.
Paul and I held hands, and it was our song after that.
Good plots look so different, book to book. But to grossly generalize, I’d say they all share a clarity of event, purpose, and consequence. Something happened, we want to understand why, and to know what it will mean. And then ideally we care about any of this because it involves characters we believe in, and we believe in them because we’re experiencing them through a narrative voice that is strong and engaging.
–Reagan Arthur, in Slate, May 8, 2014, on what makes for a good plot.
Another entry in our record of knowledge worth saving through the coming apocalypse: The Dalai Lama’s birthday is July 6. He turned 79 yesterday (2014), so he was born in 1935. Recently scientists seem to have discovered that the Tibetans came with a little something extra — a Denisovian gene that allows them to flourish in high altitudes.
The Dalai Lama says:
If you maintain a feeling of compassion, loving kindness, then something automatically opens your inner door.
janelake 