BITS & PIECES OF MISPLACED LIFE: THE JOYS OF WRITING

"It is a truth only fitfully acknowledged that whom the gods
wish to destroy, they first give an opinion column."
            Parul Sehgal. The New Yorker (October 21, 2024)
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STORY TELLING & SELF KNOWLEDGE

I believe most of us tell a story about our lives and then come to live within that story. You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell a coherent story about yourself. You can know what to do next only if you know what story you are a part of. ‘A man is always a teller oc tales,’ the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed.’ ‘He lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them, and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.”

David Brooks.”A Theory of Musk’s Maniacal Drive” in The New York Times (September 22, 2023), p. A24.

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Dogs wag their tails, but tales wag the world.

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BILLY WILDER ON THE WRITING OF LOVE STORIES

“And now we have Billy Wilder’s famous dictum posed as a Talmudic question, in re love stories: What keeps them apart?”

David Mamet. Bambi versus Godzilla (NY: Pantheon Books, 2007)

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HOW GROWING OLD AFFECTS CHARACTERS IN

LITERATURE FILM

The Two Musketeers Fiber (new title for ROPE)

Little Adult Women The Silence of the Rams

Tom Swift R.I.P. James Bond (Social Security #007-007-007)

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NASA’s Million-Dollar Typo

“On July 22, 1962, NASA’s Mariner 1 spacecraft, designed for a mission to Venus, was set to launch from Cape Canaveral. But just minutes after liftoff, the shuttle had to be destroyed due to a course deviation. The culprit behind this mission-ending error was a simple coding mistake. While it’s been widely reported that a missing hyphen in the software coding was to blame, NASA has said that it was an “omission of an overbar for the symbol R for radius (R instead of R̅) in an equation,” as well as a guidance antenna on the atlas, that caused the failure. Mariner 1 was set to be America’s first interplanetary probe. It set NASA back $18.5 million (over $180 million today), an amount that led 2001: A Space Odyssey author Arthur C. Clarke to call it “the most expensive hyphen in history.” Just 36 days later, Mariner 2 successfully launched and flew by Venus, becoming humankind’s first successful scientific planetary mission.”

HISTORY FACTS (October 19, 2024)

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The most urgent question for a writer may seem to be, What experiences do I have as my material, what experiences do I feel able to narrate? But that’s not right. The most pressing question is, What is the word, what is the rhythm of the sentence, what tone best suits the things I know.

Elena Ferrante in The Paris Review (Spring 2015)

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I think the catalyst for a book is when the writer runs out of money. 

             Richard Gid Powers

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ON RECEIVING BAD REVIEWS FROM MICHIKO KAKUTANI

“Nicholson Baker joked that reading her review of A Box of Matches was “like having my liver taken out without anesthesia.” Lorrie Moore once slyly remarked that “a writer friend” likes to lean over babies’ bassinets and bless them thus: “May you never be reviewed by Michiko Kakutani.”

Dan Kois. “Michiko Kakutani Was the Most Feared  (FEB 20, 2024)

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**”…I can’t make a discovery about the emotions of people without being deeply moved myself, partly by the discovery and partly by their pain and sorrow.”

William Saroyan. Letters From 74 rue Taitbout or Don’t Go  But If You Must Say Hello to Everybody (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1969)

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“:Don’t describe it, show it. That’s what I try to teach all young writers—take it out! Don’t describe a purple sunset, make me see that it is purple.”

James Baldwin. PARIS REVIEW interview

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SIX WORD SHORT STORY WITH A SAD ENDING

Swapped wives. He got better deal.

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WHAT INSPIRED SALLY BENSON TO WRITE JUNIOR MISS

“Mrs. Benson got the idea for her first July story while riding on a Fifth Avenue bus and seeing a 13 year-old girl snubbed by her mother and older sister when she dropped their fares.”

Current Biography (1941)

“If a story can make me cry after four scotches, it’s good.”

                           Alfred McIntye, editor at Little Brown

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BOOK DEDICATION

For all the men and women of the CIA who continue

to strive for excellence and to serve our country,

despite the obstacles placed in their way.

Lindsay Moran. Blowing My Cover: My Life As a CIASpy (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005)
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GOSSIP IN THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY

“George Orwell’s wife was a nasty snitch. The launch party for ‘Lolita’ was nearly a flop when censors threatened to spoil the fun. Saul Bellow was a needy fusspot. Mick Jagger could not tell a story. The biologist James Watson could, but he expressed such misogyny that readers, even in the 1960s, were alarmed. The anecdotes pile up in a new biograpy of George Weidenfeld, the founder of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a publisher”

unsigned review of The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing. in The Economist (September 23rd,2023)

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ON THE EXCLAMATION POINT !

“punctuation didn’t really get its start until the invention of the printing press standardized certain practices. Before that, a few scribes from the late Middle Ages used the interjection “io” at the end of sentences to indicate joy, or more generally, surprise or excitement. Like a lot of other things that were rolled out with positive associations, io got tied to a lot of other extreme emotions, but not before it started getting condensed into a sign that was less and less easy to parse as a pair of letters:” T. Campbell. Email post. May 9, 2024

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HOW MICHAEL CONNELLY, AT AGE 16, RENEWED HIS INTEREST IN CRIME & MYSTERIES

 The following paragraph comes from the Wikipedia article on Bosch’s creator:

“At age 16, Connelly’s interest in crime and mystery escalated when, on his way home from his work as a hotel dishwasher, he witnessed a man throw an object into a hedge. Connelly decided to investigate and found that the object was a gun wrapped in a lumberjack shirt. After putting the gun back, he followed the man to a bar and then left to go home to tell his father. Later that night, Connelly brought the police down to the bar, but the man was already gone. This event introduced Connelly to the world of police officers and their lives, impressing him with the way they worked.”

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MAJOR RUSSIAN NOVELS

Florida. I was 10 or 11.
My father told me
The Hungarian who owned
Shore’s Liquor Store
Had been gunned down
The night before,

Sometime around 10
Shot & killed by 2
Black teen-agers
Hopped up on drugs.
They ran off
With slightly less than 5

Dollars, vodka bottles,
& a few checks
They couldn’t cash.
So much grief
For so little return. 50
Yrs. Later,

Not having Wisdom
To bring to the table,
I have forgotten
Plots & characters,
Of major Russian novels,
But my father

At the steering wheel
Of our old Dodge,
Driving past Shore’s &
Telling me the news —
That story

I have not forgotten.

Louis Phillips