"Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin chose to express their vigorous and abundant thoughts by writing at stand-up desks, and that's how Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1885) and Through the Looking Glass (1872). 'Standing at the upright desk he always used while writing,' his biographer Morton N. Cohen said, 'he managed to breathe life and laughter onto the dry leaves of paper that lay before him."


"Playwright August Wilson 'wrote standing up, at a high, cluttered accounting desk,' said John Lahr, drama critic of The New Yorker. For years, an Everlast punching bag was suspended from the ceiling about two steps behind.  When Wilson was in full flow and the dialogue 'was popping, he'd stop, pivot, throw a barrage of punches, then turn back to work."

~ Harry Bruce, Page Fright, McClelland & Steward Ltd., 2009.

View from my window ~

Three authors who wrote standing ~

"If I sit down, I write a long opinion and don't come to the point as quickly as I could.  If I stand up I write as long as my knees hold out.  When they don't, I know it's time to stop." ~ Oliver Wendell Homes, "the Great Dissenter," while serving on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Virginia Woolf had "a desk standing about three feet six inches high with a sloping top; it was so high that she had to stand to do her work.  Her 'principal motive' was that her older sister Vanessa, a professional painter whom she both adored and saw as a rival, stood before an easel as she worked.  Virginia feared her writing would appear less worthy than Vanessa's painting 'unless she set matters on a footing of equality,' and that was why 'for many years she stood at this strange desk, and, in a quite unnecessary way, tired herself."  ~ Quentin Bell, a nephew of VW.

"Winston Churchill composed his prose while standing and walking.  'He wrote forty-two books, five thousand speeches and articles -- in all roughly thirty-million words,' said Richard M. Langworth, founder of the Churchill Centre in Washington, DC.  'When he went to work, usually late at night, he shut himself up and arranged his papers at a stand-up desk.  And there, padding up and down in his slippers, he reeled off prose in the small hours.... 'Nearly 3,000 words in the last two days!'  he told his wife in 1928. 'I do not conceal from you that it is a task.  But it is not more than I can do."

Harry Bruce, FOIBLES and FETISHES of FAMOUS WRITERS / Page Fright.  McClelland & Stewart Ltd. 2009.

They Wrote Standing Up ~

"A website that advertises the J. Peterman Stand-Up Desk asks, 'Notice how you get some of your best ideas when you're standing there shaving or taking a shower?  How your thighs and toes squirm when you sit at a desk, then 'it comes to you' when you stand up and walk around?  The fact is, you think with your legs. . . .If you want to increase the vigour and abundance of your thought, I recommend this time-tested Stand-Up Desk.'  Sitting at a desk put heavy pressure on 'those shock absorbing discs between your vertebrae,' but standing instantly relieved it and thus eliminated the risk of back pain."

~ Harry Bruce, Page Fright, McClelland & Steward Ltd. 2009.

[Tomorrow:  Authors who wrote standing up.]

From Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers / Page Fright * by Harry Bruce

"  When Hugh MacLennan was in his seventies and completing his last novel, Voices in Time, his elderly Underwood died of old age and overwork.  With that black, noisy, anachronistic, typewriting contraption -- whose shape was as familiar to the elderly as Model T Fords had once been -- MacLennan had earned his reputation as Canada's first internationally acclaimed novelist and had written no fewer than five winners of Governor General's Awards.  Now, the machine was just a mess of keys, spools, wheels, and other useless parts.  It was too old to repair or replace, and he was too old to switch to another brand.  How could he possibly finish Voices in Time?

His alarmed publisher, Douglas Gibson, asked Peter Gzowski, the host of CBC Radio's "This Country in the Morning," to appeal to his listeners for old Underwoods in working order.  Gzowski was the most popular on-air personality in the country.  He was "Mr. Canada," and, to enable a pioneer of modern Canadian literature to finish his last novel, dozens of Gzowski's fans now rummaged through their attics for dusty Underwoods of a certain age.  MacLennan accepted the machine that best suited him and, sure enough, Voices in Time reached bookstores in 1980."

* McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2009.

On Hand-writing ~

"The handwriting of Robertson Davies, the Canadian whose magical novels moved an American critic to call him 'the white-bearded magus of the North,' was neat, elegant, and supremely legible but, while composing fiction, he used a typewriter.  'I type because writing by hand I find to be a very great betrayer,' he said in 1989.  'If you try to write [by hand] legibly, as I do, you finish a page and think, That's a handsome page.  This absolutely wrong.  Also, you can only write so long with a pen before your hand becomes tired, and then your invention begins to tire.  If you type. . .you have what you've written there before you--cold and bare.  Then you can go over it, and it is as though someone else had written it and you can edit it with great severity."

~ Harry Bruce, Page Fright, Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers, McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2009.

