Repost: 25 Famous Authors’ Poetic Descriptions of Paris

http://flavorwire.com/404021/25-famous-authors-poetic-descriptions-of-paris

 

by Alison Nastasi

July 14, 2013

 

Happy Bastille Day! It’s the 224th anniversary of the storming of the famous Paris prison, which helped dismantled France’s repressive monarchy. If you can’t dance along the Champs-Élysées, but want to spread the Parisian pride, head past the jump for a few eloquent and adoring words from famous writers that celebrate the City of Light.

 

Image credit: Ernest Hemingway Collection.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Ernest Hemingway

 

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

 

“Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.”

 

“There are only two places in the world where we can live happy: at home and in Paris.”

 

Charles Dickens

 

“I cannot tell you what an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!”

 

Henry James

 

“The great merit of the place is that one can arrange one’s life here exactly as one pleases… there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.”

 

“Paris is the greatest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes.”

 

Honoré de Balzac

 

“Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.”

 

Victor Hugo

 

“To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.”

 

 

Oscar Wilde

 

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris.”

 

Willa Cather

 

“Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.”

 

Harriet Beecher Stowe

 

“At last I have come into a dreamland.”

 

Katherine Anne Porter

 

“Paris loves anybody who can live anarchically and be delightful entertainment at the same time.”

 

Henry Miller

 

“When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.”

 

Gaston Leroux

 

“In Paris, our lives are one masked ball.”

 

 

Gertrude Stein

 

“Paris, France is exciting and peaceful.”

 

“America is my country, and Paris is my hometown.”

 

Anaïs Nin

 

“Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and loves. One more enclosed and intimate day of friendship and love, an alcove. Paris intimate like a room. Everything designed for intimacy. Five to seven was the magic hour of the lovers’ rendezvous. Here it is the cocktail hour.”

 

“In Paris, when entering a room, everyone pays attention, seeks to make you feel welcome, to enter into conversation, is curious, responsive. Here it seems everyone is pretending not to see, hear, or look too intently. The faces reveal no interest, no responsiveness. Overtones are missing. Relationships seem impersonal and everyone conceals his secret life, whereas in Paris it was the exciting substance of our talks, intimate revelations and sharing of experience.”

 

Katherine Mansfield

 

“I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city… It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.”

 

Edmund White

 

“Paris… is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.”

 

Allen Ginsberg

 

“You can’t escape the past in Paris, and yet what’s so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn’t seem to burden.”

 

 

Alexandre Dumas

 

“I came to Paris with four écus in my pocket, and I’d have fought with anybody who told me I was in no condition to buy the Louvre.”

 

Jean Cocteau

 

“In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.”

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

“An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.”

 

James Thurber

 

“The whole of Paris is a vast university of art, literature and music… it is worth anyone’s while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in Everything”

 

Molière

 

“Outside of Paris, there is no hope for the cultured.”

 

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

“The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older — intelligence and good manners.”

 

Angela Carter

 

“Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.”

 

James Joyce

 

“There is an atmosphere of spiritual effort here. No other city is quite like it. It is a racecourse tension. I wake early, often at 5 o’clock, and start writing at once.”

 

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

 

“Paris is a mighty schoolmaster, a grand enlightener of the provincial intellect.”

 

François Villon

 

“Good talkers are only found in Paris.”

 

Repost: 9 Things You Can Learn from Shakespeare's Hamlet

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-critchley/9-things-you-can-learn-fr_b_3529453.html

 

by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster

Posted: 07/01/2013

 

Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster are the authors of

the new book Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine.

 

 

The main reason why Hamlet is Shakespeare's most enduring play is that it requires the most endurance. Contrary to centuries of Shakespeare scholarship on Hamlet's quintessential modernity, this requirement is first and foremost factual: Hamlet is the Shakespeare character with the most lines in a single play and Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, clocking in at over 4 hours onstage. Hamlet in its entirety might be thought of as Hamlet in its eternity. Hamlet is a king of infinite space.

 

Hamlet also requires our endurance for he is a consummate philosopher, which is why he thinks so much and at such great length and ultimately acts so little. It is difficult for us to peer through centuries of romantic fog that whirl around his character. We tend to imagine the play as lofty, overblown, the pinnacle of Western literature. But the fact is, Hamlet was a revival of an earlier play also called Hamlet- which had been a big hit- and was thus a kind of box-office sequel by London's most successful dramatist: WS. Commercially, Shakespeare never put a foot wrong. Hamlet was a blockbuster. It remained a blockbuster in the decades and centuries that followed.

 

Here we reach a conundrum: Hamlet is a revenge drama. Everyone loves a revenge drama, right? But the play consists of Hamlet's inability to take revenge. The audience would have thought they were going to watch a Tarantino-esque Elizabethan action movie with a few good sword fights. But instead of bloody acts, they get endless bloody thoughts. Hamlet soliloquizes on the meaning of life, dithers and feigns madness, tying himself up in the most exquisite dialectical knots, doubting everything, even the ghost who demands revenge. When he concocts the play within the play, to catch the conscience of the king, and it works- Claudius confesses his guilt- still he doesn't do it.

 

If Hamlet is Shakespeare's most enduring play, then the paradox is that there is something unendurable about it. The play goes on and on. Hamlet goes on and on. Spinning out words, words, words that lose the name of action. The weirdest thing is that having been a crowd pleaser from the very beginning, it seems to do so little to please the crowd. Our expectations about tight, coherent, fast-moving, well-executed plot unravel in scene after scene, spiraling down into Hamlet's infinite jest and perspicuous melancholia.

