A Young Poet, by Jane Miller
For begging beauty
one can hardly blame the artist
sleeping like butter in the sun
taking no action for action
some prefer being a yellow rose petal
I learned when I traveled
the young poet saying a prayer
is a form of panic
There was an exact moment when I decided to quit. I was sitting on a man’s lap and we had just determined that I was “his girl.” As we kissed, I thought, Well, I guess I have to stop stealing now. As if the idea of having a boyfriend, of being straight, required straightening out in other ways. I may have been looking for an excuse; I may have realized that I didn’t need to be a criminal to be an artist. Art itself could be the crime—could be scary and dangerous enough to shoulder my rebellion. After a while, I also stopped getting into physical fights, working in peepshows, bleaching my hair white, and wearing my tights over my shoes. Still, for a long time I thought my biggest heist was fooling everyone into believing that I was an upstanding citizen, a sweet girl. Then, just a few years ago, I realized that everyone feels secretly fraudulent. It’s the feeling of being an adult.
— Miranda July, on shoplifting, in the New Yorker.
I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.
— George Orwell, Why I Write, 1946 (via suzywire)
(Source: goldenfools)
The ecstatic love of a young writer for the old writer he will be some day is ambition in its most laudable form. This love is not reciprocated by the older man in his larger library, for even if he does recall with regret a naked palate and a rheumless eye, he has nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprentice of his youth.
— Vladimir Nabokov, prefacing an updated edition of Despair (March 1st, 1965) (via davefugel: whilebird)
Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about anally deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France. Madeleine had become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read. …
Right up through her third year of college, Madeleine had kept wholesomely taking courses like “Victorian Fantasy: From ‘Phantastes’ to ‘The Water-Babies,’ ” but by senior year she could no longer ignore the contrast between the blinky people in her Beowulf seminar and the hipsters down the hall reading Maurice Blanchot. Going to college in the moneymaking eighties lacked a certain radicalism. Semiotics was the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism––with sex and power. — From “Extreme Solitude,” a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides (via New Yorker)
Right up through her third year of college, Madeleine had kept wholesomely taking courses like “Victorian Fantasy: From ‘Phantastes’ to ‘The Water-Babies,’ ” but by senior year she could no longer ignore the contrast between the blinky people in her Beowulf seminar and the hipsters down the hall reading Maurice Blanchot. Going to college in the moneymaking eighties lacked a certain radicalism. Semiotics was the first thing that smacked of revolution. It drew a line; it created an elect; it was sophisticated and Continental; it dealt with provocative subjects, with torture, sadism, hermaphroditism––with sex and power. — From “Extreme Solitude,” a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides (via New Yorker)
Two memories of early education
- Before computers in every classroom became the norm, our grade one class was allocated the temporary use of an electronic typewriter. The assisting student teacher, Richard, offered to type up the students’ tentative experiments with written communication (stories, fanciful diary entries, and so on), and then staple them into individual booklets for us to illustrate and then keep. This was a scheme that I duly monopolised. Poor Richard typed and published for me half a dozen pamphlets – including a multi-volume adventure story, reportage of a chemical plant explosion that must have been a much-reported news item at the time, and an explanation of the reproductive system of kangaroos (followed by a sequel on koalas).
- One year the teachers assigned our entire grade a project on famous Australians: scientists, sporting heroes, musicians, and so on. Each of us was allocated – randomly? Or did our teachers intuit their young pupils’ individual interests? – a historical figure to research and then create a biographical poster. I was assigned the Aboriginal activist, polemicist and poet Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), and the first Aboriginal woman to publish a book. I don’t remember the ‘research’ or how my project turned out, but I do remember: the colours yellow, red, black, and green; the shapes that words could make on a page; an early notion of something like achievement.
Some childhood memories are handed to us by parents or relatives – become family lore, character sketches, or protests. “You always did like reading”; “You sat on my lap whilst you had your hair cut and were too shy to talk to the hairdresser”; “But you’ve always loved my moussaka!”
I remember the two anecdotes above on my own accord – pocketed them long ago, and their meanings have shifted over time. Today, these memories appear –seductively, instructively – both to inform and affirm the preoccupations of my day-to-day work.
Why do we recall certain things and not others? It’s easy, even gratifying, to examine these treasures; but one can also simply marvel.
Getting over American Apparel…
Tumblelogs represent the early stirrings of late adolescent creativity, the melodrama formalized, put to music, friends found, band started, bingo. Thus there is always the sense of the achievable…the ever seductive notion that with enough hard work anything contained within it is attainable.
— “Insp.” by Jackson Boxer for Dossier (via britticisms)
First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age — say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire.
— Lorrie Moore, “How To Become A Writer” (via bibliotheque) (via jeanhannah)
It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.
— The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via scribble-scribbles)
