Tag : paris review

maya-angelou-quoteMaya Angelou – de ce vorbele ei au atita putere
jurnalism
11 years ago

Maya Angelou – de ce vorbele ei au atita putere

la inceputul acestei saptamini a plecat de pe aici o mare doamna care a inspirat multe generatii, o doamna ale carei cuvinte au facut ocolul lumii: Maya Angelou

ce avea ea in plus fata de altii care-si exprima gindurile (sau povestesc vietile) prin compuneri?

in primul rind o viata din care a invatat foarte multe (a fost prostituata, dansatoare intr-un bar), a facut studii de literatura si scriere, a ajuns o poeta faimoasa dupa ce a scris scenarii de televiziune, piese de teatru si a fost un celebru producator de televiziune.

in al doilea rind a povestit intotdeauna esenta lucrurilor, nu ambalajul lor

si-n al treilea rind, a muncit foarte mult pentru fiecare fraza pe care a pus-o in spatiul public. a scris-o si rescris-o pina cind i-a dat forma cea mai buna din ce putea da in acel moment.

si da, avea HAR.

de dragul ei, dar si al celor care vor sa scrie, un fragment dintr-un interviu din The Paris Review.

 

How do you know when it’s what you want?

ANGELOU: I know when it’s the best I can do. It may not be the best there is. Another writer may do it much better. But I know when it’s the best I can do. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, “No. No, I’m finished. Bye.” And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.

How much revising is involved?

ANGELOU: I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop—I’m a serious cook—and pretend to be normal. I play sane—Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them—fifty acceptable pages—it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.

***

Aren’t you tempted to lie? Novelists lie, don’t they? 

ANGELOU: I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

intregul interviu aici 

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didion-jJoan Didion – the lady I would like to be
culturale
11 years ago

Joan Didion – the lady I would like to be

INTERVIEWER

You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

JOAN DIDION

It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

INTERVIEWER

Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you?

DIDION

Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.

INTERVIEWER

So when you ask, as you do in many nonfiction pieces, “Do you get the point?” you are really asking if you yourself get the point.

DIDION

Yes. Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.

INTERVIEWER

I wonder if your ethic—what you call your “harsh Protestant ethic”—doesn’t close things up for you, doesn’t hinder your struggle to keep all the possibilities open.

DIDION

I suppose that’s part of the dynamic. I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I’ve already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That’s very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well, it’s not the ideal, it’s not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybe—if I go ahead and finish it anyway—I can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance.

(…)

INTERVIEWER

So the process of writing the novel is for you the process of discovering the precise novel that you want to write.

DIDION

Exactly. At the beginning I don’t have anything at all, don’t have any people, any weather, any story. All I have is a technical sense of what I want to do. For example, I want sometime to write a very long novel, eight hundred pages. I want to write an eight-hundred-page novel precisely because I think a novel should be read at one sitting. If you read a novel over a period of days or weeks the threads get lost, the suspension breaks. So the problem is to write an eight-hundred-page novel in which all the filaments are so strong that nothing breaks or gets forgotten ever. I wonder if García Márquez didn’t do that in The Autumn of the Patriarch. I don’t want to read it because I’m afraid he might have done it, but I did look at it, and it seems to be written in a single paragraph. One paragraph. The whole novel. I love that idea.

(…)

INTERVIEWER

You say you treasure privacy, that “being left alone and leaving others alone is regarded by members of my family as the highest form of human endeavor.” How does this mesh with writing personal essays, particularly the first column you did for Life where you felt it imperative to inform the reader that you were at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in lieu of getting a divorce?

DIDION

I don’t know. I could say that I was writing to myself, and of course I was, but it’s a little more complicated than that. I mean the fact that eleven million people were going to see that page didn’t exactly escape my attention. There’s a lot of mystery to me about writing and performing and showing off in general. I know a singer who throws up every time she has to go onstage. But she still goes on.

INTERVIEWER

How did the “fragility of Joan Didion” myth start?

DIDION

Because I’m small, I suppose, and because I don’t talk a great deal to people I don’t know. Most of my sentences drift off, don’t end. It’s a habit I’ve fallen into. I don’t deal well with people. I would think that this appearance of not being very much in touch was probably one of the reasons I started writing.

de aici

a fost ziua ei pe 5 decembrie. a implinit 79 de ani. din pacate e o scriitoare care nu a fost tradusa la noi, dar sper din tot sufletul sa se intimple asta cit mai curind.