 

Hamlet is not a version of our best self, let alone our authentic humanity, but what is worst and most selfish in us. His failure of commitment, his radical inhibition, his suicidal melodrama, and his violent misanthropic and misogynistic cruelty, are some of the rather unappealing aspects of our selves. Shakespeare forces us to stare at that which we do not want to look; to see what Uncle Teddy Adorno felicitously called our Hamlet Syndrome.

 

Hamlet is a kind of camera obscura that presents us with a true picture of the world in its inverted form. What if the modern depressive Dane Lars Von Trier was right and some malevolent meteor obliterated the entirety of human civilization in a flash? If somehow after that apocalyptic devastation a single copy of Hamlet remained, a faithful record of our culture could be reconstructed on its basis. It's not a pretty picture.

 

So, what life lessons can Hamlet teach us? Here are a handful:

1. "The world is a prison," Hamlet sighs. This is not just a statement of his mental state. Shakespeare's play is also a drama of surveillance in a police state. Everyone is being watched. This once required expensive and expansive networks of spies. Now it simply requires the use of the internet.
"To thine own self be true"- NOT. People tend to forget that this line was put in the mouth of the Daddy of all windbags, Polonius, and was heavily laden with irony. Polonius's self-serving drivel is an endless source of amusement.




"Were you not sent for?" Never trust your friends. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they might have been sent for by your ever-loving parents and be secretly plotting your execution.




"Mother, you have my father much offended". Hamlet doesn't know if his mother was in on the murder of his father. The Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, felt that Gertrude's guilt functions like a dark spot in the play. The lesson seems to be - you'll never figure out what your mother wants. Leave her to heaven, as the Ghost says.




"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." In other words, believe in ghosts. In a world where time is out of joint and the air is filled with war and rumors of war, the dead are the only creatures courageous enough to speak the truth.




"I did love you once... I loved you not." Let's just say that Hamlet has commitment problems, while the ever-faithful and naïve Ophelia is the one labeled a Janus-faced whore. It's good to remember that this war between the sexes has gone on for hundreds of years and men cannot tolerate the question of what a woman wants.




"Tender yourself more dearly." Polonius's seemingly affectionate paternal advice circles around the valuation of his daughter Ophelia as a commodity to be brokered on the marriage market. Lessons on money abound. Here and everywhere in Shakespeare, the language of love degrades into the language of commerce.




"O shame, where is thy blush?" Hamlet accuses his mother of acting shamelessly in marrying his Uncle in rude haste after the death of his father. But the truth is everyone in Hamlet acts shamelessly and for us the moral of the play is the production of shame in its audience. Not too much, just enough.




"Stay, Illusion!" Illusion is the only means to action. The only thing that can save us in this distracted globe is theater. The only truth is found in illusion.

 

Repost: Never End a Story With a Dream?

 

 

 

 

Chasing the White Rabbit
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/mar/08/chasing-white-rabbit/

 

by Francine Prose

An illustration by John Tenniel from

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland

 

My seventh-grade teacher warned our class, “Never end a story with, ‘It was all a dream!’” She sounded thoroughly sick and tired of stories like that. I remember thinking that one of my favorite books ends with Alice waking from the long summer-afternoon dream that begins with her chasing the White Rabbit. Even so, my teacher’s advice sounded correct. Writing “It was all a dream” seemed crude and…immature.

 

Years later, another teacher read Delmore Schwartz’s classic short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” aloud to our college class. As the story begins, its narrator is sitting in a theater, watching a film:

It is a silent picture, as if an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps, and the actors, too, seem to jump about, walking too fast. The shots are full of rays and dots, as if it had been raining when the picture was photographed. The light is bad.

 

It is Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909, and my father is walking down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother.

In the film, the narrator’s parents go on a date to Coney Island. They stroll on the boardwalk, look at the sea, have their portrait taken. Schwartz’s sentences are simple, cadenced, evocative, and graceful. Finally, the courting couple has a fierce argument outside and then inside a fortuneteller’s studio, and the narrator’s father stalks off.

 

Suddenly terrified—partly, we presume, by the possibility that, if this disagreement is not resolved, he may never be born—the narrator rises from his seat and begins to shout. What is the couple doing? “Why doesn’t my mother go after my father and beg him not to be angry?” Though it is all a dream, Schwartz’s story never fails to deliver a jolt of the mysterious, of melancholy, anxiety, and of admiration for what he has accomplished in this masterpiece of fewer than ten pages.

 

Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own. Jacob’s ladder of angels. Joseph saving Egypt and himself by interpreting the Pharoah’s vision of the seven fat and lean cows. The dreams in Shakespeare’s plays range as widely as our own, and the evil are often punished in their sleep before they pay for their crimes in life. Kafka never tells us what Gregor Samsa was dreaming when he awakens as a giant insect, except that the dreams were “uneasy.” Likely they were not as uneasy as the morning he wakes into. By the end of the first paragraph of “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor has noticed his arched, dome-like brown belly, his numerous waving legs. “What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.”

