I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose among three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea of the ending until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels. Macro Planners have their houses largely built from day one, and so their obsession is internal — they’re forever moving the furniture. They’ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers build a house floor by floor, discretely and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all… Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line… Opening other people’s novels, you recognize fellow Micro Managers: that opening pileup of too-careful, obsessively worried-over sentences, a block of stilted verbiage that only loosens and relaxes after the twenty-page mark is passed… That’s the strange thing. It’s as if you’re winding the key of a toy car tighter and tighter… When you finally let it go, it travels at a crazy speed. When I finally settled on a tone, the rest of the book was finished in five months. Worrying over the first twenty pages is a way of working on the whole novel, a way of finding its structure, its plot, its characters — all of which, for a Micro Manager, are contained in the sensibility of a sentence. Once the tone is there, all else follows. You hear interior decorators say the same about a shade of paint.
That Crafty Feeling [March 2008 lecture]
Use the link below to visit the website of British novelist ZADIE SMITH:
Until the mid 1960s rock and roll was a form of entertainment designed to appeal almost exclusively to teenagers. Tunes were catchy, lyrics were largely confined to simplistic rhyme schemes of the classic 'moon–June–spoon' variety, and songs were restricted to an ideal length of no more than two and a half to three minutes so as not to overtax what was felt to be the limited adolescent attention span.
Not until Bob Dylan released his groundbreaking 1965 LP Bringing It All Back Home, containing material which was in a true sense poetic and broke every existing rule governing both song length and subject matter, did the popular song really come into its own as an authentically adult art form.
Moonlight Drive, the first single taken from The Doors' second 1967 LP Strange Days, is a case in point. The idea that a song so uncompromisingly dark could receive high rotation airplay on radio and be performed by its creators on prime time television would have been unthinkable in the buttoned down 1950s and even in the first half of the pre-psychedelic 1960s. Its masterful blending of blues imagery and Symbolist poetry is every bit as groundbreaking, in its way, as a song like Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man or anything released by Jimi Hendrix or acid-inspired UK bands like Cream or Pink Floyd during their respective heydays. While the song does conform to the three minute rule –– clocking in at 3:06 –– it is anything but predictable with Robbie Krieger's eerily haunting slide guitar continually weaving in and around the melody and Ray Manzarek's punchy keyboard work driving the rhythm alongside John Densmore's excellent (and vastly underrated) drumming. Moonlight Drive is a song that manages to captivate and unsettle the listener from its first note to its last, crowned by Morrison's supremely confident vocal performance which is, by turns, seductive, bluesy, and bordering, by the end, on the semi-psychotic.
This is rock and roll born of the unlikely melding of oldschool down home blues exemplified by artists like Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker and 'decadent' nineteenth century French poets like Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine with a healthy dose Antonin Artaud's The Theatre and Its Double thrown in to remind the listener that Morrison's primary goal as a performer was always to provoke his audience and shock them out of their complacency. He achieved this aim in Moonlight Drive, a song which confronts the listener in ways which few popular songs ever manage to do even today where shock for its own sake has more or less become a standard cultural requirement. You can love the song or hate it but the one thing you cannot feel about it is neutral.
Linguistically speaking, Moonlight Drive seems closer to a Rimbaud poem like Le Bateau Ivre [The Drunken Boat] than it does to any other late 1960s rock lyric that I can think of. Rimbaud's poem, published in 1871 when he was only seventeen years old, contains many lines which, to my mind, could be interpolated into Moonlight Drive almost verbatim without sacrificing one iota of its power as a musical composition.
The tempest blessed my wakings on the sea.
Light as a cork I danced upon the waves,
Eternal rollers of the deep sunk dead,
Nor missed at night the lanterns' idiot eyes!
