Tiah Beautement's Blog, page 101

On Risk

Linda Mannheim, Risk - The first thing people ask why I tell them that Gem is South African is: black or white? – - Neither of us had come by our accents honestly. – - By the time I met Gem, my heart had been broken so many times it was mostly duct tape. – - English was your first weapon. – - Do you know, I asked you once, how when a place comes back to you, it comes back to you in every way? You see movement on the street and hear the sounds, but most of all,...

On not getting over it

"When you ain't got nothing," Dylan sings, "you got nothing to lose." Yes, I think. Yes. I suppress the three words that have haunted me my entire adult life—"They'll smear you"—and choose Dylan's instead, composing a carefully worded private e-mail to the editor of The New York Times Book Review, alerting him to his neglect of all four of my published books. He responds graciously with two sentences in which he promises to share this information with his colleagues. Eight months later, the novel remains unreviewed. It's 2013, the day I sit down, with trepidation, to write this. The Times's...

On writing sex

The problem was trying to write a love scene and stay a lady at the same time. It wasn't possible. The minute you started thinking that writing sex was cheap and disgusting, your mind froze up and you wrote boring dreck. It was sort of like having sex. You either threw everything you had into it, or it wasn't worth the bother. - Jennifer Crusie, Welcome to Temptation

On writing letters

"I realised how much I liked to tell people what was happening to me in letters," she says. "I loved writing letters and I loved getting letters. But I recognised that I was far more interested in what I was writing to people than what they were writing back." - Liesl Jobson, Writing nurtured in a promised land by Penny Haw

On The Empire of the Summer Moon

S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon - The nomadic range of [the Comanche] bands was around eight hundred miles. Their striking rant – this confused the insurgent populations as much as anything – was four hundred miles. – - Women did all of the brutally hard work, including most of the work that went into moving camp. They did it from dawn till dark, led brief difficult lives, and did not complain about it. – - Frontier people saw Martha Sherman’s death as the random and senseless slaughter of a Christian woman by a tribe whose primitive, godless,...

On Lauren Groff

On re-writing I’m a physical learner. I learn from writing them, not reading them. When I write a new draft, I don’t like to feel I’m tied to any previous version. That’s why I don’t use a computer to write. The text looks, on the screen, too much like a book. It’s not a book—it’s a bad first draft of something that could one day be a book. Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text. Even if I tried to look back at my...

On eating together

What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They're the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done -- probably most of our recreational talking. That's what I miss. Because I can't speak that's's another turn of the blade. I can sit at a table and vicariously enjoy the conversation, which is why I enjoy...

On vice

Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all the others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading. - Germaine Greer

On books

Larry McMurtry, Books - One of my peculiarities as a book scout was that I soon developed an uncanny ability to find books inscribed by Franklin Gilliam to various former girlfriends, all of whom seemed to have sold them the next day. . . Marcia and I debated erasing the inscriptions, but that would have meant a lot of erasing. In the end we left them in place, and one day, sure enough, Franklin wandered over to a shelf, idly picked up a book, and looked inside. No man ever went scarlet quicker. – - Sometime in the mid-seventies I...

On resolutions

People keep asking me what my New Year’s resolutions are and I tell them that I don’t have any and then they get all pissy because they assume that I think I don’t need to change but it’s really just that I’m too bored with myself to invest any more time thinking about me, and also because “What are your new year’s resolutions?” is kind of code for “So tell me what you think is wrong with you.” - Jenny Lawson, My New Year's Resolution is to get you to stop asking about my New Year's Resolution