 

If Schwartz’s story represents one of literature’s most blatant violations of my middle-school teacher’s advice, possibly the boldest use of dreams in fiction occurs in Anna Karenina. In the work of a lesser writer, we might pay only minimal attention to the nightmare Vronsky has, early in Part Four—a dream about a scruffy old peasant with a tattered beard: stooped over, doing something, muttering to himself in French. It occupies the few sentences that separate the obligations Vronksy has undertaken, showing a foreign prince around town, from his visit to see Anna. Extremely upset, she has begged him to come, despite the fact that she is still living with her husband, who knows that Vronsky is her lover and has forbidden her to receive him at home.

 

What makes Anna so distraught, and what makes Vronsky’s dream lodge in our own minds—what makes it so much more than a simple description of a character’s dream—is that she cannot stop thinking about a nightmare she has had, in which a bearded old peasant was bent over, rummaging in a sack, muttering to himself in French something about iron, the iron must be beaten. She dreamed she woke up and asked a servant what the dream signified and was told that it meant she was going to die in childbirth. Vronksy tells Anna it’s nonsense. But, unnerved by the fact that they have dreamed the same dream, he feels that his attempt to reassure her lacks conviction.



David Levine

Vladimir Nabokov

Readers will recall that by this point, Anna and Vronsky’s love affair is already clouded by tensions that will continue to grow as the book progresses. Anna is jealous of the life Vronsky leads without her, and though he still loves her, he notes that she has put on weight and no longer seems quite the same woman he fell in love with. A divide has opened between them, yet they are dreaming the same dream! Had something similar happened earlier—say, after the couple met and before they became lovers—it might have seemed “romantic” at the cost of depth and complex verisimilitude. And whatever dream they shared would probably have been about something other than the scary, bearded peasant, mumbling in French.

 

It’s a risky and daring plot turn, one with which Tolstoy tests our belief in the apparently paranormal bonds that passion and intimacy can forge. Despite their disagreements, the lovers are more closely entwined and know more about one another than either one understands or might knowingly choose. By the end of the novel, the dreams will turn out to have been premonitory, as Anna fears, but they are warnings about a death quite different from the one she has imagined.

 

Nabokov devotes several pages of his Lectures on Russian Literature to what he calls The Double Nightmare in Tolstoy’s novel, tracking the dreams’ antecedents in the couple’s shared experience—most notably, an accident in which a man is crushed on the tracks near the train in which Anna and Vronsky first meet. Predictably, Nabokov has no patience for Freud. “I am politely but firmly opposed to the Freudian interpretation of dreams with its stress on symbols which may have some reality in the Viennese Doctor’s rather drab and pedantic mind but do not necessarily have any in the minds of individuals unconditioned by modern psychoanalytics.” And yet the enthusiasm and the conviction with which he and others have parsed the twin dreams in Anna Karenina are not so very unlike the dogged way in which Freud delves into his patients’ dreams.

 

Tolstoy showed it was possible to give a character a dream that strikes the reader as plausible, convincing, important enough to pay attention to, without being heavy-handedly symbolic or portentous. Or boring. What’s harder to recreate on the page is anything remotely resembling the experience of actually dreaming, with all the structural and narrative complexities involved, the leaps, contradictions, and improbable elements. Maybe that was my seventh-grade teacher’s problem: She’d read too many middle-school accounts of dreams that were nothing like dreams.

 

The most sustained and artful literary recreations of the dream state I know occur in Bruno Schulz’s stories, especially in “Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, ” which, in Celina Wienewska’s elegant translation, unfolds in the present tense and in the straightforward tone of someone describing a dream on the psychoanalyst’s couch or at the breakfast table. Consider this summary of the story’s opening sections: Joseph, the narrator, sets out on a long, halting, and peculiar train journey, then arrives in a desolate landscape and finally at the sanitorium, where he has booked a room. He is eyeing the cakes in the restaurant when he is called to see the doctor. It turns out that Joseph has come to see his father. But there is some uncertainty, as there so often is in dreams, about whether his father is living or dead. Joseph’s father is dead, the doctor says, but not to worry, all of the sanitorium patients are also dead, and none of them know it.

 

Joseph crawls into bed with his father and falls asleep. When he wakes, Father, “wearing a black suit of English cloth, which he had made only the previous summer,” announces his plan to open a shop. And now the narrator is wandering through a city with an unsettling resemblance to the city in which he lives. Somehow he finds his father’s shop, where he is given a package containing a pornographic book he has ordered. But the book is out of stock, and instead he has been sent an expanding telescope: “Like a large black caterpillar, the telescope crept into the lighted shop—an enormous paper arthropod with two imitation headlights on the front.”

 

Time moves strangely. Joseph encounters his father in unexpected places: a restaurant, back in bed, surrounded by a large crowd. Returning to the sanitorium, he is frightened by a chained watchdog that turns out to be a chained man, whom he releases. Transported back to the station, Joseph boards a train. “Farewell, Father. Farewell, town that I shall never see again.”

 

He begins to travel continuously, and the story ends:

My suit becomes torn and ragged. I have been given the shabby uniform of a railwayman. My face is bandaged with a dirty rag, because one of my cheeks is swollen…I stand in the corridor outside a second-class compartment and sing. People throw small coins into my hat: a black railwayman’s hat, its visor half torn away.

Schulz never frames the story as having been “all a dream.” We know it and we don’t, just as we know it and we don’t when we ourselves are dreaming.

 

A few days after writing the sentence above, I decided to delete a dream sequence from the novel on which I’ve been working. It took me another day or so to make the connection between the blog post and my decision to cut a passage that had survived for four years and through, let’s say, forty drafts. Having reread Schwartz and Schulz, I’d realized that the dream in my novel didn’t sound like a dream but rather like a novelist’s attempt to signal that a character knows more about the present—and the future—than he realizes. After reading Tolstoy’s double dream, my character’s nightmare seemed timid and conventional. I’d grown fond of the passage, and I missed it. Briefly.

