MAPPING
Narrative method, mythical shapes, hysterical realism, literary maximalism, codified things, unauthentic representation.
Inherent Vice
“Back when, she could go weeks without anything more complicated than a pout. Now she was laying some heavy combination of face ingredients on him that he couldn’t read at all. Maybe something she’d picked up at acting school. “It isn’t what you’re thinking, Doc.””
The Value of Literacy
“I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.”
(See also “This is how I read” and “the tyranny of belief in linear time.” (via robertogreco)
Pinter in 1978 – 02.05.16
I dated this because there probably’ll be more than one.
There was a recent rescreening of 1978 interview.
This on writing his first play
I wrote that play totally without calculation. In other words, I started at the top and at a certain point There was a knock at the door and someone came in, and I had absolutely no idea who he was, who he might be, what he might say, and I let it run. I let it happen, and found that he did have a voice, that he was the Landlord, in fact. That was the first chapter.
The two visitors arrived, and I didn’t know what they were on about really, or what they wanted. They were just part of the whole atmosphere.
This on starting:
It remains the essential joy of writing, I think. You’ve got a blank page, one moment, there’s nothing on it, and the next moment there’s something on it.
Now if you know what that something’s going to be, really, fully and comprehensively before you get to it, I don’t quite see where the spring of discovery can exist.
The discovery exists in the act of discovery.
The Gunslinger
Mysterious and strange. Just what we like.
Very aware this is a single spoke in a very large wheel.
You wonder if he even knew where he was going after he wrote that first sentence.
“Go bravely to it, not as a coward.”
Stop worrying about content and what your dipshit peers will think and who you may or may not offend on social media and whether or not someone will google you in the future and give you or not give you a job because those jobs will kill your soul anyway.
All of those things are things you don’t need in your life. They are the things that come from without, not from within. And that’s what matters: What’s inside of you. That is the stuff of you.
Where do you see the film fitting within the spectrum from news to documentary?
“In Syd Field’s book about screenwriting, he said to take a phrase that must sing throughout the film and tape it to your typewriter. And here that phrase is “Europe smashed the first left government in modern history. The politicians made mistakes, but the people were always really strong.” That’s what it’s about.”
Taking Drawing Lessons from Artist and Journalist Molly Crabapple
“There are certain things I do if I sit down to write,”
“I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning,” he explained. “I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places. The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon”
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The Daily Habits of Famous Writers: Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, Stephen King etc.
(t)
Paul Greer 