What does it say about me that when I read about the sonnets on the backs of bar maids, I immediately thought of a strange, historical prequel to "Silence of the :Lambs?"
We seem to be of the same mind about notebooks, typewriters, and computers. I especially liked what you said about how internet-connected writing on the laptop gives you the feeling of the writing being part of something bigger and in motion, which explains why I like writing my Substack drafts on my computer, but fiction on my typewriter.
I had this thought in the 2000s that I wanted to be kind of surfing the web while I wrote and to integrate the little nuggets that I was finding online. I think that was a bad impulse but I keep trying to play around with ways to make fiction more of an 'open book' - include links to other sites, that kind of thing.
Your Notes section recalls this from "My Ántonia": "When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing—the Danish laundry girls and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry."
I was meditating on this once, how the muses for art are capricious. I was once a singer songwriter, but I never wrote any songs I liked for women I was actually dating or wanted long-term relationships with. There was something fanciful about the songs I wrote for women I admired from afar or who joined me in a fling. Ironically, my favorite original, "Feels Like Coming Home," was written for a woman who I only knew briefly, while deployed on a fire assignment in California. So I wonder if there is something to that bar maid effect, at least insofar as art is concerned...
Sam, you always get my thinking juices flowing. Is this about how affecting the how? Or the what you write on/with shaping the how? The what of our writing seems to use up/need more and more resources as time progresses. While it superficially seems parchment that has the highest price per phrase, I am not so sure. Through the ages more and more structure seems to be needed to write. But the muse keeps reminding us to use whatever is at hand, to not become too dependent on the tool. If it leaves a mark, use it. If your what shapes your how, you are a human. If your how shapes the what you are an artist.
If your how shapes the how....you're probably a Youtuber.
Thank you Bertus! I do think it's important to evolve with the technology. I always get suspicious when I hear about writers locking themselves in cabins and turning off all the technology - at least that hasn't worked for me so far. I have the feeling that it's better to be plugged into the 'air around you,' and part of that means using the same gadgets that everyone else does, even if you have to go through these terrible addictions. Our minds are shaped by our tools and it seems somehow important to work with that.
I love this, Sam - not quite a note on a barmaid’s back, but I like your concision in these descriptions. And it makes me wonder what medium lends itself to disciplined concision. Notes, not quite, because there’s a shaggy distraction to setting down whatever you see but no end to what you could note down. Maybe the old 140-character limit of Twitter of yore? I do miss that.
Thank you so much Martha! I purposefully dodged Twitter, but it does seem like there was a Twitter heyday that I missed out on. I guess it was about very witty, very lucid commentary pegged to something going on in the culture?
I do kind of wish that I'd lived in one of these societies - it's described in Japan in The Tale of Genji and among the Vikings in The Long Ships - where people recite short poems, usually couplets, on all kinds of different social occasions, as a way to compete with each other or just to mark the moment. The Vikings, apparently, would have their duels in two stages: the first would be the poetry competition and then, in the second, they would start hacking away at each other.
I think of haibun, the combination of short prose with haiku, like Basho’s “Narrow Road to the Deep North.” I keep thinking that when I retire, I’ll write haibun - but not online or in social media. I’ll do it in a blank book where I can also sketch 😉
What does it say about me that when I read about the sonnets on the backs of bar maids, I immediately thought of a strange, historical prequel to "Silence of the :Lambs?"
Yes, not dried goat, but fresh barmaid...it screams to be written...
Haha! What a great icebreaker for a therapy session!
We seem to be of the same mind about notebooks, typewriters, and computers. I especially liked what you said about how internet-connected writing on the laptop gives you the feeling of the writing being part of something bigger and in motion, which explains why I like writing my Substack drafts on my computer, but fiction on my typewriter.
Fiction on your typewriter! Cool!
I had this thought in the 2000s that I wanted to be kind of surfing the web while I wrote and to integrate the little nuggets that I was finding online. I think that was a bad impulse but I keep trying to play around with ways to make fiction more of an 'open book' - include links to other sites, that kind of thing.
Your Notes section recalls this from "My Ántonia": "When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing—the Danish laundry girls and the three Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry."
I was meditating on this once, how the muses for art are capricious. I was once a singer songwriter, but I never wrote any songs I liked for women I was actually dating or wanted long-term relationships with. There was something fanciful about the songs I wrote for women I admired from afar or who joined me in a fling. Ironically, my favorite original, "Feels Like Coming Home," was written for a woman who I only knew briefly, while deployed on a fire assignment in California. So I wonder if there is something to that bar maid effect, at least insofar as art is concerned...
I didn't know that about you Josh! Singer songwriter! (I did know about firefighting.)
I do find it hard to write about anybody I'm in a relationship with. After the breakup though, it's no holds barred!
Sam, you always get my thinking juices flowing. Is this about how affecting the how? Or the what you write on/with shaping the how? The what of our writing seems to use up/need more and more resources as time progresses. While it superficially seems parchment that has the highest price per phrase, I am not so sure. Through the ages more and more structure seems to be needed to write. But the muse keeps reminding us to use whatever is at hand, to not become too dependent on the tool. If it leaves a mark, use it. If your what shapes your how, you are a human. If your how shapes the what you are an artist.
If your how shapes the how....you're probably a Youtuber.
Thank you Bertus! I do think it's important to evolve with the technology. I always get suspicious when I hear about writers locking themselves in cabins and turning off all the technology - at least that hasn't worked for me so far. I have the feeling that it's better to be plugged into the 'air around you,' and part of that means using the same gadgets that everyone else does, even if you have to go through these terrible addictions. Our minds are shaped by our tools and it seems somehow important to work with that.
I love this, Sam - not quite a note on a barmaid’s back, but I like your concision in these descriptions. And it makes me wonder what medium lends itself to disciplined concision. Notes, not quite, because there’s a shaggy distraction to setting down whatever you see but no end to what you could note down. Maybe the old 140-character limit of Twitter of yore? I do miss that.
Thank you so much Martha! I purposefully dodged Twitter, but it does seem like there was a Twitter heyday that I missed out on. I guess it was about very witty, very lucid commentary pegged to something going on in the culture?
I do kind of wish that I'd lived in one of these societies - it's described in Japan in The Tale of Genji and among the Vikings in The Long Ships - where people recite short poems, usually couplets, on all kinds of different social occasions, as a way to compete with each other or just to mark the moment. The Vikings, apparently, would have their duels in two stages: the first would be the poetry competition and then, in the second, they would start hacking away at each other.
I think of haibun, the combination of short prose with haiku, like Basho’s “Narrow Road to the Deep North.” I keep thinking that when I retire, I’ll write haibun - but not online or in social media. I’ll do it in a blank book where I can also sketch 😉
Notebooks. To be placed into the heart of my 10 foot tall compost heap of decades of tree prunings once they read false or unfriendly 🐈⬛
So many old notebooks! Where do they all go?
Jung’s Collective Conscious 🐈⬛