 

 

 

Repost: Should You be a Writer or an Editor?

Should you be a writer or an editor?

Part I: The writers.

http://www.theopennotebook.com/2013/01/15/should-you-be-a-writer-or-an-editor-part-i-the-writers/

 

Posted by Christie Aschwanden on January 15th, 2013

 

Are you an editor or a writer? How do you know? What are the crucial differences between the two specializations? The question arose when Slate science editor Laura Helmuth was visiting a class that Ann Finkbeiner teaches at the graduate program in science writing at Johns Hopkins University. Ann, hoping to help her students figure out whether they were natively editors or natively writers, asked Laura about the difference between writers and editors.

 

Laura punted.

 

Ann didn’t know, either.

 

After the class was over, Ann and Laura gave the question some more thought and then enlisted other writers and editors to help them answer it. We’ll run their answers in two separate posts today and tomorrow. Today, the writers.

 

Freelance writer Ann Finkbeiner:

 

I’m almost purely a writer. When I first started writing, my superb editors—people like Warren Kornberg and Tim Appenzeller—astounded me because they could say things like, “take the last sentence of every paragraph and make it the first sentence,” or because they could see the structure of a story that in my head was just a bunch of buzzing flies. “Wow,” I thought, “such seriously smart people.”

 

I still think they’re seriously smart, but I also think that’s what editors do: They stand back and analyze. I was busy trying to understand the science in the first place, then get it right, then write it so that readers could see how beautiful it was, then rewrite it 6,000 times for clarity, accuracy, concision, and elegance. An editor looks at the thing as a whole, analyzes its structure, and moves the boxes and connectors around until the story is logical, seemly, and stable.

 

So then what do writers do? They walk around with their recorders permanently set to “on,” listening for scientists using words oddly, for scientists saying they’ve just heard the strangest things, for scientists talking excitedly to other scientists about something the writer has never heard of and doesn’t understand anyway. They ask around and search the Internet to see whether this odd, strange, exciting thing might be a story, whether it makes that “click” that stories make. They go through the odds-against struggle of convincing an editor to feel the same click. If they don’t succeed, they try another editor. If they do succeed, they begin the joyous process of talking to scientists and understanding 100 times more about this story than they need to know. And then they try to structure it and almost can; and then they start to write it and they absolutely cannot, but they do it anyway.

 

My best example of the difference between writers and editors is when a writer-friend and I were having identical problems with our editors. We just had some neato little anecdotes (skinny physicist crawls around on Mexican border at midnight) and neato sentences (“Rumor had it she was a whore from Pahrump”) and neato people with neato quotes (“Pardon the expression, but I point the fucking telescope at the sky and see what’s out there”). And the editors were insisting on meaningful context (why were they trying to ban atmospheric tests?) and big thoughts and implications (does the nation need science advisors?) and beginnings, middles, and ends.

 

We all won, of course. Without the Mexican border and whore from Pahrump, the story has no flavor or color or sound, and the reader no point of personal contact. Without the context, implications, and structure, no one would even know it was a story.

 

Independent writer and editor Deborah Franklin:

 

Probably everyone skews at least a little bit more one direction than the other. I consider myself a writer who also edits.

 

A Writer:

 

* Paints with words. Walks through life making connections between disparate things, noticing splashes of color, snatches of conversation. Remembers what was said and what people look like. Has a vision. Sees a blank page as fun, as permission, as a place to let go and just try things. Is willing to imagine. Not afraid of working alone, struggling alone with a problem for long stretches at a time. In fact, enjoys it.

 

* Loves language and writes things that people love to read.

 

* Would rather watch a movie than act in one. At a party, would rather sit on the stairs and watch and listen to people than be the one in the middle of the room holding forth.

 

* Is curious. Asks good questions. Is not afraid to ask obvious or embarrassing questions. Is a good listener, and a quick study who thinks well on his/her feet. Has enough spidey-sense to recognize a good quote or idea or scene and knows to record them in some way. Is a voracious reader.

 

* Has internalized the ethics of journalism: Accuracy, fairness, no plagiarism. When it’s you and the source in an interview, you’re on your own; if you haven’t internalized those rules you will someday fail in a big way.

 

* Doesn’t mind long, unpredictable work hours. Knows how to make deadlines and will stick with a task until it’s done, until the story has a beginning and a middle and an end. When you’re an editor, you can stop and walk away when the time runs out. When you’re a writer, the task’s not over until you have a complete story on the page. Must be able to live with, and maybe even thrive under pressure and insecurity.

 

* Can live on a shoestring, at least at first, and/or periodically throughout your career. These days, staff writing/reporting jobs are few and far between. Freelance writers who make a substantial income have an excellent combination of talent, luck, experience, flexibility, and the ability to identify side jobs to make it work. It’s very hard these days to raise a family on one writer’s income.

 

Slate columnist and former science editor Daniel Engber:

 

I don’t think this is a binary variable, that you’re either a writer or an editor. It’s a spectrum, perhaps like being gay or straight, and (for those who care to do so) there’s room to maneuver in between the ironclad identities. I would probably call myself a writer who edits, or a writer who can edit, or a writer who has edited. Likewise, there are lots of amazing editors who write, or editors who can write, or editors who have written. And there are lots of jobs that are well-suited to intermediate types, or types who scoot around the spectrum from one year to the next. (Slate happens to be an excellent place for people who hover near the middle.)

