December 2, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Belated By Sadie Stein INTERVIEWER Can you remember one of the jokes you wrote hanging on a subway strap? ALLEN This was typical of the junk I turned out: Kid next to me in school was the son of a gambler—he’d never take his test marks back—he’d let ’em ride on the next test. Now you see why it wasn’t hard to do fifty a day during rush hour. —Woody Allen, the Art of Humor No. 1
November 26, 2013 Quote Unquote Seeing Is Believing By Sadie Stein Sandpoint, Idaho. ROBINSON No, a mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there are two sides to your encounter with the world. You don’t simply perceive something that is statically present, but in fact there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you. This is the individualism that you find in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision. INTERVIEWER How would one learn to see ordinary things this way? ROBINSON It’s not an acquired skill. It’s a skill that we’re born with that we lose. We learn not to do it. —Marilynne Robinson, the Art of Fiction No. 198
November 20, 2013 Quote Unquote Fourth Wall By Sadie Stein “When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.” —Don DeLillo, the Art of Fiction No. 135
November 19, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Sharon Olds By Sadie Stein “There’s no method. There’s no formula. If you really proceed a sentence at a time, if you pay attention to the sentence you just wrote and look to it for the clue for what to do to the next sentence, you can inch your way along to what may be a story. This wouldn’t have occurred to me starting out, for example, when I thought you wrote one sentence, then just looked out to the world trying to snag the next one. That’s not how it works. You look back at what you gave yourself to work with. Sharon Olds said something beautiful about sometimes thinking of her poems as instructions for how to put the world back together if it were destroyed.” —Amy Hempel, the Art of Fiction No. 176
November 13, 2013 Quote Unquote Nail Art By Sadie Stein Artificial nails, patented on this day in 1954. “There was nothing to being a lawyer except a certain amount of common sense, and relatively clean fingernails.” —John Mortimer, the Art of Fiction No. 106.
November 11, 2013 Quote Unquote Weapons of Mass Instruction By Sadie Stein VONNEGUT I took my basic training on the 240-millimeter howitzer. INTERVIEWER A rather large weapon. VONNEGUT The largest mobile fieldpiece in the army at that time. This weapon came in six pieces, each piece dragged wallowingly by a Caterpillar tractor. Whenever we were told to fire it, we had to build it first. We practically had to invent it. We lowered one piece on top of another, using cranes and jacks. The shell itself was about nine and a half inches in diameter and weighed three hundred pounds. We constructed a miniature railway which would allow us to deliver the shell from the ground to the breech, which was about eight feet above grade. The breechblock was like the door on the vault of a savings and loan association in Peru, Indiana, say. INTERVIEWER It must have been a thrill to fire such a weapon. VONNEGUT Not really. We would put the shell in there, and then we would throw in bags of very slow and patient explosives. They were damp dog biscuits, I think. We would close the breech, and then trip a hammer which hit a fulminate of mercury percussion cap, which spit fire at the damp dog biscuits. The main idea, I think, was to generate steam. After a while, we could hear these cooking sounds. It was a lot like cooking a turkey. In utter safety, I think, we could have opened the breechblock from time to time, and basted the shell. Eventually, though, the howitzer always got restless. And finally it would heave back on its recoil mechanism, and it would have to expectorate the shell. The shell would come floating out like the Goodyear blimp. If we had had a stepladder, we could have painted “Fuck Hitler” on the shell as it left the gun. Helicopters could have taken after it and shot it down. INTERVIEWER The ultimate terror weapon. VONNEGUT Of the Franco-Prussian War. —Kurt Vonnegut, the Art of Fiction No. 64