Eight Minutes

“All of our problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter. The more efficient you are at doing...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:12:28 -0500

“All of our problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter. The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter. If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.” — Russ Ackoff

Readings on the Atomic Bomb

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:06:41 -0500

Hiroshima (John Hersey)

Shockwave (Stephen Walker)

“Unacceptable Damage,” The New York Review of Books (Lewis Thomas)

A World Destroyed (Martin Sherwin)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Richard Rhodes)

Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb (Ronald Takaki)

Italian Travel Writing

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:56:28 -0500

Twilight in Italy (DH Lawrence)

Italian Hours (Henry James)

Italian Journey (Wolfgang van Goethe)

Pictures from Italy (Charles Dickens)

“Everybody says that you should write what you know about. But I’ve always believed that...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:56:59 -0400

“Everybody says that you should write what you know about. But I’ve always believed that you [should] write about what you supposedly don’t know about, or you write towards what you supposedly don’t know. This sounds strange, of course. But in making these imaginative leaps you can sometimes find out what you knew, but weren’t aware that you knew. So in making these spectacular leaps to places that you shouldn’t really go, there’s a journey. You take the long road in order to find the short way. You learn these things that you weren’t aware of. If someone writes only about themselves, they have a book and a half in them, and that’s it. There’s a great book and then there’s this half book where they often get stuck.” — Colum McCann, Poets & Writers interview

“f you can raise up the individual voice in any small way, if you can go into the mythical...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:17:19 -0400

“f you can raise up the individual voice in any small way, if you can go into the mythical room that has been swept clean by historians and cultural critics, by politicians and journalists, and find a small speck of dust still left there and raise it up into something human and good and valued, then I think you’ve done you’re job as a writer in a big way.” — Colum McCann, Powells interview

The Sports Guy

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:09:00 -0400

Bill Simmons has never met a paragraph he couldn’t lengthen.

ESPN.com’s star columnist may boast more than 900,000 followers on Twitter. But he has made his name—and his nickname, “The Sports Guy”—online by going long. Really long. He makes endless rankings of his most- and least-favorite players and teams. He displays a nearly infinite capacity for publishing answers to his fans’ mail. His podcasts can run the length of a feature film, spiked with deft jokes about American pop culture and delivered in the accent of a Boston sports nut.

***

For “The Book of Basketball,” Mr. Simmons spent three years shortening his regular column-writing schedule to pore over the 82 books he cites. He also dug through countless periodicals and videos of old basketball games and did his own interviews with such NBA greats as Isiah Thomas and Bill Walton. He leans especially on the sportswriting of David Halberstam, Jack McCallum and Terry Pluto, as well as memoirs from hoops stars, including Bill Bradley and one of his Boston Celtics idols, Bill Russell.

Adam Thompson, “Taking Hoops into Overtime,” The Wall Street Journal

And the Montclair exhibit provides some surprises. For example, artists of the American West—Jozef...

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:20:00 -0400

And the Montclair exhibit provides some surprises. For example, artists of the American West—Jozef Bakos and Willard Nash among them—demonstrate that they too are descended from Cézanne, even though they never traveled to Europe or to American art centers where the master’s works could be seen. They heard how Cézanne, instead of producing a naturalistic representation of his subject, analyzed and rebuilt it on canvas in a flattened perspective, using fractured, sculptural forms composed of patches of color instead of conventional light-and-shade modeling. They learned about his thinking—sometimes described as a fusion of intuition and intellect—from reproductions and from teachers such as Andrew Dasburg, one of the few Americans who exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, when he was just 26.

Dasburg had traveled to Paris a few years earlier and, upon discovering Cézanne’s work, divided his art into “before” and “after.” Here his charming “Floral Still Life,” from 1912, sharpens the angles on vibrant red flowers in a slightly off-kilter composition. His softer, earth-toned portrait “Judson Smith” (1923) also employs acute angles, flat planes and straight lines. By then, Dasburg was traveling to New Mexico, proselytizing for Cézanne and Cubism. Among his students was Nash, whose “Self-Portrait With Pipe,” from 1928, comes straight from Cézanne’s many man-with-pipe pictures, but Americanized, with a more casual pose and a striped shirt unlikely to be seen in Aix.