 

So how do you know which activity you prefer? You have to try out both and see how they each inspire and annoy you. If you need a hint, there are some broad personality traits that might align with your placement on the spectrum. Editing jobs are both collaborative and hierarchical, and so invite a certain adherence to a higher goal and respect for external authority. Writing jobs tend to be more conducive to an individualistic mindset, and one that bristles at group directives.

 

New Scientist correspondent Bob Holmes:

 

Like many people who’ve been around for a while, I’ve spent time at both ends of the editorial hatchet. In the end, though, I’m a writer at heart. When I analyze why, I come up with three main reasons:

 

1) I prefer depth over breadth. (If I really meant that, of course, I’d still be doing science instead of writing about it. But given that all journalists are dilettantes, I prefer deeper rather than broader dilettantism.) I’m always impressed by how much editors know about so many different subjects, because they range widely over the stories written by many different writers. When I was a features editor for New Scientist a decade ago, I liked that sense of seeing the whole landscape. But the downside is that when you do this you rarely get to explore the finer topography of any particular topic.

 

Now that I’m a writer again, I particularly enjoy the feeling of knowing that I’ve spoken with every important source on a story and have all the information I need to understand the subject. (I don’t get to that point with every story, of course, but it happens often enough to keep me going.) That’s a satisfaction that editors rarely get—instead, they generally have to trust their writers on the legwork.

 

2) I prefer doing over helping. Editing has its own highs, such as the joy of sitting down in the morning with 4,000 words of meandering, flabby prose and getting up at the end of the day with a tight 2,400-word story without having cut anything of substance. But even then, the writer gets credit for scoring the goal; the editor only gets an assist.

 

I’d rather be the main mover on fewer stories each year instead of a helper on many. Looking back over the years, my most memorable stories are all ones that I’ve written, not ones I edited.

 

3) I prefer a freelance lifestyle over a steady job. Of course, writers can have steady jobs too, and editors can freelance. But for the most part, editing work seems more constant, more institutional. Every week has its quota of words to be tuned up and stories to be commissioned. Usually, editors work in an office, with colleagues, schedules, regular paychecks, and a clear career ladder to climb. That has many advantages, and for many people it’s exactly what they want.

 

But I’m happier with the greater flexibility of a writer’s life. When a deadline is looming, I work harder and longer than I ever did as an editor. On the other hand, I can also walk my dog in the middle of the day or knock off early to go skiing. I can make bread or start a pot of soup during breaks between interviews. And I’m here when my son gets home from school. All this unpredictability would no doubt drive some people nuts—but for me, it’s one of the big attractions of the job.

 

*Image by Shutterstock.

 

 

Are you an editor or a writer?

Part II: The editors.

http://www.theopennotebook.com/2013/01/16/are-you-an-editor-or-a-writer-part-ii-the-editors/

 

Posted by Christie Aschwanden on January 16th, 2013

 

 

Writers and editors work together all the time, but the two clans are somewhat mysterious to one another. Mutually suspicious, even. How do you know which career path you should specialize in? And how do editors become editors, anyway? Ann Finkbeiner and Laura Helmuth asked several journalists to describe the differences between writers and editors. In an earlier post, writers explained what it is they do. Today, the editors weigh in.

Scientific American online news editor Robin Lloyd:

I didn’t choose editing over writing so much as it chose me (same goes for journalism and science writing). As a reporter, a few of my superiors mentioned over the years that they saw me on an editing track, so I just kept saying “yes” when I got offers to do fill-in editing. Then I got an offer to be a writer/editor, and I said yes. Then I got an offer to be an editor, and I said yes. And so on. Over time, I have gained confidence in my ability as a short-form editor, though I still have much to learn, especially with long-form editing. I have an ear for prose that “sounds right.” I find that not everyone has that. One of my editors once told me I have good syntax. So I looked up “syntax” and thought, “Yeah, I do have good syntax.” I also did well in grammar class in 10th grade.

More seriously, my motivation as an editor is clear, compelling communication for the reader. Delivering that is my first job. Readers are looking at every word for an excuse to bail out—to stop reading a story. My job is to prevent that and to keep them reading this story by focusing on clarity, pacing, logic, arc, and sparkling prose (rewards). Also, I enjoy teaching and helping people.

I like reporting and writing on deadline, and I did it quite a bit for more than a decade, but I find editing on deadline a bit more relaxing and rewarding. It’s about the right size for my ego and skill set for now. Based on my experience, of course, I think that one becomes a better editor after a good chunk of foundational years as a writer.

I’ve seen many edits by many people who are paid as editors. A handful of them are great editors. I quietly learn from them.

Independent writer and editor Deborah Franklin:

Not every writer can edit, nor every editor write, but it sure does improve both sets of skills if you find yourself fortunate enough to spend at least a little time wearing each hat. I started out as a writer (for magazines and newspapers) and never sought to be an editor (for magazines and radio)—in fact fought it for many years—but the time I’ve spent editing has definitely improved my writing and my life!

An editor:

* Is good at puzzles, at seeing the flecks of green in several scattered puzzle pieces and understanding that they fit together to form the green hillside at the top of the story/painting, not the puddle of green algae at the bottom. Is thoughtful and analytical; good at spotting holes in arguments and seeing through well-written hand-waving. A voracious reader.