From THE JOURNALS OF ANNE LANGTON:  A GENTLEWOMAN IN UPPER CANADA

Tuesday, January 15. [1839] Another brilliant morning, but severe frost.  John had one trip for hay before breakfast, and afterwards took another walk with me -- not a very long one.  We bent our steps in the contrary direction to yesterday.  The wolves and foxes had been enjoying themselves as well as ever;  I shall begin to be acquainted with the tracks of the beasts of the forest.  I looked back at our own tracks, and wondered whether mine would be recognised as that of a woman, enveloped as are my feet in two pairs of stockings, a pair of socks, my house moccasins, and another pair over them.

Wednesday, January 23.  This was the very coldest day we have had.  The thermometer was 20 below zero, with a strong wind.  It blew very hard during the night;  the mercury stood only three degrees above zero in our room whilst we were dressing.  At noon it rose to five, and once we contrived to raise it to eight, which is what a good fire has been able to do for it.

Tuesday, April 16.  Springtime makes busy work, notwithstanding the men and women about the house.  John was to-day chopping firewood, I kneading bread, and the other ladies also busily occupied.  This department of mine I intend now to resign, but to-day I had to pay the penalty of mismanaging matters so as to have to bake on a washing day.  There is no unmixed good in this world.  A wash-house, a boiler, and an oven are great comforts, but they consume an immensity of wood.



~ Edited by H.H. Langton.  CLARKE, IRWIN & COMPANY LIMITED. 1950.

Thought for Today ~


"Nothing is more essential to our lives than stories ~ the only things of equal importance are food, shelter, human love and some kind of religious activity."
~ Hugh Hood (1920 - 2000) Canadian novelist, university professor, quoted by John Metcalf in sixteen by Twelve.  Made Officer of The Order of Canada.


"I don't believe that those stories should be recorded by anybody except us.  I don't think that you have any right to come into my community and tell my stories for me.  I can speak for myself.  I share them with you, and you can read them.  And if you come into my circle, and I tell you the stories, then you should respect that you're invited into the circle."~ Maria Campbell.  Metis storyteller and writer, interviewed by Hartmut Lutz in Contemporary Challenges:  Conversations with Canadian Native Authors (1991). Author of seven books, award-winning playwright.


Source: FAMOUS LASTING WORDS Great Canadian Quotations,  John Robert Colombo, Douglas & McIntyre.

"Whatever is bothering you, write it down in a book.  Close the book, and a year later you'll open it up and say, "Big deal."

~ Joan Rivers (b. 1933)  American entertainer.

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation."

~ Graham Greene (1904 - 1991)  British writer.

On Writing ~

"Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness;  and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it."
Dorothy Day (1897-1980) American activist

"People who keep journals live life twice.  Having written something down gives you the opportunity to go back to it over and over, to remember and relive the experience."
~ Jessamyn West (1907-1984) American writer

"We are drawn toward journals out of a craving for the authentic, for the uncensored word and thought."
~ Mark Rudman, b. 1948, American writer

"Writing is a form of therapy, sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation."
~Graham Greene,  (1904-1991) British writer

"One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world."

~ Wm. Hazlitt (177-1830) English writer

 

 



"Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me.  I like being alone in a room.  It's almost always a form of meditation ~ an investigation of my own life."
~ Neil Simon (b. 1927)  American dramatist

"The chief utility of the journal intime is to restore the integrity of the mind and the equilibrium of the conscience, that is, inner health."
~ H. F. Amiel (1821 - 1881) Swiss writer, philosopher, poet

"I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart."
~ Anne Frank (1929-1945) Dutch diarist

On Writing ~

"I usually feel happier either writing things in longhand or typing them.  It is odd how hearing your own voice makes you self-conscious and unable to express yourself.  It was only about five or six years ago, after I had broken a wrist and was unable to use my right hand, that I started using a dictaphone, and gradually became used to the sound of my own voice.  The disadvantage of a dictaphone or tape recorder, however, is that it encourages you to be much too verbose.
"There is no doubt that the effort involved in typing or writing does help me in keeping to the point.  Economy of wording, I think, is particularly necessary in detective stories.  You don't want to hear the same thing rehashed three or four times over."

~ Agatha Christie (Sept. 15, 1890 - Jan. 12, 1976) Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, Collins, 1977.



The Neat Little Bookshop

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you:  the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.  If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

~ Ernest Hemingway Old Newsman Writes.  From Esquire, Dec. 1934.

Smile for Today ~

"At present I'm in lodgings, and while they're quite good as far as lodgings go I can't ignore the blasted RADIO which seems a feature of everyone's life these days, and it prevents me from sitting thinking and scribbling in the evenings, yet if I grumbled my complaint would be regarded as eccentric as a complaint against the traffic or the birds or the children outside.  Do you have radios in Japan? or can you sit long silk-colored evenings wrapped in a cocoon of silence sipping sake, or whatever it is, while the hours pass over as lightly as glances?  If so, me for there.  It is on now, subjecting me to its pathological highpitched burble, damn it.  Excuse this outpouring.  Obviously I ought to live out in the moors somewhere."

~ Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985) English novelist, poet, librarian. In a letter to Dennis Enright, April 27, 1955.  Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940 - 1985, edited by Anthony Thwaite.

