R J O’Hara reminds UD of this essay by Key West inhabitant Annie Dillard on writing. Let’s see if she’s got something useful for us.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Quelle downer! I’d rather write as if I were living if you don’t mind. I mean, I take the point that I should aim for non-triviality (I guess – though I can think of plenty of essays about absurd teeny things that I’ve loved.), but must we be so grim? And it’s not the case that we’re all terminal patients. Terminal, to be sure, but I understand by patient someone hospitalized. And who says dying people become enraged at anything other than profundities? The classic scene of dying people shooing away well-meaning clergy should tell you something.

She is careful of what she reads, for that is what she will write.

Absolutely. Writers have an intense and interminable relationship to other writers, always circling around and rereading inspirations. It’s important to choose well. You know UD‘s prose obsessions. Feel free to share them.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble… Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem … – the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that.

Exactly what John Banville says here. One will always fail. And it’s partly because of this that Dillard goes on to make her strongest point:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.

Not to be trivial, but UD’d call this the Scrabble rule. Veteran players know not to hoard, hoping each turn for the G that will enable them to make a seven-letter word. Always go with your strongest hand, now.

Dillard’s right that this is true of writing too. Just do it.

This is easy to say, though. The problem of constraint – verbal and otherwise – lies very deep. UD has noticed that many smart and talented people over the years develop comprehensive internal brakes. She knows not why, but there are brilliant singers who do not sing, dancers who do not dance. She presumes this odd repression has to do with the complex balances needed to succeed in other things. Psychologically, you find yourself unable to pursue your brilliant corporate litigation career and play the guitar. Or maybe it’s a time thing. You just don’t have time. And maybe instead of the musical release, you take an easier chemical one — since, whatever you do, UD assumes you need your share of disinhibition…

“[T]he draftsman must aggress.” Yes. But notice how many drafts are about the failure or errancy of that energy. We may want the writer to “magnify and dramatize our days,” as Dillard claims, to “illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness,” but we shouldn’t be surprised when the writer gives us something smaller and sadder.

UD had a wonderful visit from a University Diaries reader yesterday. Chris is a linguist, and over a late lunch at Siboney’s, he introduced her to this distinction.

Turkish is another agglutinating language: the expression Avustralyalılaştıramadıklarımızdan is pronounced as one word in Turkish, but it can be translated into English as “one of those whom we could not make resemble the Australian people.”

… totally collapsed on Duval, the island’s main commercial street. What with spring breakers avoiding Mexico, it’s madness out there.

Duval North (UD lives a few blocks from Duval South, the quiet end of the street) is always pretty raucous, with cruise shippers jostling frat packs on the narrow sidewalks — made narrower by whiskey kiosks and hawkers done up as pirates. But now it’s insane, and UD finds herself apologizing in advance to Mr UD (he arrives soon) for what he’ll soon endure beneath the noonday sun.

My Key Western Civ course isn’t complete without this notable denizen of the island… But I really can’t stand Robert Frost, and my effort to find ONE poem of his about which I can think of something to say is going very badly… Stay tuned.

… in a BBC interview. He’s talking about the attack on the internet as an avenue of illiteracy amid the decline of the novel.

I doubt you can find any sentence describing how human learning has degraded now that isn’t congruent to a similar sentence written at the time of rise of the novel – about how people were no longer reading sermons and classical literature, but were reading novels from subscription libraries instead.

The literature at the time in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, describing the contempt that the learned establishment had for the rise of the novel – and then of course later with the rise of the penny dreadfuls and sensational literature as more and more people came to read it – again there was a great cry of despair at how there would be nothing but illiteracy in the world, or at least a kind of refusal or inability to engage in proper, serious study.

And we hear the cry again.

The novel is indeed a rather disreputable form. Many of the novels UD teaches were banned, or in some way suppressed, or subjected to serious legal trouble, when their publishers attempted to release them.

Whole syllabi of hers constitute once-criminal elements: Lolita, Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer… Some of the poetry she assigns had run-ins with the law, too — Ginsberg’s Howl had to lie low for a year before being ruled non-obscene.

And, as Fry suggests, the content of novels, involving the murk of personal relationships rather than loftier spiritual or classical meditations, seemed to many people degraded.

I mean, plenty of communities in the United States continue to attempt to suppress various novels.

… beginning to write themselves.

… by Columbia News Service, “which distributes content to more than 400 newspapers across the U.S. and Canada, and is operated by the New York Times News Service,” about Google Chat. The reporter wanted to know how she uses it, whether she gchats with her students, etc.

