A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
“Read any biography of Jack Kerouac and here’s essentially what you’ll learn: that in the summer of 1956 he spent two months in a mountaintop shack as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service in the North Cascades in Washington State, and nothing much happened. Mostly he was bored. Jack’s experience on Desolation Peak […]
Desolation Journal By Jack Kerouac — 1960s: Days of Rage
‘But as his friend Jaime Sabartes recalled, his trusty pocket notebook remained his companion:
“Picasso was endeavoring to recapture the simplicity of our life as young men, despite the manifold and profound changes in us and around us. He wanted to return to a bygone period in our lives. He neither painted nor sketched and never went up to his studio except when it was absolutely necessary, and even then he put it off from day to day, no matter how urgent. In order to occupy his imagination, he wrote-with a pen if he found one handy, or a small stub of pencil-in a little notebook which he carried about with him in his pocket. He wrote everywhere.” ’
As quoted in ‘The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men’ in The Art of Manliness as found at: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-pocket-notebooks-of-20-famous-men/
…
INTERVIEWER
Can you discuss your work process? When do you sit down to write, and what do you do to warm up?
WHITE
Oh, it’s very tormented. I try to write in the morning, and I write in longhand, and I write in very beautiful notebooks [White displays a couple of hardbound notebooks filled with thick, hand-laid paper] and with very beautiful pens. I just write away, and then . . . This is a first go at it, and then I start crossing out, and it gets crazier and crazier, with inserts and so on. Finally, two or three years of this go by and then one day I call in a typist. I dictate the entire book to her or him. The typist is a sort of editor in that he or she will tell me what is really terrible and what’s good, or what’s inconsistent and doesn’t make sense. I get together a whole version this way and then I stew over it some more. Eventually my editor reads it, and then he tells me to change things, and it goes on like that. If I write a page a day, I’m lucky. But I write less. And months go by without my writing at all, and I get very crazy when I write! Sick, physically.
…
Edmund White, The Art of Fiction No. 105, as Interviewed by Jordan Elgrably in The Paris Review No. 108, Fall 1988.
Keep creating.
There are no kingdoms to inherit.
No planet to be saved.
No prizes or trophies to be awarded.
Only the act of self-satisfaction.
Of self-application.
Knowing that you have done your best.
That at least you have tried, if sometimes in vain.
To do something.
Rather than nothing.
– Marcus D. Niski, as taken from my writer’s notebook, 4 May 2020, [MN]
There is no genius as Corbusier implied. There is only steady, consistent, applied effort through diligence, insight, application and passion towards the expression of ideas in the most thoughtful and original attempt to capture them.
– Marcus D. Niski, as taken from my writer’s notebook, 4 May 2020, [MN]
As writers, we often find ourselves collecting notebooks in an attempt to fill them. Just as often, the ratio of empty notebooks to full starts to lean heavy on the “empty” side, but our compulsion to surround ourselves with empty pages is real. Curious that, for many of us, the empty page is a source […]
Six notebooks that guarantee you will get some writing done today, probably — B.W. McDermott
Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving.
— Anna Kamieńska, from “In That Great River: A Notebook,” Poetry. Originally Published: June 1, 2010
Les petits carnets Je regarde mon portable. 6:07. Mes yeux me piquent un peu. Le Tgv pour Paris est presque vide. J’ai deux heures pour écrire. Autour de moi quelques hommes, attaché-case posé sur le siège d’à côté, se mettent à travailler. D’autres dorment, la veste en guise de couverture et moi, comme à mon habitude je commence mon voyage en farfouillant mon sac.
via Les petits carnets — L’urgence est au bonheur, by Sophie Ausilio
I take a lot of crap about my note-taking. Constant scribbling is so central to my persona, in fact, that one colleague recently expressed concern during a meeting when I wasn’t taking notes. “I forgot my pen,” I shrugged. Here’s the thing: I have a terrible memory — so if I don’t write it down […]
Naked Cities Journal 
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