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harold pinterModestia unui mare scriitor (om)
carti simpaculturale
12 years ago

Modestia unui mare scriitor (om)

It’s a great mistake to pay any attention to them (critics). I think, you see, that this is an age of such overblown publicity and overemphatic pinning down. I’m a very good example of a writer who can write, but I’m not as good as all that. I’m just a writer; and I think that I’ve been overblown tremendously because there’s a dearth of really fine writing, and people tend to make too much of a meal. All you can do is try to write as well as you can.

dintr-un interviu minunat cu Harold Pinter (re)publicat in Paris Review

mai jos citeva intrebari si raspusuri frumoase.

INTERVIEWER

Why wasn’t there a character representing you in the play?

PINTER

I had—I have—nothing to say about myself, directly. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Particularly since I often look at myself in the mirror and say, “Who the hell’s that?”
*

INTERVIEWER

Do you sense when you should bring down the curtain, or do you work the text consciously toward a moment you’ve already determined?

PINTER

It’s pure instinct. The curtain comes down when the rhythm seems right—when the action calls for a finish. I’m very fond of curtain lines, of doing them properly.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel your plays are therefore structurally successful? That you’re able to communicate this instinct for rhythm to the play?

PINTER

No, not really, and that’s my main concern, to get the structure right. I always write three drafts, but you have to leave it eventually. There comes a point when you say, That’s it, I can’t do anything more. The only play that gets remotely near to a structural entity which satisfies me is The Homecoming. The Birthday Party and The Caretaker have too much writing. I want to iron it down, eliminate things. Too many words irritate me sometimes, but I can’t help them, they just seem to come out—out of the fellow’s mouth. I don’t really examine my works too much, but I’m aware that quite often in what I write, some fellow at some point says an awful lot.

*
INTERVIEWER

The theater is a very competitive business. Are you, as a writer, conscious of competing against other playwrights?

PINTER

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living. I’m never conscious of any competition going on here.

INTERVIEWER

Do you read things written about you?

PINTER

Yes. Most of the time I don’t know what they’re talking about; I don’t really read them all the way through. Or I read it and it goes—if you asked me what had been said, I would have very little idea. But there are exceptions, mainly nonprofessional critics.

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1993
Gabriel-Garcia-MarquezMarquez nu mai scrie. Deloc.
diverse
13 years ago

Marquez nu mai scrie. Deloc.

Viata nu e ce ai trait, ci ceea ce iti amintesti ca ai trait si cum ti-o amintesti sa o povestesti. Gabriel Garcia Marquez.


Saptamina asta toata lumea a aflat ca Gabriel Garcia Marquez (85 ani) sufera de dementa senila. Gata. Nu mai scrie.

Vestea a venit de la fratele lui, Jaime, cel care e administratorul fundatiei pentru jurnalism pe care a creat-o Marquez.

N-ar fi vrut sa o spuna asa public in vazul tuturor , pentru ca voia sa oamenii sa-l aminteasca pe Gabriel Garcia asa cum il stiu din scrieri sau conferinte, din articolele politice. Erau insa prea multe zvonuri despre starea sa, detalii morbide despre cum traieste ca o leguma.

“Dementia runs in our family and he’s now suffering the ravages prematurely due to the cancer that put him almost on the verge of death,” said Jaime. “Chemotherapy saved his life, but it also destroyed many neurons, many defences and cells, and accelerated the process. But he still has the humour, joy and enthusiasm that he has always had.” (via Guardian)

***

Cei mai multi isi amintesc de Gabriel Garcia Marquez via  Un veac de singuratate, dar mie mi-ar placea ca macar cei care fac jurnalism – sau scriu (cartie, esseuri etc) – sa citeasca macar o data interviul lui din Paris Review .

(…)

INTERVIEWER

How do you feel about using the tape recorder?

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

The problem is that the moment you know the interview is being taped, your attitude changes. In my case I immediately take a defensive attitude. As a journalist, I feel that we still haven’t learned how to use a tape recorder to do an interview. The best way, I feel, is to have a long conversation without the journalist taking any notes. Then afterward he should reminisce about the conversation and write it down as an impression of what he felt, not necessarily using the exact words expressed. Another useful method is to take notes and then interpret them with a certain loyalty to the person interviewed. What ticks you off about the tape recording everything is that it is not loyal to the person who is being interviewed, because it even records and remembers when you make an ass of yourself. That’s why when there is a tape recorder, I am conscious that I’m being interviewed; when there isn’t a tape recorder, I talk in an unconscious and completely natural way.

