I have two work spaces, one in Paris, the other in the country. Between them there is no common object, for nothing is ever carried back and forth. Yet these sites are identical. Why? Because the arrangement of tools (paper, pens, desk, clocks, calendars) is the same. It is the structure of the space which constitutes its identity. The private phenomenon would suffice to shed some light on structuralism: the system prevails over the very being of objects.

Roland Barthes from his autobiography. 

I wonder about this kind of thing all the time. Does the place actually change the structure of writing? Does it really change? My friend Rick said something last weekend that touches on this—that I seem more level, calmer, and focused in the things I post when I’m home. I thought about this for awhile because there is something about having an opportunity to write and create at home. Place does make a difference in that your mentality shifts. That’s really at the core of why I’m going home: I’ll be able to do what I care about up there, because the place keeps me level. Whereas here I’m like a chicken with its head cut off. Too much stimuli.

From A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. I read this book just before moving to New York and now I’m re-reading it, remembering how much I absolutely loved it nearly eight years ago. Overwhelming positivity permeates every sentence of this book. As if the lesson here is to live life utterly and completely to the fullest, and, for me, to be the best brother I can be.   

From A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. I read this book just before moving to New York and now I’m re-reading it, remembering how much I absolutely loved it nearly eight years ago.

Overwhelming positivity permeates every sentence of this book. As if the lesson here is to live life utterly and completely to the fullest, and, for me, to be the best brother I can be.   

Source: instagr.am

I think the most important thing I learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King’s book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. In there he points out that if you just write a page a day, just 300 words, at the end of a year you’d have a novel. It was immensely reassuring - suddenly something huge and impossible became strangely easy. As an adult, it’s how I’ve written books I haven’t had the time to write, like my children’s novel Coraline.

from Neil Gaiman’s interview with Stephen King.

One of my journalism professors from St. Bonaventure once gave me this page-a-day advice, and ever since then, it’s something I’ve stuck to. It is by far the best piece of writing advice I’ve ever heard, and it is something I share every time anyone asks. 

Source: journal.neilgaiman.com

The whole of speech is epitomized in this expendability of words, in this froth ceaselessly swept onward, and speech is found only where language self-evidently functions like a devouring process which swallows only the moving crest of the words. Writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in something beyond language, it develops like a seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the threat of a secret, it is an anti-communication, it is intimidating.
Roland Barthes, from Writing Degree Zero, which is just this heady meditation on writing and it is exactly my kind of thing. This book is full of gems, and I feel a little summer obsession reading coming on with him. 
Roland Barthes. I picked up A Barthes Reader today after getting into a discussion with some of my Wolfe Institute co-workers. Almost instantly, I felt like I just took down a massive chocolate shake, which really only happens when I have a chocolate shake, and when I find something within myself in relation to a great writer. Susan Sontag, in her introduction, writes:  “Throughout his late writing Barthes repeatedly disavows the, as it were, vulgar roles of system-builder, authority, mentor, expert, in order to reserve for himself the privileges and freedoms of delectation: the excerise of taste for Barthes means, usually, to praise. What makes a role a choice one is his unstated commitment to finding something new and unfamiliar to praise.”  This is something that I’ve exercised for a while, to put it simply—as one’s mother might tell us—if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. In my waning days here in New York City, I find myself trying to celebrate and go forth with as much energy as possible. There is barely any time left. Enjoy your life, Sontag seems to be saying, pay attention to it.  When I started reading this introduction there was a girl who got on the train with me, she had a black backpack and on it, stenciled in pink, “Cupcakes are the new black.” She was going through Poets & Writers Magazine with a pen, constantly working. We never stop working do we? Expanding, learning, seeing where we can put our thoughts.  “Writing is Barthes’s perennial subject—indeed, perhaps no once since Flaubert (in his letters) has thought as brilliantly as passionately as Barthes has about what writing is. Much of his work is devoted to portraits of the vocation of the writer: from the early debunking studies included in  Mythologies of the writer as seen by others, that is the writer as fraud, such as “The Writer on Holiday,” to more ambitious essays on writers writing, that is, the writer as hero and martyr, such as “Flaubert and the Sentence,” about the writer’s “agony of style.” Barthes’s wonderful essays on writers must be considered as different version of his great apologia for the vocation of the writer. For all his admiration for the self-punishing standards of integrity set by Flaubert, he dares to conceive of writing as a kind of happiness…” All of this puts me back to where I started here in New York, when Miller told me to “get a notebook and write down everything you see here,” because before I know it—I’ll stop paying attention. Like this renews my sense of celebration, of taking note and the joy in my life here. Now that I’ve figured what I enjoy, I’m going to go away and spread it around, see what can be done with it in a place I love. Saying, “We’re only alive once! Do what we love! Write about it! And then share it and see if you can help someone get to this point!” Chappelle has it right, “It’s a celebration, bitches!”  

