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“Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” A student and aspiring fiction writer wonders why I seldom refer to “inspiration.” What is it? Do I deny its existence? Have certain writers successfully relied on it? Can he? My answer is yes and no, which betrays my background as a newspaper reporter. Telling an editor I hadn’t completed a story because I wasn’t “inspired” would be grounds, at minimum, for mockery if not dismissal. All those years of writing for a daily deadline resulted in a work ethic that now is second nature. You learn to budget your time appropriately, make telephone calls in a timely fashion and write even when the Muse is nonresponsive. Writing can jump-start inspiration. Just plow ahead, get something on the page or screen, and you’ve created the conditions necessary for inspiration to bloom. Shortly after publishing his penultimate novel, Transparent Things (1972), Nabokov published a teasing essay titled “Inspiration” in the January 6, 1973, issue of The Saturday Review. Listen to the voice of a man who had published his first novel almost half a century earlier. He describes his experience with inspiration in detail: “The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer’s article. I have in view, naturally, not the hopeless hacks we all know—but people who are creative artists in their own right . . .” [The sentence at the top is Jules Renard’s entry for May 9, 1898, in his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
Writing is famously the most narcissistic of professions, even worse than acting or being a politician. We’re forever carrying on about ourselves and our precious insights, like the kid in class who raises his hand and goes “Ooh! Ooh!” each time the teacher asks a question. That’s the nature of what we do. Writing in some public fashion is a way of inflicting ourselves on others – “Ooh! Ooh!” - which accounts for some of the stupid, offensive things we write. We like the attention, positive or otherwise. Ironworkers and tax clerks can’t do that, at least as part of their jobs, or if they do there’s a good chance they’ll be reprimanded or canned. In a sense, you can’t fire a writer. The late Spanish novelist Javier Marias participated in “A Symposium on the Dead” published in the Winter 2004 issue of The Threepenny Review. He writes of a friend he never met in person, a phenomenon subsequently made familiar by the internet. I’m unlikely ever to meet in person some of the people whose company I prize. For eight months in 1999, Marias carried on an epistolary friendship with Francis Haskell, the English art historian, who died of liver cancer in 2000. Haskell told Marias of his fatal disease less than a month before his death. The Spaniard refers to Haskell as “the ephemeral friend I never saw.” Marias reminds us that most writers can’t claim to know their audience with any precision. I was always amused by newspaper editors who confidently identified our readers and told us to write specifically for them. No one has “an audience.” We have “audiences.” Marias reflects on writing to a friend he didn’t know was dying: “Those of us who write tend to forget that among those who read there is great variety, and that behind each reader there is a personal history that carries on after the rapid perusal of our insubstantial columns, and that many of these histories are dominated by despair or grief.” What impact would such knowledge have on the way we write? Probably little or none. I’ve written things that have been needlessly hurtful or dismissive. There’s plenty out there that needs to be hurt or dismissed. I’m not recommending trigger warnings or self-censorship. Just pick your targets carefully. There’s nothing wrong with hurting those who deserve it. Marias says of the last letter he received from Haskell: “It was not easy to reply to it: one fears in such cases that one’s every word might wound the one who reads.” [The Marias essay was translated from the Spanish by Eric Southworth.]