INTERVIEWER

Well, you make me feel a little guilty using it, but I think for this kind of an interview we probably need it.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Anyway, the whole purpose of what I just said was to put you on the defensive.

INTERVIEWER

So you have never used a tape recorder yourself for an interview?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

As a journalist, I never use it. I have a very good tape recorder, but I just use it to listen to music. But then as a journalist I’ve never done an interview. I’ve done reports, but never an interview with questions and answers.

INTERVIEWER

I heard about one famous interview with a sailor who had been shipwrecked.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

It wasn’t questions and answers. The sailor would just tell me his adventures and I would rewrite them trying to use his own words and in the first person, as if he were the one who was writing. When the work was published as a serial in a newspaper, one part each day for two weeks, it was signed by the sailor, not by me. It wasn’t until twenty years later that it was re-published and people found out I had written it. No editor realized that it was good until after I had written One Hundred Years of Solitude.

INTERVIEWER

Since we’ve started talking about journalism, how does it feel being a journalist again, after having written novels for so long? Do you do it with a different feel or a different eye?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I’ve always been convinced that my true profession is that of a journalist. What I didn’t like about journalism before were the working conditions. Besides, I had to condition my thoughts and ideas to the interests of the newspaper. Now, after having worked as a novelist, and having achieved financial independence as a novelist, I can really choose the themes that interest me and correspond to my ideas. In any case, I always very much enjoy the chance of doing a great piece of journalism.

INTERVIEWER

What is a great piece of journalism for you?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Hiroshima by John Hersey was an exceptional piece.

INTERVIEWER

Is there a story today that you would especially like to do?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

There are many, and several I have in fact written. I have written about Portugal, Cuba, Angola, and Vietnam. I would very much like to write on Poland. I think if I could describe exactly what is now going on, it would be a very important story. But it’s too cold now in Poland; I’m a journalist who likes his comforts.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think the novel can do certain things that journalism can’t?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Nothing. I don’t think there is any difference. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same. The Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a great novel and Hiroshima is a great work of journalism.

INTERVIEWER

Do the journalist and the novelist have different responsibilities in balancing truth versus the imagination?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.

(…)

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I do find it harder to write now than before, both novels and journalism. When I worked for newspapers, I wasn’t very conscious of every word I wrote, whereas now I am. When I was working for El Espectador in Bogotá, I used to do at least three stories a week, two or three editorial notes every day, and I did movie reviews. Then at night, after everyone had gone home, I would stay behind writing my novels. I liked the noise of the Linotype machines, which sounded like rain. If they stopped, and I was left in silence, I wouldn’t be able to work. Now, the output is comparatively small. On a good working day, working from nine o’clock in the morning to two or three in the afternoon, the most I can write is a short paragraph of four or five lines, which I usually tear up the next day.

(…)

INTERVIEWER

Did you anticipate the extraordinary success of One Hundred Years of Solitude?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I knew that it would be a book that would please my friends more than my others had. But when my Spanish publisher told me he was going to print eight thousand copies I was stunned, because my other books had never sold more than seven hundred. I asked him why not start slowly, but he said he was convinced that it was a good book and that all eight thousand copies would be sold between May and December. Actually they were all sold within one week in Buenos Aires.

Intregul interviu aici.

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HouellebecqHOUELLEBECQ despre singuratate si casatorie
carti simpa
13 years ago

HOUELLEBECQ despre singuratate si casatorie

INTERVIEWER What about marriage?

HOUELLEBECQ :I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at university, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce, when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result people get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone understands.

INTERVIEWER So marriage is just a reaction to . . .

HOUELLEBECQ To a largely solitary life.

***
Dintr-un interviu mai vechi din Paris Review, in care recunoaste ca plinge la anumite pasaje din carti:)

(…) that’s what I like best in literature. For example, the last pages of The Brothers Karamazov: not only can I not read them without crying, I can’t even think of them without crying. That’s what I admire most in literature, its ability to make you weep. There are two compliments I really appreciate. “It made me weep,” and “I read it in one night. I couldn’t stop.”

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joan-didionInterviu: Joan Didion
carti simpa
13 years ago

Interviu: Joan Didion

scriitoarea mea preferata, Joan Didion intr-un interviu vechi pentru Paris review, despre tehnicile de scris.
e reconfortant sa stii ca si aia mari mari scriu si rescriu la nesfirsit.
aici e dupa lansarea cartii A year of magical thinking, o analiza asupra doliului, singuratatii, iubirii – scrisa dupa moartea sotului sau.