* Is more of a team player than a loner. Sociable. Likes dealing with different types of people (e.g. the infographics expert and the physics writer and the psych reporter).

* Is verbally articulate on the phone as well as in person. Can write a good, conversational email that makes the writer feel understood, appreciated, liked, and motivated to make the story better.

* Is part therapist; knows how to talk friends (or writers) through tough spots, and doesn’t hold their insecurity against them.

* Has good parenting skills. Knows to first point out some specific things you like about the writing and the story before being negative about things that don’t work. Not a pushover; knows the value of discipline, and knows how to deploy it.

* Knows that only one part of the job is working with the writer. Doesn’t mind being interrupted; is organized, can multi-task gracefully, and is able to quickly switch gears during a tough day.

* Finds meetings tolerable, maybe even fun.

* Can manage up as well as down in an organization. Understands how to represent the reader in fiercely defending the story, whether to the writer, the top-editor, the fact-checker, the copy-editor, the art director, the photographer, the illustrator, the social media czar, the publisher, or the advertising director. Is honest and kind and empathetic. Not a stick-your-finger-in-the-air-to-see-which-way-the-wind’s blowing kind of manager who just tells people what they want to hear. Rather, a calmly firm and compassionate listener/leader who has a strong enough ego to make and defend a good argument, but not an ego so big that it sucks all the air out of the room.

* Prefers/needs to work hours that are more easily contained. Editors often work long hours, too, but it is easier to walk away from the job at the end of the day as an editor than as a writer.

* Does not mind that the writer often gets the credit for a collaborative effort. Is able to take a parent’s pride in a successful, beautiful, groundbreaking piece.

Slate science editor Laura Helmuth:

My editing muse is Charlie Watts, the drummer for the Rolling Stones. For 50 years, he’s been the least famous or recognizable member of the band. In videos, you glimpse him only briefly as the camera pans across the stage to focus on Mick Jagger as he struts or Keith Richards as he snarls. Charlie sits behind his drums with a slight smile, nodding his head as he watches the real rock stars entertain the crowd. Charlie doesn’t wear spandex or eyeliner or weave beads into his hair, which is gray. He never had a drug problem or stole his bandmates’ girlfriends. He is easily the most boring musician of his generation—steady, calm, and resolutely not in the spotlight.

Editing requires most of the same skills writing does, but it also demands, if you’re going to be a good editor, a huge dose of humility. You will never and should never get the credit for a great story. Editors who seek recognition for their work are mostly bad editors—the Phil Collinses of the editing world, people who may be fine as solo artists but should really never work collaboratively. Other editors think they can write better than anyone else—and maybe they can, but then why are they working as editors? Those are the Keith Moons of the editing world. They will drown out their writers’ words and then vomit all over the stage.

An editor’s job is to make writers sound better, sound more like themselves. You cannot be proud and be an effective editor. The best writers don’t need much from you, and the worst ones may not appreciate how much you’ve helped them. If you edit well, your work will be invisible to a reader and as unnoticeable as possible to the writer. If you suggest a metaphor or joke or perfect transition that your writer uses, you should be satisfied even though no one will ever know it was yours (even writers forget where things came from, as they should, those clever magpies).

You cannot be jealous. If you are sitting in an office all day and you send someone to India to write a story about tigers and he emails one morning to say that he finally saw a tiger, an email full of exclamation points, you must be genuinely and purely delighted for him, to the point that you have a stupid smile on your face for the rest of the day. Imagine this: You have a great idea for a story and suggest it to a writer who then writes a terrific story, better than what you could have written. If you can imagine this being the most satisfying part of your job, you should be an editor.

Editing is like match-making. Perhaps the most important part of your job is knowing your audience. What writers would your readers fall in love with? Which stories should they sit next to at a dinner party? What fields of science would surprise and amuse them? You have to think about what your readers know they want and satisfy those desires, but you also have to keep introducing them to unexpected treats. And you’re constantly trying to attract new readers.

You have to think long-term. Every story you edit should be a pleasure to read, but the mix of stories you publish in a given day or month or year should build its own form of pleasure. You have to follow a lot of fields at a shallow level and know when they’re ripe for coverage, which may be years from now. You have to say no to a pitch in a way that makes writers want to keep pitching you when they find that perfect story in the future. You speak to journalism classes in the hope that one of the students will come to you someday with a scoop.

Editing isn’t as creative as writing, and it lacks the thrill of pursuit of reporting; it’s more business than art sometimes. You have to think about budgets and how your publication is funded and who the competition is (and how to smash them). You have to be conversant in marketing-ese and sit in on a lot of meetings. You’re basically a project manager, working with the art department, copy desk, publication staff, and technical development department on individual stories and long-term strategies.

There are actually a lot of good reasons not to be an editor, now that I think about it. But the best thing about being an editor is getting to work with writers. When they’re performing, you have the best seat in the house.

*Image by Shutterstock.

 

Repost: Poetry Magazine's Editor Christian Wiman Discusses Faith

Exclusive: Christian Wiman Discusses Faith as He Leaves World's Top Poetry Magazine

Wiman's Baptist faith lay dormant until love and cancer unearthed it.

