Status Updates From Daily Rituals: How Great Mi...

This is a book you can pick up and put down anytime you have a free moment. It’s a vignette of routines by artist past and present.

Day 75: Umberto Eco. He once told an interviewer: “This morning you rang, but then you had to wait for the elevator, and several seconds elapsed before you showed up at the door. During those seconds, waiting for you, I was thinking of this new piece I’m writing. I can work in the water closet, in the train. While swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the bathtub, but there too.”

Day 74: Martin Amis. Unlike his father, Martin Amis does not approach his writing with a feeling of dread: “I seldom have that kind of squeamishness”.

Day 73: Kingsley Amis. "Do you have a daily routine?"

"Yes. I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter."

Day 72: Wallace Stevens. “I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me. It introduces discipline and regularity into one’s life."

Day 71: WB Yeats. “I am a very slow writer. I have never done more than five or six good lines in a day.” So, a lyric poem of eighty or more lines took Yeats about three months of hard labor. Fortunately, Yeats was not so careful about his other writing, like the literary criticism he did to earn extra money. “One has to give something of one’s self to the devil that one may live,” he said. “I give my criticism.”

Day 70: Louis Armstrong. “It’s been hard goddam work, man. Feel like I spent 20,000 years on planes and railroads, like I blowed my chops off.… I never tried to prove nothing, just always wanted to give a good show. My life has been my music, it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public.”

Day 69: John Cheever. “I must convince myself that writing is not, for a man of my disposition, a self-destructive vocation,” he wrote in his journal in 1968. “I hope and think it is not, but I am not genuinely sure.”