A green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.

“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Helpful Writing Advice from the Pros

From Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris:

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” — Somerset Maugham

“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.” — Truman Capote

“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.” — Doris Lessing

. . . .

“A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil your lunch.”— Kingsley Amis

. . . .

“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” — Ray Bradbury

. . . .

“The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.” — E. M. Forster

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris

Enjoying success

Enjoying success requires the ability to adapt. Only by being open to change will you have a true opportunity to get the most from your talent.

Nolan Ryan

Education is not confined to books

Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.

Louisa May Alcott

Typography

90 percent of design is typography. And the other 90 percent is whitespace.

Jeffrey Zeldman


I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

Anne Lamott

The more social media we have

The more social media we have, the more we think we’re connecting, yet we are really disconnecting from each other.

JR

Regulation

The reality is regulation often lags behind innovation.

Bill Maris

It seems to me we can never give up longing

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

George Eliot

A villain must be a thing of power

A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.

Agnes Repplier

When you fall in love

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.
And when it subsides you have to make a decision.
You have to work out whether your root was so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.
Because this is what love is.

Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion.

That is just being in love, which any fool can do.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières

Publishing a volume of verse

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Don Marquis

Time is free

Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back.

Harvey Mackay

Burnout

Burnout is grist to the mill. I write every day, for most of the day, so it’s just about turning into metaphor whatever’s going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words.

Grant Morrison

We are such stuff

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

And therefore education at the University

And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.

Terry Pratchett

Narcissism

Narcissism falls along the axis of what psychologists call personality disorders . . . but by most measures, narcissism is one of the worst, if only because the narcissists themselves are so clueless.

Jeffrey Kluger

When people are driving themselves crazy, they have neuroses or psychoses. When they drive other people crazy, they have personality disorders.

Albert J. Bernstein

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. . . .They justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

T.S. Elliott

The only place success comes before work

The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.

Vince Lombardi

For those living outside of the United States who are unfamiliar with Vince Lombardi, he was the very successful coach of The Green Bay Packers, a professional American Football team.

Unlike all other American professional football teams, which have their headquarters in large cities, the Packers are headquartered in Green Bay, Wisconsin, which has a population of a little over 100,000 shivering souls.

Green Bay typically has twenty-one days with high temperatures failing to rise above freezing during a typical November and December, which is the latter part of football season.

Green Bay is also on the shores of northern Lake Michigan, one of the Great Lakes. Lake Michigan generates lots of strong cold winds during November-December, the latter part of football season.

These days, professional sports franchises typically play in large domed stadiums where the temperature is always the same as it is inside the homes of the spectators. Green Bay is different. The Packers play in Lambeau Field, an open-topped stadium that holds over 80,000 Packers fans.

The coldest day for a football game in Green Bay was the “Ice Bowl,” a game played between the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers in 1967. It was a crisp -13 degrees Fahrenheit, while the wind chill made it feel like -48 degrees.

A photo of Packers fans taken during The Ice Bowl

And the team name, The Packers?

In 1919, one of the original founders of the club, Curly Lambeau, a shipping clerk at The Indian Packing Company, a meat packer located in Green Bay, asked the owner of the company to donate money for the jerseys for a football club he was organizing and for permission to practice on the company’s athletic field.

The owner of the packing company agreed to both requests and The Packers were born.

Bringing good news is imparting hope

Bringing good news is imparting hope to one’s fellow man. The idea of redemption is always good news, even if it means sacrifice or some difficult times.

Patti Smith

The least scary future I can think of

The least scary future I can think of is one where we have at least democratized AI…[also] when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.

Elon Musk

Bitter struggles deform their participants

Bitter struggles deform their participants in subtle, complicated ways. The idea that one should speak one’s cultural allegiance first and the truth second (and that this is a sign of authenticity) is precisely such a deformation.

Zadie Smith

One of the Great Joys of Literature Is That It’s Useles

From Publishing Perspectives:

When Publishing Perspectives asked Salman Rushdie today in his press conference (October 20) whether literature has a role in pushing back against the acceptance of “new normals” of authoritarianism and vulgarity seen in some book markets’ governments today he didn’t hesitate.

“I wish I could say yes to that,” he said,

“But I really resist the idea that literature has a role. I think one of the great joys of literature, one could say, is that it’s useless.

“What is the use of Alice in Wonderland? What is the use of The Lord of the Rings? Or Mrs. Dalloway?

“If it has a use, it’s to create beauty and to stimulate the mind. And maybe sometimes to challenge our assumptions, yes. “But don’t ask it to have a direct social function. That’s polemic. And I think polemics are very bad for literature.

“I don’t like books that tell me what to think. I like books that make me think.

“And that’s the difference. What literature can do is stimulate thought. And where that leads is up to the reader, not up to the writer to say.”

A journalist asked, “Do you want to say something about the book?—why it was important for you to write this book?”

Rushdie looked calmly back at the reporter and answered, “Well, it just seemed like an important subject to me.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG says that Mr. Rushdie certainly knows how to generate press coverage.

It was not a coalition of factions that brought down Anne

It was not a coalition of factions that brought down Anne but Henry’s disaffection caused by her miscarriage of a defective child, the one act, besides adultery, that would certainly destroy his trust in her.

Retha Warnicke

O death, rock me asleep, Bring me on quiet rest, Let pass my very guiltless ghost Out of my careful breast; Toll on the passing bell, Ring out my doleful knell, Let the sound my death tell. For I must die, There is no remedy, For now I die.My paines who can express? Alas! they are so strong, My dolour will not suffer strength, My life for to prolong; Toll on the passing bell, Ring out the doleful knell, Let the sound my death tell, For I must die, There is no remedy, For now I die.Alone in prison strong, I wail my destiny; Wo worth this cruel hap that I Should taste this misery. Toll on the passing bell, Ring out the doleful knell, Let the sound my death tell, For I must die, There is no remedy, For now I die.Farewell my pleasures past, Welcome my present pain, I feel my torments so increase, That life cannot remain. Cease now the passing bell, Rung is my doleful knell, For the sound my death doth tell, Death doth draw nigh, Sound my end dolefully, For now I die.

A poem said to have been written by Anne Boleyn just before her execution.

Private-equity and hedge-fund guys

Private-equity and hedge-fund guys typically come into a situation of mediocrity, where rapid change may result in a profit.

Austin Ligon

If you really want to hear about it

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

First Lines of Catcher in the Rye

It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers

It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.

First Lines from Matilda

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

First Lines from Tristram Shandy

January: An Exceptionally Bad Start.

January: An Exceptionally Bad Start. Sunday 1 January. 129 lbs (but post-Christmas), alcohol units 14 (but effectively covers 2 days as 4 hours of party was on New Year), cigarettes 22, calories 5424.

First Lines from Bridget Jones’s Diary

Mr and Mrs Dursley

Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

Opening Lines from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

You better not never tell nobody

You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.

Opening Lines from The Color Purple by Alice Walker

It was a queer, sultry summer

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

Opening Lines from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

As Gregor Samsa awoke

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Opening Lines from Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Thursday January 1st

Thursday January 1st BANK HOLIDAY IN ENGLAND, IRELAND, SCOTLAND AND WALES These are my New Year’s resolutions:

I will help the blind across the road

I will hang my trousers up

I will put the sleeves back on my records

I will not start smoking

I will stop squeezing my spots

I will be kind to the dog

I will help the poor and ignorant

After hearing the disgusting noises from downstairs last night, I have also vowed never to drink alcohol.

Opening lines from The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4

My name was Salmon

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.

First Lines of The Lovely Bones

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

Anne Lamott

They don’t ask much of you

They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

Boris Pasternak