Why There Are Words (WTAW) launches its Betty imprint, dedicated to publishing books by women for everyone, today. Read more about it here.
Category: Writing
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This concept (Depth of Focus) is so beautifully described (still on the Introduction to Storm of Steel — if this book is full of the ‘blood lust,’ this Introduction may be as close as I get to Ernst Junger) by Michael Hofmann:
- “While the most characteristic depth of focus of the book is maybe ten yards or so — the interiors, the trenches and dugouts, the cars and lorries, the ruined houses, the beautiful, cultivated catalogues of war junk (like the one on p. 94) — still, there are also equally memorable distance shots, repeatedly of the sky, and of the colors and sounds of various ordnance, moments of eerie contemplation, like the background of a Renaissance portrait, and with just that in-and-out effect . . . “
Wow! I mean . . . WOW!
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Essay # 1: A Town Ringed by Missiles
Imagine turning your head and holding your arm out, as if for a blood test. You feel a slight prick, you loosen the tie, and then suddenly this warmth floods up; you feel a rush that begins at the base of your spine and surges up until it explodes in your head, like light. Then, for hours, you float in a bubble of warmth and well-being, dreams as vivid as movies drift before your eyes. This is why people like heroin.
Imagine you no longer feel like an ordinary girl, bland and vulnerable, but like a girl who is daring, an outsider, one of the guys.
This is why I tried it in the first place.
Beth, is this you, Beth?
I knew you when I was a shy Filipina in the Stanford Creative Writing Program, 23 years old and tongue-tied. And possibly the most naive person ever to enter a Creative Writing Program. And you were kind to me. Why didn’t you just stick me in a trash can and say, You’re hopeless! You convent-bred wuss! I mean, I would have understood if you burst out laughing at every single thing I said in workshop. I even attempted to be more “American” by choosing to spend my first month in the program reading — guess what? No, not Raymond Carver. Not Grace Paley. Moby Dick! Lame! Now I hate Herman Melville!
But, let’s turn back to the essay I’ve just started reading:
Janis was still alive, I think, maybe even Morrison and Hendrix. The Civil Rights Bill was six years old.
Stay tuned.
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Self loves that she can join Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge (CFFC) this week. She has got a gallery of rides!
- The Rolls that has seen better days was near Spitalfield’s, East London.
- Beltane & Pop van was on the London Eye Pier.
- The bus was self’s ride from Belfast to Downpatrick, on her way to River Mill for a month of mad writing, last April.
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The quote from Louise Gluck is on p. 85 of Dear Memory:
- At the heart of that work will be a question, a problem. And we will feel, as we read, a sense that the poet was not wed to any outcome. The poems themselves are like experiments, which the reader is freely invited to recreate in his own mind. Those poets who claustrophobically oversee or bully or dictate response prematurely advertise the deficiencies of the chosen particulars, as though without strenuous guidance the reader might not reach an intended conclusion.
Victoria Chang: “Louise Gluck talks about how writing is the act of learning to know.”
It is very interesting how Chang, in writing about grief, ends up writing about writing.
Stay tuned.
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Sometimes writing can feel like digging holes, planting and replanting things that might never turn into anything. My eyes point down when I’m planting, but the breath of something else is always in my ears. Sometimes that breath is mortality. Other times, that breath is history. Sometimes memory. Sometimes the moon. Oftentimes, silence.
— Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, p. 77 -
It appears self’s books have been available on kindle for a few years. She never knew!
Two of the four:
The cover of The Lost Language is a detail of a painting by the late, great Filipino artist Santiago Bose.
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Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday.
Kanlaon 