Ernest Hemingway is one. The early stories. “Big Two-Hearted River,” “Cat in the Rain,” “The Three-Day Blow,” “Soldier's Home,” lots more. Chekhov. I suppose he's the writer whose work I most admire. But who doesn't like Chekhov? I'm talking about his stories now, not the plays. His plays move too slowly for me. Tolstoy. Any of his short stories, novellas, and Anna Karenina. Not War and Peace. Too slow. But The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Master and Man, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” Tolstoy is the best there is. Isaac Babel, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Connor. James Joyce's Dubliners. John Cheever. Madame Bovary. Last year I reread that book, along with a new translation of Flaubert's letters written while he was composing—no other word for it—Madame Bovary. Conrad. Updike's Too Far to Go. And there are wonderful writers I've come across in the last year or two like Tobias Wolff. His book of stories In the Garden of the North American Martyrs is just wonderful. Max Schott. Bobbie Ann Mason. Did I mention her? Well, she's good and worth mentioning twice. Harold Pinter. V. S. Pritchett. Years ago I read something in a letter by Chekhov that impressed me. It was a piece of advice to one of his many correspondents, and it went something like this: Friend, you don't have to write about extraordinary people who accomplish extraordinary and memorable deeds. (Understand I was in college at the time and reading plays about princes and dukes and the overthrow of kingdoms. Quests and the like, large undertakings to establish heroes in their rightful places. Novels with larger-than-life heroes.) But reading what Chekhov had to say in that letter, and in other letters of his as well, and reading his stories, made me see things differently than I had before. Not long afterwards I read a play and a number of stories by Maxim Gorky, and he simply reinforced in his work what Chekhov had to say. Richard Ford is another fine writer. He's primarily a novelist, but he's also written stories and essays. He's a friend. I have a lot of friends who are good friends, and some of them are good writers. Some not so good. -Raymond Carver

things

i wonder if when you figure out you've been doing it wrong all along

and you figure that out

if the universe starts to fall into place a little

just a little
-me

writer

"The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him...A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it."
— Roald Dahl

"The prime function of the children's book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it. And that first love affair between the young child and the young book will lead hopefully to other loves for other books and when that happens the battle is probably won. The child will have found a crock of gold. He will also have gained something that will help to carry him most marvelously through the tangles of his later years.
Roald Dahl"

"My dear young fellow,' the Old-Green-Grasshopper said gently, 'there are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven't started wondering about yet."
— Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach)

"Bunkum and tummyrot! You'll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he'd said 'What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?' He wouldn't even have started."
— Roald Dahl

"I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be"
— Roald Dahl (My Uncle Oswald)

"One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing it for a year, you go away and you have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, then you are in trouble!"
— Roald Dahl

long slow process

"When you're writing a book, it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long, slow process."
— Roald Dahl

indeed

"Matilda said, "Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable..."
— Roald Dahl (Matilda)

more thoughts

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
— Roald Dahl

on writing

"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it." — Roald Dahl

Better Than Amazon

Amazon is not hurting for profits, so take a moment to consider where you buy your books and the impact your purchases make. Check out Better World Books, a certified B-Corp, and start helping to improve literacy around the world:

http://www.betterworldbooks.com/

Also, spend your hard-earned money at other B-Corps:

http://www.bcorporation.net/community/search

Feminism Reading List

Found this on autostraddle.com. Looks like a great list!

http://www.autostraddle.com/feminist-reading-43637/

Life is short

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/04/19/135508305/the-sad-beautiful-fact-that-were-all-going-to-miss-almost-everything

Google to sentence YouTube violators to 'copyright school'

The new updates unveiled Thursday allow users to watch a new tutorial video about YouTube’s copyright policies and access a redesigned copyright help center.

In addition, Google instituted new policies for users who are found to have violated YouTube’s copyright rules.

If YouTube receives a copyright notification about a user’s video, the user will have to complete “YouTube Copyright School,” which requires watching a tutorial video and passing a quiz to prove the user understands the copyright policies.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53178.html#ixzz1JoFcewML

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53178.html#ixzz1JoFVO7C8

Turning Point

Sometimes, when you least expect it, you change. Not because of the outside world--that spins madly on no matter what--but because some part of you is tired of living the way you did before. For so long I have let obsession with grades and success dominate my life, my very sense of self. I'm tired of it.

The sun is passing behind clouds and reemerging again and again outside my window. I can't see the sky, all I can see are the apartments that are across the way, but I know that's what's happening because everything is pulsating bright and gray outside.

I refuse to feel like a caged bird anymore. There are too many things to see and do and feel before my life will be eclipsed by another generation.

Sometimes you have to end before you can really begin.

Six Reasons Google Books Failed by Robert Darnton | NYRBlog | The New York Review of Books

Six Reasons Google Books Failed by Robert Darnton | NYRBlog | The New York Review of Books

Knowing each other

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title. -Virginia Woolf

A poem for the revolution(s)

Sonnet: England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, -
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, -mud from a muddy spring, -
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, -
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field, -
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield, -
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless -a book sealed;
A Senate, -Time's worst statute unrepealed, -
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

-Shelley

"Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life. " -Nabokov