Likewise, it’s a revelation to see photographers Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen here. The works by Strand, such as “Pears and Bowls” (1916), and Steichen, such as “Three Pears and an Apple” (1921), are particularly convincing. Choosing subjects Cézanne painted again and again, these photographers did not ape him; they imbibed his use of space and light to create their own style.

— Judith H. Dobrzynski

“None of this has come easy for me. It’s stuff I’ve worked hard for, and a lot of it I just...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:49:45 -0400

“None of this has come easy for me. It’s stuff I’ve worked hard for, and a lot of it I just learned how to do this off-season. Seeing the standouts on this team studying film, working hard at practice, staying after practice to work, whether it’s the guys on the O-line working on the bags or the DBs catching deep balls. The little things really count in this league. That’s something I didn’t really realize until this past off-season. You have to work on the things you’re already good at as much as the things you’re not good at.” — Sidney Rice, NFL wide receiver

For more ideas on drafting, consider John McPhee’s process. His writing teacher in high school...

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:19:56 -0400

For more ideas on drafting, consider John McPhee’s process. His writing teacher in high school assigned three compositions a week, with an outline of its beginning, middle and end. His process of writing, as is his style, is taut, ordered, and disciplined. He gathers material from the people he interviews, or from research. He says he goes into the process with no preconceptions, preferring his mind to be as blank as the page. After he has taken notes, he retypes them, which gives him ideas about phrasing, order, analogies. It also lets him know what he needs to go back over or do more research on.

He writes the “lead” first, a journalism term. Then, he writes the rest of the topics on index cards, so he can see the possibilities of order and shuffle the cards. He tacks them on the wall so he can get a broad view. Then, he goes to the corresponding notes, cuts those up, and sorts them in some order and puts them in a file folder. He has a dart that he tacks up under the card he is working on. You might conduct a similar process with your annotations. Group them into topics, then decide on the order of those topics (parts), and them determine how they’ll fit into a larger whole.

He’s a craftsmen, and understands that the work must have a form (he once wrote a book about making a birchbark canoe). When McPhee writes a first draft, he spends twelve hour stints in his office, concentrating and distilling his research into prose.

— Rick Van Noy via Edward Vielmetti

As time went on, [John] McPhee began to focus more and more on the structure of a piece. Each...

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:15:35 -0400

As time went on, [John] McPhee began to focus more and more on the structure of a piece. Each article, he believes, has an organic shape. He finds it by sorting his ample research into subtopics, writing the name of each subtopic on an index card, and playing around with the cards till he finds the right order. To an outsider, the results of this search can seem specific to the point of absurdity. An introduction to the collection The Literary Journalists (1984) reports that the Hoving profile was shaped like a capital Y, in which “the descending branches finally joined at a moment of an epiphany during Hoving’s college career at Princeton, and then proceeded along the bottom stem in a single line.” In some sense that I struggled to understand but eventually gave up on, another famous piece, “Travels in Georgia,” was apparently shaped like a lower case e. “Like Water from a Stone,” Slate.

Tucked away in the cabinets of Oliver Sack’s Greenwich Village office are hundreds of small...

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:32:03 -0400

Tucked away in the cabinets of Oliver Sack’s Greenwich Village office are hundreds of small black notebooks, each one filled with jottings and sketches, newspaper clippings and photos. These are the accumulated reflections from a lifetime spent observing the extraordinary ways the human brain can misfire and misbehave… Discover Presents The Brain, Fall 2009

Nothing is lost on Maira Kalman. She collects ideas and images as a child on the beach collects...

