“I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.”
—David Ogilvy
(Via Letters of Note.)
“Innis’s technique, like McLuhan’s, forswears the building up of a convincing argument, or any attempt at ‘proof,’ instead gathering in a ton of disparate ideas from different disciplines that might seem irreconcilable at first; yet considering them together results in a shifted perspective, and a cascade of new insights.”
— Maria Bustillos, “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert”
Posted in writing
“All of us who have migraine suffer not only from the attacks themselves but from this common conviction that we are perversely refusing to cure ourselves by taking a couple of aspirin, that we are making ourselves sick, that we ‘bring it on ourselves.’ And in the most immediate sense, the sense of why we have a headache this Tuesday and not last Thursday, of course we often do. There certainly is what doctors call a ‘migraine personality,’ and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of error, rather rigidly organized, perfectionist. ‘You don’t look like a migraine personality,’ a doctor once said to me. ‘Your hair’s messy. But I suppose you’re a compulsive housekeeper.’ Actually my house is kept even more negligently than my hair, but the doctor was right nonetheless: perfectionism can also take the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.”
—Joan Didion, “In Bed,” The White Album (1979)
In an interview about his latest book, McKenzie Wark discusses his preference for “low theory”:
The American university is where so-called ‘French theory’ was actually invented, and not in philosophy departments but via comparative literature, other literature departments, sometimes media studies, and various other places. So you couldn’t quite call it philosophy—it got called ‘theory’ and sometimes ‘high theory’. You end up with this construct, based essentially around the reception of Derrida into the Anglophone world through these centres of intellectual power in the US. And this is interesting, but it occupies a certain kind of terrain, a certain space. It requires a certain training.
I’ve always been much more interested in something else: The self-conscious attempt to construct conceptual practices outside of formal settings. That is what Marx did, it’s what Freud did, it’s what Benjamin did; I’d even say it’s what Nietzsche did, because of course he’s on ‘permanent leave’ when he’s writing all these amazing books, when he’s already losing it. Somehow, these guys are all now ‘high theory’, but that’s not where they came from whatsoever. Marx is not a philosopher, Freud is not a philosopher, Benjamin is not a philosopher; I’d even say Nietzsche is not a philosopher. They’re all doing ‘low theory’, and I’m trying to tell stories that fit into that tradition, maybe not at that level, but as a whole other way of thinking about the practice of knowledge in everyday life. This puts on the table the question of the politics of knowledge in a way that can’t be directly asked, or answered, in the space of the university.
Yeah, me too.
Posted in academe, books, philosophy, writing
(See also Mike Monteiro’s “Fuck You, Pay Me” talk.)
“I don’t get people who don’t like coffee, and I distrust writers who don’t drink it. How can anyone be a writer without coffee? … Coffee has been an essential tool of almost all the greatest modern writers, and certainly of the most prolific ones. Voltaire reportedly drank 50 cups a day (and I’ve seen estimates as high as 72 cups a day). Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote what amounted to a love letter about freshly roasted coffee. Arthur Conan Doyle and his fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, loved coffee almost as much as they loved cocaine (Holmes: ‘A cup of coffee would clear my brain’). Anthony Trollope, admirably disciplined, rose every morning at exactly 5:00 and drank his coffee before writing for three hours, after which he went to work at the post office. Edgar Allan Poe drank coffee by the gallon (the tell-tale heart’s pounding: conscience or caffeine overdose?). Maigret’s creator, Georges Simenon, could write a detective novel in three days on the power of his bottomless coffee cup. Beethoven loved his coffee strong, and Johann Sebastian Bach dedicated a sonata (BMV 211) to the glories of coffee.”
(Via.)
Posted in coffee, endorsements, quotes, writing
“I’m not exactly a slow writer – when I’m really cooking I can do 800–1,000 good, polished words in two hours, that’s not bad – but it can take me a long time to get cooking, and sometimes one sentence can hang me up for an hour. (Those are usually the first sentences, in the next draft, to be cut. You would think I might have learned by now.) I have a hard time writing an excuse to one of my kid’s teachers, a recipe for Dutch babies, an apologetic email, without sinking into a revisionary funk. I’m also slow to know what I think, and slow to know how I feel: we’re talking reptile time, rock time, empires rising and then crumbling to dust. I still haven’t decided how I feel about Sandinista!, for example, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off since 1980.”
(Via Alan Jacobs.)
Posted in writing
“My best working-to music are the film scores of Ennio Morricone. You may know his sound from the Sergio Leone Italian westerns – A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, etc. – but you probably don’t know that he’s done almost five hundred film scores, songs, albums of background music, television tracks, arrangements, orchestrations, canonical and ecclesiastical works, full orchestra pieces for modern classicism, incidental music and whatall. His ‘sound’ ranges from the dramatic exuberance of, say, The Big Gundown, a 1967 Lee Van Cleef oater, to the exquisite loneliness of Terry Malick’s film Days of Heaven, for which work he was nominated for an Oscar. Morricone is my best companion when I’m deep in the world of what I’m writing.”
—Harlan Ellison, 1981
“It’s a writer’s responsibility to orient modern publics to the catastrophic world in which they live. But he cannot do this if he remains a mere specialist. To do it all, he’s got to do it big!”
—C. Wright Mills
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