UD does indeed gchat with some of her students, and enjoys it. She went into great detail about this, and other online forms of communication. In a week or so, the article will be available, and I’ll link to it.

The Washington Post quotes the impressive new president of what the Post correctly calls the “long-troubled” University of the District of Columbia. He’s talking about dropping the school’s undergraduate major in education, which has many students but graduates almost no one.

There are about 380 undergraduate education majors now, but enrollment has gradually declined for five years. During that time, the school has issued diplomas to just a handful of students a year from each of four specialty areas. In undergraduate special education, which has about 30 students a year, there are years when no one graduates.

“Are you writing the great American novel?”

UD‘s server, a thin young man in a thin cotton shirt, asked her this as he set a spinach salad in front of her at a sunny corner table at Kelly’s. UD had been writing in her notebook.

“Nope. I’m writing about writing.”

“Writing’s hard!” he said. “I’ve been trying to write a novel based on my travels. But I don’t know how to start! How to start?”

“All kinds of ways. Some people just do a kind of automatic writing which somehow if they’re lucky begins to be what they want. Other people spend weeks outlining…”

“You have to know what you want to say…”

“But not entirely. A vague sense of the general point can work. What’s more important, I think, is some particular catalyst: A person you met along the way who moved you. The hats women at an outdoor market wore. Often you gain entry to your writing and thinking through small stuff.”

And often as you lie in bed a sentence comes to you. UD wrote a poem this morning that she likes a lot so far (Ask her again when she rereads it in a day or two.), and the first line came to her as she lay in bed thinking about its subject. Really just a pure sentence-visitation. Can’t rely on those, though.

“I spend half the year here, and half in Catalina. So my surroundings are certainly inspiring…”

“Well, the other thing you need is to read. A ton.”

“I do. You know who I love? Bill Bryson. I’ve read every word of his a bunch of times. He’s hilarious.”

“And a fine prose stylist. Good choice.” UD‘s phone rang. Mr UD, giving her information about his arrival in Key West at the end of the week. “Good luck with your writing.”

“Thanks. Enjoy your salad.”

From the Daily Cal.

… I actually dropped a class at the beginning of the semester because the professor wouldn’t allow laptops in lecture.

But I do admit that the professor had a point. Most of the time, Microsoft Word is minimized with Facebook or Gmail taking its place. The problem is that this is distracting for everyone who can see the screen. For some inexplicable reason, indirectly Facebook-stalking a random stranger is much more intriguing than the atomic mass of uranium…

As you know (see this post), UD has begun a project – at the request of an entity which will for the moment remain anonymous – of writing about writing.

One initial point she’s already made, via George Orwell, about serious writing, is that it’s very difficult, its actual process often acutely unpleasant. Here’s more data along these lines, testimony from some very good writers:

Colm Toibin: “I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult.”

John Banville: “The struggle of writing is fraught with a specialised form of anguish, the anguish of knowing one will never get it right, that one will always fail, and that all one can hope to do is ‘fail better’, as Beckett recommends.”

Robert Greacen: Writing poetry is like “trying to catch a black cat in a dark room.”

Most university creative writing courses make it fun, because they make it about you. But Orwell, you recall, also said, “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.”

T.S. Eliot said something similar. “What happens is a continual surrender of [the writer] himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality… Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

James Joyce, in the character of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist, writes: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

Let’s put these two things together:

1.) Writing is hell.

2.) Writing extinguishes the personality.

and suggest the following. Writing is hell because in order to get at and express the truth of some aspect of existence you have to get over yourself — an excruciating task. You have to be riveted to the world outside yourself — both the physical world of objects and other people, and the metaphysical world of history and, in particular, the world that is the history of the literature preceding you.

If you remain riveted on yourself, you produce, at best, sincere feeling.

And “All bad poetry,” Oscar Wilde notes, “is sincere.”

*******************

Update: Wow. These are really easy to find.

Joan Acocella in The New Yorker:

Writing is a nerve-flaying job. First of all, what the Symbolists said is true: clichés come to the mind much more readily than anything fresh or exact. To hack one’s way past them requires a huge, bleeding effort. (For anyone who wonders why seasoned writers tend to write for only about three or four hours a day, that’s the answer.) … Anthony Burgess [says] a writer can never be happy: “The anxiety involved is intolerable. And . . . the financial rewards just don’t make up for the expenditure of energy, the damage to health caused by stimulants and narcotics, the fear that one’s work isn’t good enough. I think, if I had enough money, I’d give up writing tomorrow.”

