writing is sorrow; having had written is sublime
“Hell, man, I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to become a writer and after all what do I really know about it except you’ve got to stick to it with all the energy of a benny* addict.”
~ Dean Moriarty from ON THE ROAD
#amwriting
#ofthejournals
*Benzedrine, the trademark name for Amphetamine.
I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.
#meditate
There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.
*Perhaps a better caption would be, Willem Defoe as Arthur Schopenhauer, which is why I shan’t give up my day job.
Oh yeah, my books will be free from 00:01 (PDST) tonight until 23:59 PDST) Friday.
✌️
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. ~ Bertrand Russell
#happybirthdaybertrand
You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless -there is only one thing to do with a novel [or anything important**] and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.
Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1929 letter from France, courtesy the New York Times archive
#alonetogetherwiththelostgeneration
*Even though it says Straight On Through and not Break On Through, I wonder how many first thought of the Doors…
**IMO
As I discussed in my last post, I’ve embarked on an effort to memorize stuff that interests me. I’m finding that the more I memorize stuff, the easier is to memorize and retain new stuff.
So as I just finished up memorizing the poem Invictus, I decided to go large and take on the grandest, and perhaps greatest, of all letters penned on behalf of these United States, The Declaration of Independence.
Yeah, maybe I am getting a little cocky/in over my head taking on such a significant body of work — significant as in packed with meaning, and, especially, significant as in packed with a lot of words. One-thousand, four-hundred and fifty-eight of them to be exact.
I would sooner a writer were vulgar than mincing; for life is vulgar,
and it is life he seeks. ~ W. Somerset Maugham
#ofthejournals
A couple days ago, I wrote a painfully long post called The Irrepressible Nature of Irony.
I mean, dude*, it is a massive monster of a missive.
I mean, wow.
Anyway, as a mea culpa, of sorts, for torturing you with such interminablely tedious twaddle, I left a footnote that reads:
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat. ― Rebecca West
#notetoself
#timesup
