My idea of a writer: someone interested in “everything.” I’d always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation of a writer in this way. And reasonable to suppose that such fervency would find more scope in a great metropolis than in any variant of provincial life, including the excellent universities I had attended. The only surprise was that there weren’t more people like me.
—Susan Sontag
For a long time, he communicated exclusively by answering machine. I would leave him a message at some point during the day—he didn’t answer the phone—and then, late at night, when I was no longer at my desk, he would leave a very long response on my voicemail. I didn’t take this personally—it was a quirk of his, and I think he was perhaps more open and direct speaking to a machine than he would have been speaking directly to another voice.
For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee – with lots of sugar. And there’s lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It’s a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob’s.
—David Lynch
(Via.)
From the Washington Post’s profile of Edward P. Jones:
“He makes his home near Washington National Cathedral in an apartment so disheveled that he allows only close friends inside. There is no bed (he sleeps on a pallet), no bookshelves, no couch, nor much to sit on other than a kitchen chair. He does not have a car, a driver’s license or any mechanized means of transport, not even a bicycle. He has no cellphone, no DVD player, and his Internet connection is sporadic. Though he loves movies and trash daytime television — in particular, those judge shows — he has only a 10-year-old, 13-inch TV and has never had cable. He has never been to a sporting event. He has no deep romantic attachments. He says his closest friend has been Lil Coyne, an elderly woman who for 20 years lived down the hall from him in an apartment building in Alexandria. She died this summer at age 90.”
(Via.)
Recently, I’ve developed a weakness for hotel stationery. It’s rare enough to receive an honest to goodness letter in the mail these days. Getting one on hotel letterhead just adds to the romance. If you believe my stationery, I’m at the Hotel Ritz one day, Fontainebleau the next. And while a box of Crane’s correspondence cards will run you north of $100, hotel stationery is complementary, so I try to go home with a stack every time I’m on the road. (Some of the classiest joints like the Chateau Marmont will even print you up personalized stationery.) And if it’s a vintage find off eBay, all the better. I just got a box of stationery from the long defunct Eastern Steam Lines. Along the bottom of the paper it says, “Onboard Steamship.” That’ll keep ‘em guessing.
(Via.)
This page’s footer made me smile:
Hi, if you are coming to this site via Internet Explorer 6, you might not be getting the best experience possible. Honestly, I can’t even begin to think about what your entire experience on the internet must be like? (…probably like riding a bike on the highway while cars blow by you on their way to Costco to get gallons of mayonnaise and 60-inch plasma TV’s). How will you ever be able to use this website?????? You wont. You’re an asshole and your browser is an asshole. So look, I’m going to be honest: I kind of hate you. BUT we c-a-n make this work. Here is what I am going to need you to do: fire up your Toshiba ShitBook© that weighs about 45 pounds, wipe the Cheeto dust off the screen, download Safari, delete Internet Explorer from your computer, punch yourself in the face, and get me a pulled pork sandwich.
(Via.)
Posted in Links, technology, writing
I don’t have a cellphone. I have never used a computer, and I’m not lying to you – I have an assistant. I’m computer-illiterate. I’ve never been on the internet…. I don’t have a television set…. I ignore the world. I live in a vacuum. I don’t watch TV. I don’t read the newspapers. I don’t go to movies. I lie in the dark and I brood. I think about deep, dark torture, historical shit. I think of the holy conjunction of men and women, and I put all this stuff together in my head.
“Like their creator, Tarantino’s characters never shut up and are plainly enthralled by the sound of their own voices. More than the spasms of violence, the lifeblood of his movies is their ornate dialogue, which tends to unfurl at great, meandering length. (Tarantino was sly enough to call attention to this hallmark early on: In Reservoir Dogs, when Tim Roth’s character, an undercover cop, is handed the scripted anecdote that he will have to perform to pass as Mr. Orange, he balks at the sheer level of detail: ‘I’ve got to memorize all this? There’s over four fucking pages of shit here.’) Tarantino movies are known for two kinds of verbal expulsions: the stem-winding monologue (Samuel L. Jackson’s Old Testament shtick in Pulp Fiction) and the micro-observational tangent (Steve Buscemi’s anti-tipping tirade in Reservoir Dogs). In Death Proof, which revels in a buzzed, leisurely camaraderie, he quietly masters a third kind: the language of downtime and hanging out, not exactly naturalistic (his most subdued chatter retains a heightened quality) but less baroque and truer to the rhythms of actual human interaction. Modest as it seems, Death Proof is in fact a clear-cut demonstration of Tarantino’s gifts.”
Related viewing: “Quentin Tarantino: Words in Action”
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