THE WRITING LIFE June 22, 2006
Posted by thenaturalist in Work, Writing.add a comment
Garret Keizer has just gotten a Guggenheim Fellowship for Nonfiction. According to the Chronicle of Barton, “On a good day, he gets up early and starts to write in earnest after his wife has left for work. It’s tough though to avoid being distracted by other responsibilities when the workday is dictated largely by yourself, and when the work is such that it might, or might not, actually make some money. So he asks himself, if I worked at Tap and Die would I be doing this at two in the afternoon? No, he’d be working, and the laundry and the lawn would simply have to wait. The same idea of work has to apply to writing. On the other hand, he said, he sometimes gets his best ideas while stacking wood or mowing the lawn. ‘To do this, or any other kind of self-employment, you’re making a trade-off.’ A self-employed man once told him, ‘I work 60 hours a week for myself so I don’t have to work 40 hours a week for someone else.’ It’s a philosophy Mr. Keizer relates to…. ‘Other people dream of getting rich so they won’t have to work anymore,’ he said. ‘Artists and writers want to get rich so they can keep working. Doing what I want to do has been gratifying.’”
AGE June 5, 2006
Posted by thenaturalist in Age.add a comment
Here’s an interesting question posed by “Satchel” Page: “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” I guess I’d have to say, it depends on how I feel that day. My range is late 20s to late 80s. I hardly ever feel the age I know I am….
POETRY June 3, 2006
Posted by thenaturalist in Poetry.add a comment
Geof Hewitt defines poetry as “any writing where the author, not the typesetter, decides where to end each line.” He makes it seem much easier than I thought it was….
EARTHWORMS June 3, 2006
Posted by thenaturalist in Darwin, Interesting, Nature/Natural History.add a comment
Darwin said of EARTHWORMS: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world.”
PASSIONS June 3, 2006
Posted by thenaturalist in Interesting, Nature/Natural History.add a comment
Thomas Eisner, Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology at Cornell, has this to say about his high-magnification photos of the scales on a moth’s wing: “There is proof in these images that science and art, while dwelling separately in the confines of our consciousness, do merge in that vague domain of the subconscious that guides us in our passions.”