***
INTERVIEWER

Do you do a lot of rewriting?

DIDION

When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting. At the end of the day, I mark up the pages I’ve done—pages or page—all the way back to page one. I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past that blank terror.

INTERVIEWER

Did you do that sort of retyping for The Year of Magical Thinking?

DIDION

I did. It was especially important with this book because so much of it depended on echo. I wrote it in three months, but I marked it up every night.

INTERVIEWER

The book moves quickly. Did you think about how your readers would read it?

DIDION

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

INTERVIEWER

At what point did you know that the notes you were writing in response to John’s death would be a book for publication?

DIDION

John died December 30, 2003. Except for a few lines written a day or so after he died, I didn’t begin making the notes that became the book until the following October. After a few days of making notes, I realized that I was thinking about how to structure a book, which was the point at which I realized that I was writing one. This realization in no way changed what I was writing.

INTERVIEWER

Was it difficult to finish the book? Or were you happy to have your life back—to live with a lower level of self-scrutiny?

DIDION

Yes. It was difficult to finish the book. I didn’t want to let John go. I don’t really have my life back yet, since Quintana died only on August 26.

***
Restul interviului aici
in urma cu 3 saptamini a mai lansat o carte Blue Nights, tot autobiografica. din pacate Joan Didion nu e tradusa (inca) in Romania.

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jack-kerouackerouac – un interviu rar
carti simpa
14 years ago

kerouac – un interviu rar

pentru fanii lui Jack Kerouac, o bijuterie de interviu… in paris review

The Kerouacs have no telephone. Ted Berrigan had contacted Kerouac some months earlier and had persuaded him to do the interview. When he felt the time had come for their meeting to take place, he simply showed up at the Kerouacs’s house. Two friends, poets Aram Saroyan and Duncan McNaughton, accompanied him. Kerouac answered his ring; Berrigan quickly told him his name and the visit’s purpose. Kerouac welcomed the poets, but before he could show them in, his wife, a very determined woman, seized him from behind and told the group to leave at once.

(…)

“As the evening progressed the atmosphere changed considerably, and Mrs. Kerouac, Stella, proved a gracious and charming hostess. The most amazing thing about Jack Kerouac is his magic voice, which sounds exactly like his works. It is capable of the most astounding and disconcerting changes in no time flat. It dictates everything, including this interview.”

***

INTERVIEWER

What is that state of “Yeatsian semi-trance” which provides the ideal atmosphere for spontaneous writing?

KEROUAC

Well, there it is, how can you be in a trance with your mouth yapping away . . . writing at least is a silent meditation even though you’re going a hundred miles an hour. Remember that scene in La Dolce Vita where the old priest is mad because a mob of maniacs has shown up to see the tree where the kids saw the Virgin Mary? He says, “Visions are not available in all this frenetic foolishness and yelling and pushing; visions are only obtainable in silence and meditation.” Thar. Yup.

restul, o bucurie de interviu, aici.

nabokov_nti-ar fi placut sa-l ai profesor pe Nabokov?
culturale
14 years ago

ti-ar fi placut sa-l ai profesor pe Nabokov?

da, domnul ala care a scris Lolita. si Ada sau ardoarea.

unii, mai norocosi, l-au avut profesor pe vladimir nabokov

My father took Nabokov’s American literature course and says he can’t remember anything about it except for the way that Nabokov, wearing a black cape, used to sweep into the lecture hall with Vera, his wife and assistant, in tow. Nabokov would then deliver his lecture from prepared notes to great affect. His dramatic performances in class drew students to him, and, according to Nabokov’s most meticulous biographer Brian Boyd, his European literature course was second in enrollment to Pete Seger’s folk-song course. As a literature teacher, Nabokov emphasized the importance of reading for detail, assigning students fewer books in order to read them slowly. He quizzed students on the pattern of Madame Bovary’s wallpaper and sketched the path that Bloom walks in Ulysses on the blackboard. According to Nabokov, this approach “‘irritated or puzzled such students of literature (and their professors) as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends,’ and ‘schools,’ and ‘myths,’ and ‘symbols,’ and ‘social comment,’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.’ Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.”

din Paris Review, unde e si istoria unui interviu cu el, la care el a centrat, el a dat cu capul. adica pt ca nu i-au placut intrebarile trimise, a inventat altele si-a raspuns la ele:))

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