 

Interview by Josh Jeter

posted December 7, 2012

 

 

In the afternoon of his 39th birthday, less than a year after his wedding day, poet Christian Wiman was diagnosed with an incurable cancer of the blood. Wiman, who announced Wednesday that he will step down in June as editor of Poetry magazine, the oldest and most esteemed poetry monthly in the world, had long ago drifted away from the Southern Baptist beliefs of his upbringing. But the shock of staring death in the face gradually revived a faith that had gone dormant (a story he first told publicly in a 2007 article for The American Scholar).

 

Wiman's new book of essays, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), took shape in the wake of his diagnosis, when he believed death could be fast approaching. These writings come from someone who is less a cautious theologian than a pilgrim crying out from the depths. They divulge the God-ward hopes (and doubts) of an artist still piecing together a spiritual puzzle. San Francisco-based lawyer and author Josh Jeter corresponded with Wiman about his new book, his precarious health, and the ongoing challenge of belief in God.

 

How did you arrive at your Christian faith?

 

I was raised in West Texas as a Southern Baptist, in a culture and family so saturated with religion that it never occurred to me there was any alternative until I left. Then it all just evaporated in the blast of modernism and secularism to which I was exposed in college. Or, it didn't evaporate, exactly, because I never would have called myself an atheist. But religious feeling went underground in me for a couple of decades, to be released occasionally in ways I never really understood or completely credited—in poems, mostly.

 

'There's no question that illness has brought a great urgency to my work:

One speaks differently when standing on a cliff.'

- Christian Wiman

 

Then about 10 years ago I fell into despair. There is no other way to say it, really, nor do those words do anything but hint at the abyss. Whether it was cause or effect, I went through a writing drought unlike anything I had ever known—three years of it. In the midst of this—miraculously, it now seems to me—I fell suddenly and utterly in love with the woman who is now my wife. I still couldn't write, but the despair was blasted like a husk away from my spirit.

 

We found ourselves saying little prayers together before dinner. They were almost jokes at first, and then, increasingly, not. We'd been married about eight months when I got a surprise diagnosis of an incurable cancer, and the encroaching darkness demanded that the light I felt burning in me acquire a more definite and durable form. One Sunday morning we wandered into a church. A couple of days later I started to write. I don't think it's quite accurate to say that I had a conversion or even a "return" to Christianity. I was just finally able to assent to the faith that had long been latent within me.

 

You have three vocations: poet, editor of Poetry magazine, and, most recently, spiritual essayist. How did you decide to begin writing spiritual essays?

 

I've always written prose, and I can now see how God's absence—or, more accurately, my refusal to admit his presence—underlies all of my earlier work (poems as well).

 

But you're certainly right to point out a change. My work—prose and poetry—is still full of anguish and even unbelief, but I hope it's also much more open to simple joy. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann once wrote that all theology, especially a theology of hope, had to be conducted "in earshot of the dying Christ." Abundance and destitution are both aspects of God—or, more accurately, aspects of our experience of God.

 

Soon you will release a set of essays. How has your turn to faith shaped or influenced these essays?

 

After my diagnosis, I wrote a short piece trying to make sense of all that had happened to me. It was published in a relatively small magazine, The American Scholar, but the response to it was pretty overwhelming. I began to realize there was an enormous contingent of people out there who were starved for new ways of feeling and articulating their experiences of God. I wanted to have a conversation with these people.

 

I also wanted to figure out my own mind. I knew that I believed, but I was not at all clear on what I believed. So I set out to answer that question, though I have come to realize that the real question is how, not what. How do you answer that burn of being that drives you both deeper into, and utterly out of, yourself? What might it mean for your life—and for your death—to acknowledge the insistent, persistent call of God?

 

You have had some very difficult health issues the past few years, and according to one essay, have recently been "close to death." How is your health now? And what have your health struggles meant for your work?

 

I've been through a multitude of treatments, culminating in a bone-marrow transplant last fall. There's no question that illness has brought a great urgency to my work: One speaks differently when standing on a cliff. Then again, I have always had little patience for art that is not elemental, art that doesn't take on the major questions of our existence. Perhaps my own inclinations have simply been intensified by my illness.

 

As for that illness, it's gone. For now. I haven't felt this healthy in eight years. I hope I am now faced with the difficult task of learning to live without my familiar miseries. "Our torments also may, in length of time, Become our elements," says John Milton. "[T]hese piercing fires [a]s soft as now severe." There is always some devil in us—that's a demon speaking the lines above—who makes us think we love or need our pain.

 

Sometimes your essays feel like you are arguing with yourself. Do you write them for yourself or others?

 

I've never thought of my essays like this, but I see immediately that you're right. W. B. Yeats defined rhetoric as the quarrel we have with others. Poetry, he said, comes out of the quarrel we have with ourselves. Prose isn't poetry, obviously, but I've always felt the two arts to be raveled up with one another for me.

 

I read a lot of theology, even though I am almost always frustrated by it. Thomas Merton once said that trying "to solve the problem of God" is like trying to see your own eyes. No doubt that's part of it. There is something absurd about formulating faith, systematizing God. I am usually more moved—and more moved toward God—by what one might call accidental theology, the best of which is often art, sometimes even determinedly secular art.

 

I am moved by works of art that don't so much strive to make meaning as allow meaning to stream through them: Bach, certain poems by T. S. Eliot, the novelist Marilynne Robinson, the late work of the American sculptor Lee Bontecou, even less conventional religious writers like Simone Weil or Sara Grant. People can occasionally embody and enact this kind of meaning as well—we are, after all, works of the very greatest Creator's hands.