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:26:11 -0400

Nothing is lost on Maira Kalman. She collects ideas and images as a child on the beach collects seashells. Her pail is a journal or sketchbook or camera—one or more of which she has handy at all times. Into these she drops hundreds of photos a week plus sketches and thoughts sparked by such things as a chair or people walking down the street or a pink box delivered to her home. “I wake up and, from the very first minute, I’m writing down my dreams, thoughts or sentences or images or fragments of images. The day continues like that,” she says. “I’m really just accumulating this scrapbook of the week—all the ephemera of the week.” The Artist’s Magazine, October 2009

I don’t believe that music is either emotional or rational. As I’ve said, all this terminology only...

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:34:50 -0400

I don’t believe that music is either emotional or rational. As I’ve said, all this terminology only speaks about our reaction to it. If there’s only emotion, you cannot really make music, because music is a combination of things; music is larger than all of this. And the difficulty in talking about music is that music definitely has a very strong content, but that content can only be expressed in sound. If you try to express it in words, you only reduce it. The greatness of music is precisely that it can laugh and cry at the same time, that it can be mathematical and sensual at the same time, that it can be all extremes and opposites put together. Music, in that sense, is a whole creation, it’s a creation of a world where everything is expressed through sound. And therefore whatever you say about it is not a description of the thing itself, but a description of your perception of it at that moment. — Daniel Barenboim

I am reminded of when Eudora Welty came to Hollins. The back of the class was filling up with these...

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 19:34:00 -0400

I am reminded of when Eudora Welty came to Hollins. The back of the class was filling up with these guys in beards, academic types. As she read this short story in which one female character presents another with a marble cake, you could see one of the beards getting all excited. He started waving his hand as soon as she stopped reading and said, “Miz Welty, how did you come up with that powerful symbol of the marble cake, with the feminine and masculine and the Freudian and the Jungian all mixed together like that?” — his doctoral thesis probably hanging on this. And Welty, this wonderful little old lady, just looked at him for a really long time from the lectern. Finally she said, “Well, you see, it’s a recipe that’s been in my family for some time.”— Sally Mann

"Complex ecosystems are more resilient, and complex species seem to have significant advantages over..."

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:00:26 -0400

“Complex ecosystems are more resilient, and complex species seem to have significant advantages over simpler ones when the environment in stable. However, during times of change, complex species are more likely to die off. At those times, the hardiest species are those which are very simple, such as viruses and bacteria. Simple organisms are hardier because they are less dependent on their specific surroundings. That simplicity is significantly beneficial when the ecosystem is subjected to major change such as that might occur if a large meteor struck the earth or a large volcano eruption caused a major drop in temperatures. When the climate changes, dependency on the previous climate is a significant disadvantage.”

- Curtis Faith, Way of the Turtle

"What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial..."

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:38:10 -0400

“What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire.”

- Francine Prose

"Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfill their..."

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:41:35 -0400

“Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfill their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were, and by wresting the past from fictions and legends.”

- Czeslaw Milosz

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and...

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:57:29 -0400

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time. This expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

—Martha Graham

What is it about education in America, that you walk into a room full of six year olds and say,...

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:06:00 -0400

What is it about education in America, that you walk into a room full of six year olds and say, “How many people here can draw?” and every hand goes up. “I can draw. I can draw anything.” And then you walk into a classroom of graduate students and you say, “How many people here can draw?” and almost no one thinks they can. What kind of an education system is that?

- Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, quoted in Slideology

A book should try to accomplish something more than just to repeat a child’s own experiences....

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:12:12 -0400

A book should try to accomplish something more than just to repeat a child’s own experiences. One would hope rather to make a child laugh or feel clear and happy-headed as he follows a simple rhythm to its logical end, to jog him with the unexpected and comfort him with the familiar; and perhaps to lift him for a few moments from his own problems of shoe laces that won’t tie and busy parents and mysterious clock time into the world of a bug or a bear or a bee or a boy living in the timeless world of story.

- Margaret Wise Brown