At age fourteen, our dog, if human, would be eligible for Social Security. Luke sleeps more than he did when a pup. His rear end aches and he takes nearly as many meds each day as I do. He throws up more often and has trouble jumping on the bed. We indulge him as we would a sick child or elderly relative, but he still surprises us. This week I found behind the garage a squirrel he caught and left on the grass – unbloodied, pristine, as though sleeping. It suggests reservoirs of wildness and grit still latent in the old boy. Proving his deftness as a hunter is the point, not a meal. In February he caught one and tried to bring it into the house: That makes five or six squirrels he has snared in the backyard since we got him. Twice we found them semi-buried in the lawn. The opossums he has caught number about fifteen. They’re slower than squirrels, less agile, and Luke leaps and grabs them as they move along the top on the wooden fence. I once saw him clutch a opossum by the head and shake it like his blanket. I heard bones crack. Only once did he actually kill one. The others “played opossum” and walked away when safely alone. Deborah Warren describes their enviable adaptation to danger and death in her poem “In Extremis” (Connoisseurs of Worms, 2021): “Lucky possum who, in any crisis, doesn’t have to do a thing but yield: a stroke of narcolepsy takes control. Stunned by an automatic anaesthetic, his body seizes up, and the sudden coma (the silver corpse dead to the wood and field) is actual out-and-out paralysis, “and it keeps the howling, yipping things at bay by telling the world: nolo contendere. Playing possum, as if it were a role and he a gray marsupial Juliet? Acting? No. He’s sleeping out the drama where, making of ‘death’ a sanctuary, he lies until the trauma trots away.” Warren is one of our finest poets. She’s smart, tough-minded and has a reliably good ear. In this she recalls Robert Frost. “In Extremis” skirts light verse without ignoring philosophical heft. What biologists call “thanatosis” – playing opossum – Warren makes an enviable gift. She is both opossum and seasoned old dog.
A reader tells me of her disgust with most insects and reptiles, the small creatures, almost domestic, that surround us. She resents the “nature sentimentality” such “vermin” rouse in some people. They “make [her] skin crawl,” she writes – an idiom I’ve always found amusing. After all, our skin is powerless to crawl or do much of anything beyond keeping us intact. Think of the mess we would make without skin to hold us together. She makes an exception for butterflies and moths – everyone’s token favorites among arthropods. I share her disgust only when it comes to mosquitoes, and that’s less disgust than irritation. I have no compunction about swatting them. One of Guy Davenport’s many charming gestures was putting out dishes of sugar water to attract bees and wasps. This year in Houston we’re experiencing a bumper crop of anoles. They are the small lizards, green and brown, often mistakenly called “chameleons” because of their ability to change color. The cats and I watch them in the garden through our front window. They are disappearingly fast. The green ones favor the trunks of the pine and oak. The males have reddish-orange dewlaps which they inflate while doing what looks like pushups. It’s intended to make them look larger, attract females and intimidate potential predators. Human males do the same things with their biceps and pectorals. Anoles are prolific devourers of the above-mentioned mosquitoes. They are, in other words, our allies. In his poem “A Wood,” Richard Wilbur addresses the hierarchy imposed by humans on flora, specifically trees. Oaks he calls “adumbrators to the understory, / Where, in their shade, small trees of modest leanings / Contend for light and are content with gleanings.” I remember a field along a road in Western Massachusetts bordered by maples and beeches under which the smaller flowering dogwoods in the spring grabbed all the attention. As Wilbur puts it: “And yet here’s dogwood: overshadowed, small, But not inclined to droop and count its losses, It cranes its way to sunlight after all, And signs the air of May with Maltese crosses.” I remember learning in a nature guide as a kid that American Indians and early European settlers used the bark of dogwood as a substitute for quinine to treat fevers, including mosquito-carried malaria. Wilbur encourages an egalitarian approach to human/natural-world interactions. His poem concludes: “Given a source of light so far away That nothing, short or tall, comes very near it, Would it not take a proper fool to say That any tree has not the proper spirit? Air, water, earth and fire are to be blended, But no one style, I think, is recommended.” Has anyone in all of human history ever likened a dogwood blossom to a Maltese cross? Wilbur’s poems work because he never discounts the particular when his object is the general. He reminds me of a line in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: “Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy — in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.” [“A Wood” was published in the May 6, 1967 issue of The New Yorker and collected in Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translations (1969).]
