aesthetics

Playwright David Hare on reality art

June 4, 2010 | No Comments

David Hare, known as a “verbatim playwright” for his plays taken from news events, gave a lecture on the relationship between nonfiction and art to the Royal Society of Literature in which he drew the distinction between what he does and ordinary daily journalism. In a nutshell, “without metaphor we have no art,” he said. The Guardian printed an edited version, under the headline “David Hare: mere fact, mere fiction.” In turn, I excerpt it here: Journalism is reductive. This …

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Finding a font for our words

January 13, 2010 | 6 Comments

The New Yorker online recently excerpted a passage from Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City concerning a man who believes his mind to be controlled by the magazine’s font. This mention allowed The New Yorker to reveal: “Fiction editor Deborah Treisman expounded a bit on the font (it’s ACaslon Regular), and how it factors into the story selection process: Often when we’re reading stories, and thinking about them and editing them, we’ll say, ‘Let’s go ahead and put it in …

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The poetic prose of ‘Nat Turner’

January 3, 2010 | 2 Comments

William Styron’s great novel showcases the strengths of lavish, incantatory words and sentences. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Vintage. 480 pages. William Styron told interviewers he worked slowly, writing his thick books by hand, in No. 2 pencil, on yellow legal pads. In Sophie’s Choice his alter ego reads his sentences aloud, testing them, as he goes. Styron had an ear for rhythm and a fearsome vocabulary that he wasn’t afraid to unleash. The lovely word motes …

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A few more words

December 21, 2009 | No Comments

I own a few sacred words, words of such beauty I desire to be worthy of them. I adore these watery two: lacustrine, of or pertaining to a lake, and pelagic, of or pertaining to the open seas or oceans. The oceans are mighty places, you know, and pelagic fishes must swim faster than their lacustrine kin. We try to capture our feelings with words, and we think more precisely and deeply with them. Therefore knowing the meaning of bumptious …

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A writer’s words

December 16, 2009 | 4 Comments

The more I consider words, the more beautiful and useful and strange they seem individually and in combination: What does “hopelessly endearing,” used in a recent New Yorker review to describe an actor’s smile, literally mean? Yet the phrase captures a doofus charm, and I can picture George Clooney pulling it off. I got frustrated with my own writing vocabulary when I felt I’d strung together about a dozen words to build a book-length manuscript. And it came to perplex …

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Virginia Woolf on journalism

November 23, 2009 | 7 Comments

“To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. And so, if one reads Mr. Lucas, Mr. Lynd, or Mr. …

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Reading and re-reading pleasures

November 6, 2009 | No Comments

Doctorow’s great story, Ragtime, and its fine sentence rhythms. Ragtime: A Novel by E.L. Doctorow. Random House. 336 pages. I read Ragtime more than thirty years ago when it first appeared, and was impressed by its prose—which seemed like nothing I’d ever read and which was rumored to be in ragtime rhythm—and was gripped by its story. What strikes me now, having just reread it, is the spare beauty of its language and its narrative audacity. So, much the same. The bestseller …

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