Acocella also quotes Elizabeth Hardwick: “I don’t think getting older is good for the creative process. Writing is so hard. It’s the only time in your life when you have to think.”

… wherever she lived growing up in Maryland, UD can recall her parents laughing at the state song, authored during the Civil War by a secessionist.

Sen. Jennie Forehand was attending a conference of Southern lawmakers some years ago when Maryland, My Maryland, the state song, began playing at a ceremony.

An impassioned Confederate-era poem set to the tune of O Tannenbaum, the song takes a particularly exclamatory turn at the end: “She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb – Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum! She breathes! She burns! She’ll come! She’ll come! Maryland! My Maryland!”

“People were laughing at it,” said Forehand, a Montgomery County Democrat, “They were asking, ‘What in the world is this all about?'”

Forehand told the story yesterday as she tried to persuade lawmakers to change their tune about the state song. The Senate hearing was packed with Confederate re-enactors, amateur historians, teachers and a seventh-grader who said she loves the state song, which taught her the meaning of “despot.”

For more than 50 years, lawmakers have periodically tried to dethrone Maryland, My Maryland, written in 1861 by James Ryder Randall and codified as the state song in 1939. Randall, 22 at the time, penned the lyrics after learning that his former college roommate had been killed in a Pratt Street riot between Confederate sympathizers and Union soldiers from Massachusetts, the history goes.

Many of those testifying yesterday said they were present seven years ago, the last time Forehand unsuccessfully tried to do away with Randall’s words. She wants to replace them with a more pacifist version written in 1894 by John T. White, an Allegany County teacher.

“I feel like a victim’s family who has to show up again and again for parole hearings,” Linda Atwell, a history buff who lives in Frederick County, told the committee.

Hyattsville resident William F. Fronck said Forehand’s motives were “an insidious spiritual virus called political correctness.”

Fronck and others argued that the song is a history lesson that should not be wiped away. Some called attempts to sanitize the lyrics a “Stalinist” revision of past events.

“This song is our history,” said self-described historian and author Daniel Toomey, who brought along an original copy of the Randall poem.

But opponents of the song said it misrepresents Maryland – “The Free State” – and unfairly portrays only one side of the Civil War.

“It’s a bitter and abusive diatribe written to incite revenge,” said William Moulden, a teacher who lives near Annapolis.

Respected state archivist Edward C. Papenfuse wants to see the song go. “While Randall deserves recognition as a Maryland poet, he was decidedly partisan and bitter, a strong advocate of slavery and secession,” he wrote in a letter to Forehand…

CURRENT FIRST STANZA:

The despot’s heel is on thy shore, Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door, Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland! My Maryland!

[The despot is Abraham Lincoln.]

FIRST STANZA OF PROPOSED STATE SONG

We dedicate our song to thee,
Maryland, my Maryland,
The home of light and liberty,
Maryland, my Maryland.
We love thy streams and wooded hills,
Thy mountains with their gushing rills,
Thy scenes — our heart with rapture fills —
Maryland, my Maryland.

********************

Here’s something clever. How about instead of wooded hills you simply switch the first letters of gushing rills?

We love thy streams and rushing gills,
Thy mountains with their gushing rills…

Digestive CARE(TM), a medical group of 46 gastroenterologists in Broward and Palm Beach County, today launched the “Bottom Line Poetry Contest” in honor of National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month (March 2009).

Digestive CARE(TM) is offering a $500 cash prize (or the option of a free colonoscopy) to the poet who submits the best new original poem about colonoscopies.

… Original poems about colonoscopies should be submitted directly to [email protected]. Please write “COLON POEM” in the subject line. The deadline for submission is April 30, 2009, the last day of National Poetry Month.

… punishments in response to the university running a cheating ring for athletes.

A commentator writes:

[Coach] Bobby Bowden, one of the greatest ambassadors college football has ever known, should not be punished because some obscure academic counselor helped athletes cheat.

“So it’s a very bad situation. We feel like Harvard has plenty of money. When I came here 20 years ago they had $4.5 billion in their endowment. Now they have 29 billion. To me, that’s a staggering record of capital accumulation. And they made some risky investments that made the endowment skyrocket during the boom times – leveraged private equity, oil, timber, hedge funds, and of course these things, when the economy is doing great they do fantastic and the endowment doubled in just a few years. Predictably, in a downturn, those investments are going to take a hit. But they want us to pay for that. They want ordinary workers to pay for their investment strategies. They pay their top people – one guy got 6.4 million in a year for managing a Harvard endowment. There were several of them. It was reported in the Globe. He goes up from 3 million to 6 million. So why do they have to cut jobs?”