Your Taste Is Still Killer

Ira Glass: “What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

If I am not mistaken, you were not disinclined to me

"If I am not mistaken, you were not disinclined to me, Lugones, and you would have liked to like some piece of my work. That never happened..." - Borges, Dream Tigers

Sad Beautiful Fact Et Cetera

"[W]hat we've seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can't change that." -- Linda Holmes, The Sad, Beautiful Fact, etc.

So enough angsting about it, already.

Advice

"Be a good steward of your gifts.
Protect your time.
Feed your inner life.
Avoid too much noise.
Read good books, have good sentences in your ears.
Be by yourself as often as you can.
Walk.
Take the phone off the hook.
Work regular hours."

-- Jane Kenyon

Something hard & glorious

"A first book is a treasure, and all these truths and quasi-truths I have written about publishing are finally ephemeral. An older writer knows what a younger one has not yet learned. What is demanding and fulfilling is writing a single word, trying to write le mot juste, as Flaubert said; writing several of them which becomes a sentence. When a writer does that, day after day, working alone with little encouragement, often with discouragement flowing in the writer’s own blood, and with the occasional rush of excitement that empties oneself, so that the self is for minutes or longer in harmony with eternal astonishments and visions of truth, right there on the page on the desk; and when a writer does this work steadily enough to complete a manuscript long enough to be a book, the treasure is on the desk. If the manuscript itself, mailed out to the world where other truths prevail, is never published, the writer will suffer bitterness, sorrow, anger, and, more dangerously, despair, convinced that the work was not worthy, so not worth those days at the desk. But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer’s soul. If the work is not published, or is published for little money and less public attention, it remains a spiritual, mental, and physical achievement; and if, in public, it is the widow’s mite, it is also, like the widow, more blessed." -- Andre Dubus

About choice...

" Writers don't choose their craft; they need to write in order to face the world." -- Alice Hoffman

Where the soul might go ...

"... to the sky or to the earth far away, to the four-cornered earth far away, to the four quarters of sky, to the billowy ocean, to the flowing streams of light, to the waters, or to the plants, to the sun or to the dawns, to the high mountains far away, to this whole moving universe, beyond the beyond, to what has been and what is to be, far away." (Adapted from the Rig Veda, trans. O'Flaherty.)

Mystery

"It is not the resolution of difficulty that the ideal reader we imagine for ourselves is after, but the nature of the mysterious, mysteriousness itself." -- Jonathan Baumbach, from this interview

Rue is three-fourths of true.

"The market joyfully promotes worthless women writers as long as they reinforce the idea that ladies are dumb and sensitive.” -- Carmen Boullosa

Ki-Lin

"I would walk the floe-edge, then, in those days, hoping to hear the narwhals, for the wonder of their company; and hoping, too, that they would not come. The narwhal is a great fighter for its life, and it is painful to watch its struggle. When they were killed, I ate its flesh out of respect for distant ancestors, and something older than myself. [..]

"I watched closely the ivory gull, a small bird with a high, whistly voice. It has a remarkable ability to appear suddenly in the landscape, seemingly from nowhere [...] It is hard to say even from what direction it has come. It is just suddenly there. [...] Like any animal seen undisturbed in its own environment, the ivory gull seems wondrously adapted. [...] To avoid water in winter, which might freeze to its legs, it has become deft at picking things up without landing. In winter it follows the polar bear. When no carrion turns up in the polar bear's wake, it eats the polar bear's droppings. It winters on the pack ice. Of the genus Pagophila. Ice lover.

"And I would think as I walked of what I had read of a creature of legend in China, an animal similar in its habits to the unicorn, but abstemious, like the ivory gull. It is called the ki-lin. Theki-lin has the compassion of the unicorn but also the air of a spiritual warrior or monk. Odell Shepard has written that 'unlike the western unicorn, the ki-lin has never had commercial value; no drug is made of any part of its body; he exists for his own sake and not for the medication, enrichment, entertainment or even edification of mankind.'

