NOTED

The Beatles were all about this

October 22, 2011 | 9 Comments

I found Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland by way of a British blog, The Beatles Songwriting Academy, devoted to learning to write songs by studying the Liverpool lads. It’s not just a worshipful fan site: blogmaster Matt Blick rebukes them for lame songs (his “Hall of Shame” includes “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”) and for some stinky rhymes that mar great songs. But Blick has a “Be-atltudes” page, too, in which he enumerates virtues, especially the prolificacy of Paul McCartney and John Lennon:

“Between 1962 and 1970 Lennon & McCartney wrote close to 200 songs. Almost all were recorded and released. The majority were top 10 hits as singles or album tracks. Whereas most writers today would throw away a song that wasn’t good enough for their next album or didn’t fit stylistically, the boys always had a reason to finish that song. And because of their insane recording schedule they always had to come up with more songs.”

Mates and rivals, who happened also to be gifted, Lennon and McCartney inspired and goaded each other to craft new work. What’s ranked as one of the greatest songs ever written, and their masterpiece, “A Day in the Life,” which concludes Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, showcases their separate gifts being expressed together under the pressure to come up another tune. They melded utterly separate lyrical fragments each had written.

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Flannery O’Connor’s scary scowl

October 17, 2011 | 3 Comments

While searching for something else entirely, I came across this remarkable interview on Vimeo with Flannery O’Connor’s good friend Louise Abbot, who discusses O’Connor’s disdain for fame, among other things. The unusual, very occasional blog where I found the interview link is The Role of Imagination in Literary Nonfiction, worth a visit. This quiet blog is about, according to its author, Colin Foote Burch: • About the value of the nonfiction narrator’s subjective internal experience: real events that happen in …

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Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, Walker Percy, Fannie Flagg

October 12, 2011 | 11 Comments

My southern fiction orgy last summer started with Flannery O’Connor. Since I often dip into her stories, I bought and read the latest bio of her, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch. I hoped to learn how she got so wise, and so dark. Apparently, her mother and their ouchy relationship. And Flannery’s imaginings: she seemingly nudged her own prickly ways a bit to depict sullen grown children like the nasty daughter-with-PhD in “Good Country People”; she …

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4 writers on their messy process

October 4, 2011 | 8 Comments

Bill Roorbach has instituted a new feature over at Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, an author interview. The first, with John J. Clayton, marking the appearance of his new novel, Mitzvah Man, is remarkable for being done all in scene—Bill interviewed him at his home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts—and for Clayton’s thoughts on just what God truly is. Or may be. On his laborious daily struggle to write:  I do what I can to avoid writing fiction, because writing fiction is …

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Bret Lott’s ‘Against Technique’

September 29, 2011 | 7 Comments

If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.—Bret Lott This blog has been mostly about craft, even though I know craft isn’t the most important thing about writing. Not by far. A paradox about writing—maybe any art—is that craft, or call it technique, is what …

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An ancient lesson in structure

September 15, 2011 | 11 Comments

A version of this post first ran October 3, 2008 The King James Bible’s stories and ancient words and lovely turns of phrase have influenced legions of writers. I’m charmed by its liberal use of sobering colons: like so. And by the nonsensical italics. And then there’s Jesus: talk about someone who works on multiple levels. He’s always getting thronged and spied upon—What’s he gonna do now?—and he delights in flummoxing. He speaks in riddles to the dumbfounded masses, though …

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Welty on what’s ‘greater than scene’

September 6, 2011 | 5 Comments

A version of this post first appeared on August 31, 2008. Eudora Welty’s essay “The Little Store” takes us with her, as a child, to a neighborhood grocery, what we’d call a convenience store today. It’s a story about the lost world of childhood and it captures turn-of-the-century Jackson, Mississippi. All she conveys is suffused with meaning for her, but Welty avoids sentimentality by showing  instead of telling readers what to feel. The store’s realm is one of children on …

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