 

How much is spiritual experience—prayer, solitude, and the like—a part of your artistic process?

 

I think poetry is how religious feeling survived in me during all those years of unbelief, and it remains the most intense experience I have of another order of being entering my own. But poems are not contemplative or peaceful times for me; they're chaotic and can wreck my life for a while. They're also few and far between, and you can't (or I can't) build a spiritual life on that kind of intermittent intensity.

 

So I try to pray every day, usually in a little chapel near where I work, sometimes in a cathedral because I like the huge estrangement of it, the volatile silence. I feel no connection between prayer and poetry, except for the poems that I have written as prayers. Poetry is a much more powerful experience for me than prayer, but I feel this to be a weakness in me. I'm still just learning how to pray.

 

In your essays, you often appeal to the work of Christian mystics (like Meister Eckhart, Thomas Traherne, George Herbert, Marguerite Porete, Weil). What draws you to the mystics?

 

Partly I feel envy. I want to be taken over by God. I want to have the kind of disciplined inwardness that allows the ego to be annihilated. I want the kind of revelation that precedes all doctrine and dogma, is the reason for all doctrine and dogma. Christ's life is one long revelation; everything after that merely grows up from it.

 

But then, too, all of these writers have an artistic consciousness. I understand the language they speak, though I don't quite speak it myself, or maybe speak a different dialect. The energy of art may be prior to religion, but religion, paradoxically, is a way of sustaining and surviving the psychic storm of that original energy (just as ritual and doctrine are ways of stabilizing and preserving the awful power of mystical revelation). Art for its own sake, art that has no answering "other," will eventually eat you alive.

 

You have written that one measure of a genuine spiritual experience is the extent to which it "demands uncomfortable change." What kinds of "uncomfortable changes" have you experienced in your life?

 

That's what my wife always asks me!

 

I would like to think of this new book as a viable answer to your question, but solitary writing is quite natural to me, and we should be suspicious when God's call conforms so neatly to our own inclinations.

 

More relevant, maybe, are the many speaking engagements, including sermons, I have taken on at religious schools and organizations in the past few years. This is new to me and, while very gratifying, has at times been quite discomfiting. I have also become deliberate about being open and honest about my thoughts of God. Maybe not so honest in secular settings. That, too, has provoked some useful but uncomfortable exchanges.

 

Still, the question is a thorn in my brain. I feel that I spend too much time agonizing over what faith might mean, rather than simply acting in accordance with my instincts. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote that only the person who obeys believes. It is a hard road, but the right one. I will probably end up as a preacher after all.

 

Your faith does not come across as breezy in your essays, which you occasionally grace with levity. For example: "If I ever sound like a preacher in these passages, it's only because I have a hornet's nest of voluble and conflicting parishioners inside of me." Does your faith ever express itself as peace?

 

Rarely, which I see as a weakness. I do feel that some people may be called to unbelief—or what looks like unbelief—in order that faith may take new forms. Emily Dickinson is a good example of this, or Albert Camus. But I also believe that God requires every last cell of yourself to bow down.

 

Or perhaps that verb, requires, is wrong, or that it's God doing the requiring: It's more like your nature requires, in order to be your nature, that every last cell of yourself bow down. There is still some satanic pride in me, for which I pay a high price.

 

And yet, I have certainly experienced peace in poems that in their sheer givenness seemed to reveal something of God to me. I have written poems that begin in great anguish and explode into joy. As psychically difficult as the poems may have been to write, certainly I have felt peace and presence in their wake.

 

There are other moments, too, which are simply moments of life. Simply! I think of the poet Paul Eluard: "There is another world, but it is in this one." I have 3-year-old twin daughters. It would be disingenuous in the extreme for me to pretend that they don't at times drive all thought of God out of my head and make me want to write a series of sonnets in praise of celibacy, but it would be equally insane for me not to acknowledge that they are the source of my greatest happiness. Father Zossima, in The Brothers Karamazov, defines hell as "the inability to love." I have known that hell, and I should probably spend my remaining days thanking God that I am free of it.

- CT

 

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Relevancy22 - Faith & Theology

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

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 Amazon Listings

 

Christian Wiman's books and editorial contributions -

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=christian+wiman

 

 

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January 2013

Google Listings

 

The American Scholar: Mortify Our Wolves - Christian Wiman

Tere comes a moan to the cancer clinic. There comes a sound so low and unvarying it seems hardly human, more a note the wind might strike off jags of rock ...

 

The American Scholar: Gazing into the Abyss - Christian Wiman

Though I was raised in a very religious household, until about a year ago I hadn't been to church in any serious way in more than 20 years. It would be ...

 

The American Scholar: My Bright Abyss - Christian Wiman
And there the poem ends. Or fails, rather, for in the three years since I first wrote that stanza I have been trying to feel my way—to will my way—into its ending.

 

The American Scholar: Hive of Nerves - Christian Wiman
It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming, That unrest formed a heart. —Paul Celan. During a dinner with friends the talk turns, as it often does these ...

 

Christian Wiman's Remarkable Essay in The American Scholar ...
Oct 31, 2012 – Back in April, we blogged about Christian Wiman, a member of the Washington and Lee Class of 1988, for two pieces of news. He had just won ...

 

Evil Is What Humans Do: An Interview with Christian Wiman: The ...
Mar 12, 2012 – Christian Wiman is one of America's most important poets. ... year reading your essay “Gazing into the Abyss” from the American Scholar and it ...