Roland Barthes.

I picked up A Barthes Reader today after getting into a discussion with some of my Wolfe Institute co-workers. Almost instantly, I felt like I just took down a massive chocolate shake, which really only happens when I have a chocolate shake, and when I find something within myself in relation to a great writer. Susan Sontag, in her introduction, writes: 

“Throughout his late writing Barthes repeatedly disavows the, as it were, vulgar roles of system-builder, authority, mentor, expert, in order to reserve for himself the privileges and freedoms of delectation: the excerise of taste for Barthes means, usually, to praise. What makes a role a choice one is his unstated commitment to finding something new and unfamiliar to praise.” 

This is something that I’ve exercised for a while, to put it simply—as one’s mother might tell us—if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. In my waning days here in New York City, I find myself trying to celebrate and go forth with as much energy as possible. There is barely any time left. Enjoy your life, Sontag seems to be saying, pay attention to it. 

When I started reading this introduction there was a girl who got on the train with me, she had a black backpack and on it, stenciled in pink, “Cupcakes are the new black.” She was going through Poets & Writers Magazine with a pen, constantly working. We never stop working do we? Expanding, learning, seeing where we can put our thoughts. 

“Writing is Barthes’s perennial subject—indeed, perhaps no once since Flaubert (in his letters) has thought as brilliantly as passionately as Barthes has about what writing is. Much of his work is devoted to portraits of the vocation of the writer: from the early debunking studies included in  Mythologies of the writer as seen by others, that is the writer as fraud, such as “The Writer on Holiday,” to more ambitious essays on writers writing, that is, the writer as hero and martyr, such as “Flaubert and the Sentence,” about the writer’s “agony of style.” Barthes’s wonderful essays on writers must be considered as different version of his great apologia for the vocation of the writer. For all his admiration for the self-punishing standards of integrity set by Flaubert, he dares to conceive of writing as a kind of happiness…”

All of this puts me back to where I started here in New York, when Miller told me to “get a notebook and write down everything you see here,” because before I know it—I’ll stop paying attention. Like this renews my sense of celebration, of taking note and the joy in my life here. Now that I’ve figured what I enjoy, I’m going to go away and spread it around, see what can be done with it in a place I love. Saying, “We’re only alive once! Do what we love! Write about it! And then share it and see if you can help someone get to this point!” Chappelle has it right, “It’s a celebration, bitches!”  

Trailer for Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, via Rachel. Yep, counting the days to this. 

Descriptions of Connecticut in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.

Via ubiquitousamericana:

abhorrent Connecticut
accursed Connecticut (x2)
maddening Connecticut
degenerate Connecticut
Bad News Connecticut
repugnant Connectcut
Fucking Connecticut
mephitic Connecticut
loathsome Connecticut
goddamned Connecticut

The primary thing I learned from Zone One is to avoid Connecticut during the zombie apocalypse.

Not just those fantastic descriptors, but I also greatly appreciate the fact that Buffalo is the haven of American thought. 

Source: bradleywarshauer

Finding, stalking, and interviewing writers who haven’t published in a while: Dustin Long at HTMLGIANT. You know, I asked myself this question when I was going through my bookshelf at home and seeing this book. I loved Icelander when it came out and I knew Dustin from the Brian K. Vaughan board. We became friends and I knew he was moving to Brooklyn for grad school I think. I want to say he is from Indiana. I’m happy to hear that he’s got some more work in the oven, but I’m also dismayed that his dissertation topic is the kind of thing I’ve also been thinking about.  Wish I knew what I did with his email address. It would be great to catch up.

Finding, stalking, and interviewing writers who haven’t published in a while: Dustin Long at HTMLGIANT.

You know, I asked myself this question when I was going through my bookshelf at home and seeing this book. I loved Icelander when it came out and I knew Dustin from the Brian K. Vaughan board. We became friends and I knew he was moving to Brooklyn for grad school I think. I want to say he is from Indiana.

I’m happy to hear that he’s got some more work in the oven, but I’m also dismayed that his dissertation topic is the kind of thing I’ve also been thinking about.  Wish I knew what I did with his email address. It would be great to catch up.

Molly Crabapple:

“Si Spurrier drowns you in his grouchy fabricated nonsense, in a shame-inducing attempt to shill his novel “A Serpent Uncoiled.” Which is, like, really really good.”

Says Si.  Si is delightful.  And you should buy his book

Si is wonderful and you should watch this, because he is one of the best writers today. The man is literally the king of obscene phrasing, the level of which is put on display in this magnificent video.

Source: mollycrabapple