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Category Archives: writers
“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination…think twice before you think.” — E.E. Cummings
It’s his birthday today. I responded to E.E. Cummings in a visceral way when I first had to read his stuff in high school. I didn’t know what it was all about, but I loved the syntax, the unmistakable look … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, George Orwell, Harriet Monroe, Michael Schmidt
9 Comments
Getting unstuck
From a 2023 interview David Simon gave with Ari Shaprio at NPR: SHAPIRO: Okay, so you’ve spent your career creating television without AI, and I could imagine you today thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve … Continue reading
Posted in writers
4 Comments
“Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks.” — Ciarán Carson
It’s Ciarán Carson’s birthday today. He died in 2019. Paul Muldoon’s name invariably comes up when Carson is mentioned (post about Muldoon here). They share similarities (Northern Irish settings/concerns, long chatty lines, postmodern accumulation of detail, the use of humor, … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Belfast, Ireland, Irish poetry, poetry, The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry
6 Comments
“If someone spends his life writing the truth without caring for the consequences, he inevitably becomes a political authority in a totalitarian regime.” — Václav Havel
“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” — Václav Havel Václav Havel, whose birthday … Continue reading
Posted in On This Day, Theatre, writers
Tagged Czechoslovakia, Golshifteh Farahani, Iran, Iranian film, Jafar Panahi, scripts, Shabnam Toloui, Vaclav Havel, war
2 Comments
“[At Swim-Two-Birds is] just the book to give to your sister, if she is a dirty, boozey girl.” – Dylan Thomas on Flann O’Brien’s masterpiece
When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged Dylan Thomas, Flann O'Brien, Ireland, poetry
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“I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.” — Truman Capote
It’s his birthday today. In Cold Blood put him on the map for all time. His journalism/literature hybrid told the terrifying story of a random murder in Holcomb, Kansas, where an entire family was annihilated in their own home, for … Continue reading
“Sunlight on a broken column.” — T.S. Eliot
It’s T.S. Eliot’s birthday. Poets like William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane both said that they needed to forcibly divorce themselves from Eliot’s influence in order to be able to write. His voice, his way, became THE way. (Interestingly enough, … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Algernon Charles Swinburne, Camille Paglia, Christopher Hitchens, E.M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth Bishop, George Orwell, Harold Bloom, Harriet Monroe, Hart Crane, Henry James, Jeanette Winterson, John Dryden, John Milton, Lord Byron, Marianne Moore, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Philip Larkin, poetry, Rebecca West, Robert Graves, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, William Blake, William Carlos Williams
23 Comments
“Paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.” — William Faulkner on his writing requirements
“The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Movies, On This Day, writers
Tagged nonfiction, Robert Duvall, William Faulkner
12 Comments
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
So you see that old libel that we were cynics and skeptics was nonsense from the beginning. On the contrary we were the great believers. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Generation” It’s his birthday today. First off, here’s a piece … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Baz Luhrmann, essays, F. Scott Fitzgerald, fiction, The Great Gatsby
20 Comments
“I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.” — Eavan Boland
“I began to know that I had to bring the poem I’d learned to write near to the life I was starting to live. And that if anything had to yield in that process, it was the poem not the … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Eavan Boland, Ireland, Irish poetry, Michael Schmidt, poetry
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