“I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum.” You may recognize the almost overripe prose. Ingesting so rich a diet too early in life can spoil one for plainer fare. It’s a sentence I underlined on Page 537 in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, the Nabokov novel I bought ($8.95) shortly after its publication on May 5, 1969. It’s a book I love almost as much for the memory of my teenage infatuation as for its teasing, alliterative, game-playing, occasionally self-indulgent density. Further down the same page, beside Nabokov’s mention of “Aurelius Augustinus,” I helpfully wrote “St. Augustine.” At the bottom and continuing onto the next page I underlined this passage: “Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.” I can’t say with certainty but Nabokov’s concern with Time probably influenced my own preoccupation with Time’s passage and efforts to recover the past. Within a few years I would read one of Nabokov’s rare, acknowledged masters, Marcel Proust, and that reinforced my devotion to memory. Scattered throughout my fifty-six-year-old copy of Ada are other underlinings and annotations that impressed my younger self, including this on Page 539: “Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content, context, and running commentary—this is my time and theme. All the rest is numerical symbol or some aspect of Space. The texture of Space is not that of Time, and the piebald four-dimensional sport bred by relativists is a quadruped with one leg replaced by the ghost of a leg. My time is also Motionless Time (we shall presently dispose of ‘flowing’ time, water-clock time, water-closet time).”
More in literature
I should make that the new official slogan of the blog. It is from p. 614 of Finnegans Wake, one of the books I recently read. FICTION The Sword in the Stone (1938), T. H. White – I for some reason did not read this as a youth. It is wonderful, full of anachronism and parody and outstanding British nature writing in the tradition of Gilber White (mentioned in the novel) and Richard Jefferies. It turns out that the most important thing in the education of a king is to know what it is like to be a fish. Finnegans Wake (1939), James Joyce – begin Here and Continue to the End. The Big Clock (1946), Kenneth Fearing – A jittery Whitmanian poet of the 1920s and 1930s finally cashes in with a jittery multi-voiced semi-mystery. The “detective” is the staff of the equivalent of Time Inc., making the killer Henry Luce. The detective is deliberately not trying to solve the mystery. The single best part is narrated by a cranky painter. Odd, odd book, but I see why it survives. The Mountain Lion (1947), Jean Stafford – A Boston writer, but this sad descendent of What Maise Knew is set in California and on a Colorado cattle ranch. The Jewels of Aptor (1962), Samuel R. Delaney – His first novel, clumsily constructed but stuffed with imaginative conceits. I’d never read Delaney. God's Country (1994), Percival Everett – Almost every Everett novel and short story I have read has a similar voice and narrator, a PhD with a savior complex. James in James does not have a PhD, but might as well. In this Western, however, Everett’s narrator is an idiot and another, non-narrating character fills the usual role, which is a lot of fun. Thirty years older, God’s Country is a companion novel to James (2024). I urge anyone interested to read them together. It is time to get the James backlash going. I have seen a couple of interviews where Everett himself seems to be trying to get the backlash going, but it has not worked yet. I have read eleven of Everett’s books now and hope to read many more. James is the worst one! POETRY Blues in Stereo (1921-7), Langston Hughes – It is like a gift book, a pointlessly tiny volume that could and should be expanded to include all of The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), both of which are in public domain, which seems to be the limiting concept. But for some reason this book does include the pieces of a never-realized collaboration with Duke Ellington that is a fantasy refraction of The Big Sea (1940), Hughes’s first memoir. I do not think the theater piece has been published before. Worth seeing. Collected Poems (1940), Kenneth Fearing – High-energy Whitman mixed with advertising=speak and business lingo and gangsters. So sometimes it’s kitsch. Ten Burnt Offerings (1952) & Autumn Sequel (1953) & Visitations (1957), Louis MacNeice Chord of Light (1956) & Hermes, Dog and Star (1957), Zbigniew Herbert What Rough Beasts (2021), Leslie Moore – An earlier book by a Maine poet and artist I read a year ago. She specializes in prints, and poems, about birds and other animals. About an hour after reading her poem about grackles invading her yard and establishing a grackledom the grackles invaded my yard and ruled for several days. That was enjoyable. MISCELLANEOUS Lexington and Concord: The Battle Heard Round the World (2018), George C. Daughan – Preparation for