This post has been waiting to be finished for the last two weeks. Many things have changed since then, but a few are still the same. Hope you enjoy the post. Better late than never. JDD
The past week, this current week, and the next two weeks have been and will be full of life's many obligations and issues. The main one is that my Fall semester is coming to a screeching halt and that means final notes, Open House, the infamous "test" before the midterm, exams, grading, conferences, emails, meetings, subject reviews, peer reviews, finalized curriculum plans, and salt-n-pepper in there a lot more grading and you will have about 1/2 of what I have been up to. Also, Fordzilla (See pic below. He looks so innocent, but know he is not!) has outsourced his sleep patterns overseas and just doesn't do much of it anymore. Which is ok for him, I guess, but it makes everything else just a tad bit harder. I did want to update my blog this week though and I really wanted to share some more of Steinbeck's, Journal of a Novel, with you. I hope you aren't getting tired of the excepts. If you are, we are almost done with them. I just feel there is so much to be gleaned from them whether you are a writer, a reader, or even just a human being living on the planet.
"The writer's of today, even I, have a tendency to celebrate the destruction of the spirit and god knows it is destroyed often enough. But the beacon thing is that sometimes it is not. And I think I can take time right now to say that. There will be great sneers from the neurosis belt of the south from the hard-boiled writers, but I believe that the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha....,Christ, Paul, and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial. Not that it is necessary to be remembered but there is one purpose in writing that I can see, beyond simply doing it interestingly. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know." Pg. 115-116
"And in other ways I seem to have been writing on this book all of my life. And throughout, you will find things that remind you of earlier work. That earlier work was practice for this, I am sure. And that is why I want this book to be good, because it is the first book. The rest was practice." Pg. 117
"To a certain extent I have thought about the reception of this book. And it seems to me that it might find a public ready for the open and honest. As you know the novel has been falling before the onslaught of non-fiction. That is largely because the novel has not changed for a very long time now. Sherwood Anderson made the modern novel and has not gone much beyond him. I think I am going beyond him. This may be rejected and kicked down but I do not think so. I really don't. However, this is a conjecture which will be demonstrated." Pg. 124
"A book is as complicated as life, in some ways more complicated." Pg. 128
"I must have great violence in me because I react to violence in nature with great joy. And a good thunder roll makes me feel almost as though I could do it myself." Pg. 131
"...It is about time for something like that. and it is also time for gaiety. the death of Samuel has removed gaiety from the world. And I have to put some back in. For Eden must be everything, not only the grim and terrible because that isn't the way life is. Life is silly too sometimes and that must be in it. Everything I have seen or heard or thought must go in and I feel the necessity for release now." Pg. 131
"A book finished, published, read--is always an anticlimax to me. The joy comes in words going down and the rhythms crowding in the chest and pulsing to get out." Pg. 132
"I have been planting the book full of restlessness which precedes change. Just as history seems to ride up a series of plateaus, so does it seem to me that a man's life goes--up a little or down and then a flat place, and then another quick change and another plateau. In a book about a man, because of the restriction of space, the distance between the rises or falls is necessarily small and this must give a feeling of unreality." Pg. 134
"A cousin of mine--Pat Hamilton, son of George, grandson of Samuel and the only bearer of the name, the only one (isn't that odd)--died two days ago. He was an incurable alcoholic and died of a heart attack after a two-weeks' drunk. And there lies that family name. I have the blood and my sons but he had the name. I feel badly that he did not wear it well. He left it no pride and surely no shine. In fact he dirtied it...This is the tragedy of a name." Pg. 138
"A book, as you know, is a very delicate thing. If it is pressured , it will show that pressure." Pg. 139
"A book takes so long that people get tired of waiting. I know that. But I said at the beginning that this had to be written as though it would never get done." Pg. 139
"Today I have to do something I haven't done in this whole book. I have to eliminate some of yesterday's work and change the pace I had set for it. It has not been often. It was just wrong. But I don't mind. And surely that is a minimum." Pg. 144
"Maybe good, maybe bad. But I shall want to draw the reader into the personal so that he is reading about himself." Pg 145
"It has been good, but good things should not last too long or they cease to be good things." Pg. 145
Happy Reading,
David
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