"With our own Aristotelian and Cartesian sense of animals as objects, our religious sense of them as mere receptacles for human symbology, our single-mindedness in unraveling their workings, we are not the kind of culture to take the ki-lin seriously. We are another culture, and these are other times. [...] The history of the intermingling of human cultures is a history of trade -- in objects like the narwhal's tusk, in ideas, and in great narratives. We appropriate when possible the best we can find in all this. The ki-lin, I think, embodies a fine and pertinent idea -- an unpossessible being who serves humans when they have need of its wisdom, a creature who abets dignity and respect in human dealings, who underlines the fundamental mystery with which all life meets analysis.

"I do not mean to suggest that the narwhal should be made into some sort of symbolic ki-lin. Or that buried in the more primitive appreciation of life that some Eskimos retain is an 'answer' to our endless misgivings about the propriety of our invasions of landscapes where we have no history, of our impositions on other cultures. But in that simple appreciation of a world not our own to define, that poised Arctic landscape, we might find some solace by discovering the ki-lin hidden within ourselves, like a shaft of light."

-- Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

He crossed the Danube on his cloak ...

"Legend has it that he was the son of a king, from Dacia or Denmark, who married a French princess in Paris. During the wedding night, the story goes, he was afflicted with a sense of profound unworthiness. Today, he is supposed to have said to his bride, our bodies are adorned, but tomorrow they will be food for worms. Before the break of day, he fled, making a pilgrimage to Italy, where he lived in solitude until he felt the power to work miracles arising within him [...] and went over the Alps to Germany. At Regensburg he crossed the Danube on his cloak, and there made a broken glass whole again; and, in the house of a wheelwright too mean to spare the kindling, lit a fire with icicles. This story of the burning of the frozen substance of life has, of late, meant much to me, and I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the precondition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow." -- W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Use, Refuse

"Method of this project: literary montage. I need not say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulation. But the rags, the refuse -- these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them." -- Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Ears to Hear

"What we ask of writers is that they guarantee survival of what we call human in a world in which everything appears inhuman [...] Literature is like an ear that can hear beyond the understanding of the language of politics." -- Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature.

What She Said

"Perhaps all unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways, but in any home where one person usurps or is given more than a fair share of the oxygen, the others must find ways to go on breathing: denial, secrets, control, use, anger... As a writer, no question my anxiety, my concern for my children, my sometimes longing to escape and leave no forwarding address, were the initial energies that caused me to try to make this world on the page, but right from the beginning, the story came to me
as a novel ..." -- Ginnah Howard, author of Night Navigation

Journey without Maps

"You want to be a map fetishist, help yourself. I'm gone." -- Iain Sinclair, Landor's Tower

Summons

"It is entirely conceivable that life's splendour forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create but summons. " (Kafka, Diaries, 18 October 1921)

Flood

"You know they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding: it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory --- what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our flooding." -- Toni Morrison

The Music of What Happens

Once, as they rested on a chase, a debate arose among the Fianna-Finn as to what was the finest music in the world.
"Tell us that," said Fionn, turning to Oisin.
"The cuckoo calling from the tree that is highest in the hedge," cried his merry son.
"A good sound," said Fionn. "And you, Oscar," he said, “what is to your mind the finest of music?"
"The top of music is the ring of the spear on the shield," cried the stout lad.
"It is a good sound," said Fionn.
And the other champions told their delight: the belling of a stag across the water, the baying of a tuneful pack heard in the distance. The song of the lark, the laugh of a gleeful girl, or the whisper of a moved one.
"They are good sounds, all," said Fionn.
"Tell us, chief," one ventured, "what do you think?"
"The music of what happens," said great Fionn, "that is the finest music in the world."

-from a book of Irish Fairy Tales

Revolution

"Revolution is one function of the romance." -- Gillian Beer

Just A Name

"No poet is obsessed with craft per se; craft is just a name for the mechanics of immortality." -- Dan Chiasson