the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride and the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which is another thing I did in April. Here I am at the Concord parade, the library in the background. Sound May Be Seen (2025), Margaret Watts Hughes Lecture on Radium (2025), Loie Fuller No Title (2025), Richard Foreman – Three little collectible conceptual art books. I will just point you to the website. IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Peregrinação de Fernão Mendes Pinto: Aventuras extraordinárias dum português no Oriente (The Pilgrimage of Fernão Mendes Pinto: Extraordinary Adventures of a Portuguese Man in the Orient, 1614), Fernão Mendes Pinto – The real book is a 900-page semi-true account of a Portuguese wanderer in the 16th century Far East who, in the most famous episode, joins up with a patriotic privateer, or a bloodthirsty pirate. The book I read is a rewritten abridgement for Portuguese 9th graders. How I wish I knew how it was taught. La femme partagée (The Shared Woman, 1929), Franz Hellens La Cité de l'indicible peur (The City of Unspeakable Fear, 1943), Jean Ray – I plan to write a bit about these two novels, my excursion to Belgium. Navegações (1983), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
“Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” A student and aspiring fiction writer wonders why I seldom refer to “inspiration.” What is it? Do I deny its existence? Have certain writers successfully relied on it? Can he? My answer is yes and no, which betrays my background as a newspaper reporter. Telling an editor I hadn’t completed a story because I wasn’t “inspired” would be grounds, at minimum, for mockery if not dismissal. All those years of writing for a daily deadline resulted in a work ethic that now is second nature. You learn to budget your time appropriately, make telephone calls in a timely fashion and write even when the Muse is nonresponsive. Writing can jump-start inspiration. Just plow ahead, get something on the page or screen, and you’ve created the conditions necessary for inspiration to bloom. Shortly after publishing his penultimate novel, Transparent Things (1972), Nabokov published a teasing essay titled “Inspiration” in the January 6, 1973, issue of The Saturday Review. Listen to the voice of a man who had published his first novel almost half a century earlier. He describes his experience with inspiration in detail: “The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse, or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer’s article. I have in view, naturally, not the hopeless hacks we all know—but people who are creative artists in their own right . . .” [The sentence at the top is Jules Renard’s entry for May 9, 1898, in his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
Ian Kumekawa tells the story of the global economy in one barge The post The Shipping News appeared first on The American Scholar.
Rutger Bregman's new book is the subject of our next literary salon.
Rest in peace little one. I never would have guessed that a 4-lb Chihuahua would come into our lives, let alone be the animal to steal my heart before Jen’s. Our previous animals — two cats and a Boxer dog — are a stark contrast to a tiny dog that we would carry around in a sling or a backpack and take practically everywhere. That was what was in store for us in May 2019 for Memorial Day weekend, when Muttville — where Jen volunteered at the time to help with the rapid succession of loss with our other animals — was encouraging employees and volunteers alike to help take an animal home for the long holiday weekend so all would have a home. There were two dogs in ISO (isolation) because of potential kennel cough. One was a miniature pinscher named Dolly Parton, and the other was a tiny white-and-tan Chihuahua named Barbara. Jen went in and scooped up a blanket that contained the Chi. I had to take a quick group selfie as we walked from Muttville to the car. We were to foster her through her initial intake: help with looking at her messed up eye, getting spayed, removing a cancerous mammary tumor, and then to bring her to adoption events. We fixed her eye with the help of the amazing Dr. Mughannum at Vet Vision, who had helped Shaun, our Boxer, with issues years prior. We got her spayed. We got her tumor removed. And then she stole our hearts. This lady cleaned up nicely. I fell in love quickly, while Jen held out a little longer. It’d only been four plus months since the last of our original trio, Loki the cat, had passed. We joined the foster fails club. Estimated at 12 years old, we had another animal living with us again. She was our first female, and true to her nature, was absolutely fierce, independent, and extremely loving. Over the next almost six years, she would fill our lives with joy, laughter, and showed us what life looked like when you could take an animal almost everywhere. One of our favorite camp spots in southwestern Utah, overlooking a valley. We're perched by this cliffside and enjoying