writing

A.L. Kennedy: "Remember writing doesn’t love you. It doesn’t care."

Geoff Dyer: "Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov."

Zadie Smith: "Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied."

Guardian UK

Buckminster Fuller

I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.

in all forms

art is fundamentally pleasure-chasing. this is how it moves forward and evolves - our tastes change, often randomly, as we desire and pursue the most beautiful.

stasis

• the facts (conjecture)
• the meaning or nature of the issue (definition)
• the seriousness of the issue (quality)
• the plan of action (policy)

1) Issue; 2) Rules; 3) Application; 4) Conclusion.

Rule 17. Omit needless words.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell.

(Strunk and White, Elements of Style)

the sun burns, the moonlight burnishes

refining gesture - olga berluti

soucie-toi de toi-même

"Taking care if oneself requires knowing [connaître] oneself."

"But if you take proper care of yourself, that is, you know ontologically what you are, if you know what you are capable of, if you know what it means for you to be a citizen of a city, to be the master of a household in an oikos, if you know what things you should and should not fear, if you know what you can reasonably hope for and, on the other hand, what things should not matter to you, if you know, finally, that you should not be afraid of death - if you know all this, you cannot abuse your power over others. Thus, there is no danger."

(Michel Foucault, The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom)

ocd wont let me be / trouble inside

“I’m of the persuasion that budget constraints are very, very good for creativity. I think people having unlimited amounts of money makes you really lazy. And I will be quoted on that, believe it or not.” The speaker turning his back on decades of Hollywood wisdom was Matthew Weiner, 44, the auteur behind Mad Men, who also has a Sopranos pedigree, having written for that series during its final three seasons. As Mad Men’s creator and show-runner—the industry term for whoever has ultimate creative responsibility for a series, typically a writer- producer—he has imbued his own series with a similarly novelistic richness, scope, and meticulous sense of craft. He talks about “training the audience” to learn how to read the show, and says things like “It’s been a process for the audience to trust the show on some level, to think that we’re thinking about it as much as they hope we are.”

Interviewing Weiner is a heady experience. Oblique as Mad Men can sometimes be, resistant as the show is to explaining its characters’ behavior or having them mouth talking points, Weiner is not. “I always tell this about Matt,” said Jon Hamm. “It’s impossible to get anything out of him, unless you do one thing: ask him. Because he loves to talk, and he will eventually spill his guts about everything, because he’s so excited about it.” Which isn’t to say his thoughts come out in linear equations. Ask him a question and he’ll consider it from numerous angles, turning it over and over, returning to answers to amend or expand on, perfectly content to live with contradictions, as with this summation after a long analysis of Don’s and Betty’s motives during a particular scene, which struck me as a kind of mission statement: “Anytime you can have a character wanting something and not wanting something, I feel like I’m in my life, and I hopefully am in the audience’s life.”

“I count on my subconscious to be consistent,” Weiner told me. “And how that works I have no fucking idea, and I don’t even want to investigate it. Because if I lose that I have nothing to say.”

VF here.