Just Staring Just Writing

Ephemera from the Royal Alexandra show opens up to a reprinted interview and old chestnut.

From the programme to Lily Tomlin in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe written by Jane Wagner, this bit on the nature of writing work…

I know I lack discipline. But I also think that being at the typewriter is not absolutely the most important thing about writing. I find it hard to get Lily to understand that I'm writing even when I'm just staring out the window.

Excerpt from an interview with Lily and Jane by Stephen Saban appearing in May 1986 issue of Details. Reminds one of the James Thurber self-reported anecdote:

I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.’ She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, ‘Is he sick?’ ‘No,’ my wife says, ‘he’s writing something.’

James Thurber, The Art of Fiction No. 10 interviewed by George Plimpton & Max Steele, Fall 1955.

And so for day 2038
12.07.2012

Unclipping Oliver

It's on the jacket as a blurb. It appears in callouts.

My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

Fair enough. But the celebration of literacy is missing.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. […] I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Reassembling the pieces to the two-paragraph status…

I cannot pretend I am without fear. My predominant feeling is one of gratitude.I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

"My Own Life" in Gratitude by Oliver Sacks

And so for day 1510
31.01.2011