MEMBER BLOG TAG: inspiration
| Sunday, May 1, 2011 8:40PM | | | | A CONVERSATION WITH HAROLD BLOOM | Tags: Literary taste, Western literary canon, literary criticism, Shakespeare's greatness: naturalistic characterizations. Walt Whitman's finest works, Ralph Waldo Emerson as American mentor, Edmund Wilson as inspiration, Dr. Samuel Johnson as role model for Harold Bloom, love of reading.
| | | | Yale University’s Sterling Professor of Humanities, author of many books of literary criticism and cultural analysis, Harold Bloom, was introduced and questioned by Paul Holdengraber to stimulate a conversation about Mr. Bloom's opinions and career. Holdengraber is curator of “LIVE from the NYPL, a Cognitive Theatre with a mission to provoke, engage, instigate, and agitate the mind.” The acoustics in the auditorium were poor, causing an echo-like reverberation that made it difficult to understand what the men were saying. Holdengraber's German accent and Harold Bloom's age and difficult speech, and habit of mumbling behind the hand supporting his chin, made it hard to understand their conversation. Most audience members, except for those in the very front rows near the stage, had difficulty getting all the... | | | | | | | Tuesday, April 5, 2011 8:05AM | | | | The Cranky Muse | Tags: writing, muse, inspiration
| | | Last month during the Sharpening the Quill writing workshop I lead here in Princeton, one of my students mentioned that although her lifelong dream has been to be a writer, she's been plagued over the past year or so by a series of illnesses that have kept her from writing as much as she'd like. At the same time, she feels more and more antsy, more irritable. Could this be, she wondered, some part of her subconscious trying to both sabotage her and urge her on at the same time?
Of course it could.
As we talked about our own similar experiences with The Cranky Muse, it became clear that although the form the discomfort took varied from ... | | | | | | | Sunday, May 2, 2010 11:14AM | | | | War and the Novel | Tags: Atxaga, Florian, Gavron, Rahimi, war, inspiration, Afghanistan, Gaza, Romania, Spanish Civil War
| | | The four writers Bernardo Atxaga of Spain, Assaf Gavron of Israel, Atiq Rahimi of France, Afghanistan and I wonder where else, and Filip Florian of Romania met in the cool confines of Scandinavia House and discussed in depth the sources of their inspiration.
It was a bit surprising at first to see these four male writers, flanked by their translators, all young women and the moderator Susan K, but the translators more than held their own.
Assaf Gavron, the one writer without a translator, began by reading from his novel CROCATTACK that begins on a bus. A woman has become suspicious of another rider and tries to engage the protagonist in seeing the other rider as a threat. Gavron's point was that... | | | | | | | Friday, May 1, 2009 7:26AM | | | | Original Inspiration - James Agee | Tags: James Agee, Let Us Know Praise Famous Men, Dwight Garner, David Denby, inspiration, Walker Evans
| | | I was, I think, fourteen, perhaps fifteen when someone I can't recall handed me a book, called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The 'someone' was a woman, older than I, and I vaguely recall we were sitting in a kitchen, drinking tea. I have an image of wooden floors, a pot-bellied stove, sagging bookshelves, and a red and white checkered plastic table cloth. I can't for the life of me imagine where this might have been, or who this woman might have been and I suspect I am superimposing the scenes and settings of the book onto the moment when I discovered it. Nonetheless, it was a moment that changed my life.
Up until then I had hoped to be a... | | | | | | | Thursday, March 5, 2009 4:21PM | | | | DISCIPLINE - for writers and drunks | Tags: discipline, sobriety, inspiration, authors vs writers, faith
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As a writer, I have learned the benefit of regular habits. Although I realize some writers only scurry to the typewriter (oh, how I date myself!) when the inspiration strikes them, I am in agreements with March Heaton Vorse, who said, "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair."
Implicit in that statement is the idea of consistency and discipline. I never used to think I had any discipline, but after I got sober back in 1995, I was startled to discover that, if required, I could muster up quite a bit of it.
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