some simple food I just cooked up. Barb went camping with us everywhere. People would take photos of her for their socials, swoon over her, give us free coffee, and even bypass hotel pet deposits, all because she was a tiny thing that fit in a sling. Sitting at Quarrelsome Coffee in St. Louis, Missouri, on our mega roadtrip to the Midwest. We were told because of her cancer and tougher life — she was a stray on the streets of Oakland — that we’d maybe have two or three years with her. With Jen making all of her food (Chihuahuas of this size do not have high caloric needs), and us taking her on adventures camping, hiking, and regularly exercising and socializing her with our friends, we believe we were able to extend her years and we hope she got to live out her retirement years with panache. After all, what 4-lb dog would go camping in a roof top tent at 11,000 feet in Colorado, but also slum it at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas? This Chihuahua. Camping in late December 2022 on a cool evening in Quartzsite, Arizona, and someone is enjoying the fancy bed at the hotel. We realized she was slowing down when we last went camping. A trip to the Sierra with Ryan, showed us that her tolerance for high altitudes and heat were becoming too much for her. August 2024 would be her last time out in the wild. 117 nights in a roof top tent. Her last phase of homebodiness began to show towards the end of last year, and in December, a rough few nights had us begin the discussion of the end. As 2025 rolled over, she began to lose her eyesight. It’d been declining due to cataracts for a while, so walks had stopped, and around February, we could no longer take her outside to potty. She couldn’t tolerate the time from our 2nd-floor apartment to the street, and we let her use the tiled floor in our bathroom. Her bowels needed frequent disposal, and pee pads in the apartment were normal in the past few months. She was still eating, she was still digging in her bed, and she was still enjoying the sun. Dementia had started and her bouts of confusion coupled with her blindness limited her autonomy. Her beds were her safe place, as well as our laps. Especially mine. We started to keep tally of the good and the bad days. For a while, the good days still outweighed the bad, and then they started to draw even. This past week, the days were all bad. And late on Thursday, May 1st, she started to wheeze and cough. “She’ll tell you when she’s ready,” was what our friend and neighbor told us a week prior. And he was right. She was telling us. We made a plan to call her vet this morning but if anything happened in the middle of the night, we’d head to the emergency vet. As we wound down for bed, she struggled with getting comfortable and ultimately snuggled up to me by my head. This was something she did regularly when she first came into our lives but hadn’t in past two years, and groggily, I took that as a further sign that she wanted to just be with us and know that we were there. Puffy face, red eyes, but cherishing this last night and then enjoying Jen's lap despite her tiredness. In the morning, Jen made the call and we made an appointment for 1:30pm. We wanted to have some time. Barb had other plans though and her weak body and labored breathing was a little worse. I canceled meetings and we left the house early. She seemed content in her blanket and Jen’s arms. We decided to drive to Bernal Heights to let her feel the sun on her skin, and the wind through her fur. We wanted to give her one last look at the city that was home for the past six years. Even if she couldn’t really see anymore. One last look at this city she's called home for almost six years. We arrived at the vet and they quickly arranged and sorted out a room for us. A new vet gently welcomed us. She wasn’t Barb’s regular vet, but was still kind and gracious as she told us the plan: a sedative, then a deeper one. They were busy, but they also wanted to give us a bit of time so we spent the twenty or so minutes snuggling her and recalling some of her best moments. She came into my arms so I could get some last snuggles in. She emitted a sleepy tiny bark and her little legs were moving. It reminded us of when she’d be dreaming and running in her sleep. She settled. Moments later, the vet walked in and asked if we’re ready. We started to adjust position a bit, and the vet asks, “Is she still with us?” We laid her down on the nearby table, and I knew. The vet confirmed it with a stethoscope, and she was gone. Barb crossed the rainbow bridge at around 10:45am, in my arms with the two people who loved her the most. We lingered saying our goodbyes, thankful that she stayed true to herself, and did it on her terms, in her way, in my arms. She is missed severely. Our little adventure buddy, and the joy of our lives will meet the rest of the gang. I hope they’re romping around together. RIP Barbara, c. 2007–May 2, 2025. See you at the rainbow bridge. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email