Thought for Today ~

"We strongly support free speech and we believe that all authors and publishers must support the following fundamental freedoms:  freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.  These fundamental freedoms are embodied in the Canadian Charter of Rights."

~ Statement made by Avie Bennett, Chairman of McClelland and Steward Inc., rejecting a demand that a book be withdrawn from publication, Newsletter of the Canadian Centre of International PEN, Dec. 1990.

"...what is important about free speech in a democracy is not only that everyone has a right to express an opinion, however ill-considered, but that fools should have full liberty to speak so that they can be recognized to be fools."

~ Northrop Frye, cultural critic, Entry 774.  Notebook 1997.1. Northrop Frye Newsletter, Summer 1997.

"It is only after long practice and much interest in the work that one can set down plain truth, without over-embellishment or wandering from the point....When this is done even the truth itself sounds a little better than true, which is the basis of what is called literature."

~ Stephen Leacock (1869 - 1944) Canadian teacher, humourist, writer.

A firm knock at the door;  "Is Jeff Deck here?"  A tall, muscular fellow squeezed into a tan uniform handed over some photocopied documents, "This is about a sign you vandalized at the Grand Canyon."
Appalled by the man's characterization of the act, Benjamin replied,"We corrected it."
"It was a hundred years old," the ranger said.
"Oh." Benjamin signed that he'd officially received the document.

The National Park Service was not grateful for the correction.The federal government advised that Jeff and Benjamin had "first conspired to vandalize and then vandalized a precious national historic treasure" and very much desired that they return to Arizona to appear in court.

Suddenly the saga of TEAL, the Typo Eradication Advancement League had taken a "bleak twist."  One bad correction had the power to negate hundreds of good ones.  Jeff took down his blog, the website; spoke with several lawyers and deleted the Grand Canyon entry.  They were guilty by their own blogged admission.
Banned from National Park territory, assigned a probation officer and left to pay expenses incurred (including $3,035 in restitution) Benjamin returned to his bookshop job;  Jeff was ordered to post public statements regarding the dangers of correcting typos.  He administers a website www.greattypohunt.com

~ THE GREAT TYPO HUNT / TWO FRIENDS CHANGING THE WORLD ONE CORRECTION AT A TIME.  Crown Publishers, 2010.  Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson.

www.greattypohunt.com  includes typos sent in by readers.

Armed with a typo-correction kit, Jeff and his friend Benjamin set out to locate and correct signs with typos.  Their initial kit contained:  elixir of correction, a thick black marker, a black Sharpie, white and colored chalk and vinyl stick-on letters.
There was no worry about the goal of finding a typo per day ~ of greater concern was the possibility of resistance from shopkeepers and restaurateurs.  Jeff mused, "I could even be arrested if I rankled the wrong folk...I would need to confront strangers about spelling, punctuation, and grammar.  These people would not necessarily share my zeal for such things, particularly in regard to their own errors."

~ Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson, THE GREAT TYPO HUNT - TWO FRIENDS CHANGING THE WORLD ONE CORRECTION AT AT TIME.  Crown Publishers, 2010.

Tomorrow:  What could possibly go wrong? Vandalism at the Grand Canyon?
[Photo:  files lbw]

On Writing ~

"It took many years of writing, thousands of pages, to discover that I could not find the fit between experience and record by writing with 'summing up' words.  To say that a canoe trip was wonderful, and that the river was beautiful, and that I had many adventures accomplished nothing in the journal:  I didn't even have the pleasure of reliving the best moments while writing about them.  And yet this ingrained tendency to generalize I still have to fight daily.  A journal filled with 'nices,' wonderfuls,' 'terribles,' and 'interestings' is one drained of any live juice.  If that kind of writing merely reflects habit, there is hope for change.  If the writer insists on it, consider it a sign of a deep-seated fear of the real."

~ Hannah Hinchman, A TRAIL THROUGH LEAVES, The Journal As A Path to Place/An Inspiration to journal-keepers and commonplace-book-makers everywhere, W.W.Norton & Company, 1997.

Miss Marple

"I may fling down a sketch in a moment, if my cat happens to be doing something droll, and then the page has received the seed of its structure.  Or it may begin with a deliberate and soothing geometry:  blocks of intricate text building up like rows of knitting, a tension between  organic form and implied vertical/horizontal axes.  The book, the pages, are physical things, and the way I make something with the raw materials is handiwork.
     There is nothing like the feel of the tip of a reliable, familiar pen gliding over the paper, leaving a crisp trail, and the sense of control in the fingers shaping beautiful letters.  Especially early in the morning before a cup of coffee has rippled the stillness of the waking state, to write is to luxuriate, and fulfills some indescribable need.  Then there is the boldness of brush lettering, the cooperation between the tip of the brush, which has its own shape and tendencies, and the guiding hand  working out a plant-like pattern made of thick and thin, curved and straight, sharp and rounded marks."

~ A TRAIL THROUGH LEAVES The Journal as a Path to Place, Hannah Hinchman, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Tomorrow:  Hannah's "fit between experience and record by writing with 'summing up words.' " 

(photo lbw Thought for my artist friend Sharon)