text and observation from Wolfandfox.
Freud and the Uncanny
While visiting a friend in London, I decided to stop in at the Freud Museum, which I had visited as a child with my psychoanalyst father. I spent a long time in the museum looking at his collection of antiquities and the home movies which show Freud playing with his pet Chows.
A week after my trip, my father called. One of his patients had been in London at the same time and had also visited the museum. He told my father - I saw a young woman at the Freud museum, and I imagined that she was your daughter.
How to write a great novel →
Featuring Pamuk, Ishiguro, Powers, Atwood, McCann (via @WSJAE)
i need to make a list like this:
q: what do you want to do most in the next two years?
a: hunt butterflies, especially certain whites, in the mountains of iran and in the middle atlas. quietly take up tennis again. have three new suits made in london. revisit landscapes and libraries in america. find a harder and darker pencil.
an interview with v. nabokov
from here.
It’s like playing chess with a monkey. You get them to checkmate, and then they swallow the king.
(via)
Please stop.
A dry-stone wall is a lovely thing when you see it bordering a field in the middle of nowhere but becomes more impressive when you realise that it was built without mortar, that the builder needed to choose each interlocking stone and fit it in. Writing is like building a wall.
For all of you doing NaNoWriMo, or just writing a book: http://bit.ly/jvSNO was the letter of encouragement Neil Gaiman wrote 2 years ago.
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
Ernest Hemingway (via @parisreview)
Life on White. (via telegraph uk)
My experience is you always get lucky if you’re willful enough about it. I discovered when I was in my twenties, and I started trying to make work, that if I would spend even more hours on it, luck would kick in on some story. And then you have to be ready to throw stuff out, too. You’re making room for the better stuff that’s going to come.
— Ira Glass. More of the interview here.
(via Babe in Cashland, who is 3 days into National Novel Writing Month)