Translated from the original French
by LOUISE VARÈSE
The imagery is similar and there is the same uneasy feeling of barely contained madness lurking below the surface of the language. The same is also true of the track that precedes Moonlight Drive on the Strange Days LP. Horse Latitudes is not a song as such, but rather a spoken word piece, lasting just over sixty seconds, which Morrison allegedly wrote when he was fourteen for a high school English assignment, basing its imagery on a painting he'd seen of the horses of Spanish conquistadores plunging from the deck of a galleon into a storm-tossed sea:
When the still sea conspires in armor
And her sullen and aborted currents
Breed tiny monsters
True sailing is dead
Awkward instant
And the first animal is jettisoned
Legs furiously pumping
Their stiff green gallop
And heads bob up
Poise
Delicate
Pause
Consent
In mute nostril agony
Carefully refined
And sealed over
I can think of almost no other songwriter in the English language who could get away with putting a track like this on what was ostensibly a commercial recording designed to appeal to what, despite its newfound sophistication, remained a predominantly suburban teenaged audience. Nor can I think of any other lyricist who could successfully juxtapose magnificently poetic lines like 'Surrender to the waiting worlds / That lap against our side' with straightforward blues steals like 'Come on, baby, gonna take a little ride' without making the result sound trite and utterly ridiculous. Few songwriters have ever come close to replicating the visionary quality of Morrison's best work or its astonishing ability to provoke, confront and disturb the listener five decades after it was originally unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
STRANGE DAYS
THE DOORS
Elektra Records 1967
Use the link below to visit the website of THE DOORS:
The Lords and The New Creatures, two volumes of poetry by JIM MORRISON, were originally published separately in 1969 and republished in one volume following his death in Paris on 3 July 1971 and his internment in that city's Père Lachaise cemetery (also the final resting place of Frédéric Chopin, Honoré de Balzac and Oscar Wilde, among others). These works have now been joined by Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison Volume I and The American Night: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison Volume II.
Special thanks to everyone who take the time to upload music to YouTube. Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.
In this case [when writing her 2016 novel The Portable Veblen] I had diagrams on large sheets of paper and something in my head like a musical score. I also did more drafts than I can count, and stumbled into many dead ends. There was a constant back and forth between making practical assessments of the progress (and damage), and writing spontaneously, letting the narrative develop unplanned.
Marketing, Marriage and a Sentient Squirrel [BookPage, January 2016]
Use the link below to read the full 2016 interview with North American novelist ELIZABETH McKENZIE:
Use
the links below to visit INCIDENTAL COMICS, the wonderful blog of North
American cartoonist GRANT SNIDER, and purchase his many fine books from
ABRAMS COMIC ARTS and CHRONICLE BOOKS:
According to a 2017 survey by The Washington Post, 47% of Republicans erroneously believe that Trump won the popular vote, 68% believe that millions of illegal immigrants voted in 2016, and more than half of Republicans say they would be okay with postponing the 2020 presidential election until such problems with illegal voting can be fixed. Another study conducted by political scientists at the University of Chicago showed that 25% of Americans believe that the 2008 [financial] crash was secretly orchestrated by a small cabal of bankers, 19% believe that the US government had a hand in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and 11% even believe a theory made up by the researchers –– that compact fluorescent lightbulbs were part of a government plot to make people more passive and easy to control.
The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump (2018)
Use the link to read articles by North American literary and political critic MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Her latest book The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump was published by Tim Duggan Books in July 2018.
When you are stuck in a book; when you are well into writing it, and know what comes next, and yet cannot go on; when every morning for a week or a month you enter its room and turn your back on it; then the trouble is either of two things. Either the structure has forked, so the narrative, or the logic, has developed a hairline fracture that will shortly split it up the middle — or you are approaching a fatal mistake. What you had planned will not do. If you pursue your present course, the book will explode or collapse, and you do not know about it yet, quite… What do you do? Acknowledge, first, that you cannot do nothing. Lay out the structure you already have, x-ray it for a hairline fracture, find it, and think about it for a week or a year; solve the insoluble problem. Or subject the next part, the part at which the worker balks, to harsh tests. It harbors an unexamined and wrong premise. Something completely necessary is false or fatal. Once you find it, and if you can accept the finding, of course it will mean starting again. This is why many experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade.
The Writing Life (1990)
Use the link below to visit the website of North American novelist, essayist and educator ANNIE DILLARD:
