Tag: write

96 years old and still laboring at her trade

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“How, after all, does one dare, how can one presume?” That is Cynthia Ozick on the paralyzing challenge of saying something new about Franz Kafka. But they can be applied equally to Ms. Ozick, who in her 60-plus years of publishing has produced a body of work—novels, short stories, essays, criticism, poetry and plays—unrivaled by any living American author. Can such a monument be summarized without being cheapened?

One dares to try in part because of the mist of obscurity that has always surrounded Ms. Ozick’s output, the rift between her reputation and her readership. Perhaps no other author of her accomplishment has been so consistently taken for granted. Ms. Ozick is 96 years old and still laboring at her trade like an outsider with something to prove. Not for her are the perquisites of eminence. There have been no vague, self-indulgent late works (her 2021 novel, “Antiquities,” is as sharp and questing as anything she has written); no retirement celebrations, Festschrifts or public tributes as there were for her contemporary Philip Roth. The closest Ms. Ozick may come to a career retrospective is “In a Yellow Wood,” a heaping selection of short stories and essays that seems likely to burnish her legacy while continuing to confound all attempts at marketing her. […]

The artist, Ms. Ozick continually asserts, must claim absolute imaginative freedom, even at the risk of being misunderstood. “Coiled in the bottommost pit of every driven writer is an impersonator—protean, volatile, restless and relentless,” she says in “Isaac Babel and the Identity Question.” […]

Such are the fertile contradictions of Cynthia Ozick, a self-described “fanatic” of literature who grasps better than anyone the moral perils of fanaticism, an accomplished writer who deeply distrusts the worldly authority her writing has earned her. “The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to,” she once said. So this titan of literature keeps her head down, toiling away like the hapless strivers and mole-eyed bookworms of her stories, working not for recognition but to contribute something lasting to posterity, with its dreamt-of future readers who are as avid for the pleasures of art as she is. Now that is daring, that is presumption.

— Sam Sacks, excerpts from his Book Review of “In a Yellow Wood” written by Cynthia Ozick (wsj.com, March 7 , 2025)

Writes and Write-Nots

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I’m usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won’t be many people who can write. […]

AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.

The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can’t write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can’t write, there will just be good writers and people who can’t write. […]

— Paul Graham, from “Writes and Write-Nots” (October, 2024. PaulGraham.com)

Photo: Todoran Bogdan

My Bookshelf, Myself.

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People have been arguing that print is dead, or about to be dead… It is not dead in this house. We write in books. We dogear pages and underline passages and draw little stars in the margins. To read a book after my husband has read it is to have a window into his curious and wide-ranging mind.

I’m aware that a novel is not a thing. A poem is not a thing. Whether a story or a poem or an essay or an argument comes in through your ears or your eyes or your fingertips doesn’t change the alchemy that happens in reading: the melding of writer and reader, one human heart in communion with another, and with all the others, past, present, and future, who have read the same book. That magic is unrelated to the delivery system of a text. It happens whenever and however a person reads.

Nevertheless.

I will always prefer a book I can hold in my hand, the kind that smells of paper and glue, the kind whose unfolding I control, no button or touchscreen involved, by flipping backward and forward with pages ruffling between my fingers. The physicality of it pleases me. I listen to audiobooks on solo road trips, but I always switch back to the physical book as soon as I unpack. Reading a book on paper feels slower — calmer, stiller — than encountering any digital text.

For me, a book made of paper will always be a beautiful object that warms a room even as it expands (or entertains, or challenges, or informs, or comforts) a mind, and a bookcase will always represent time itself. I walk past one of our bookcases, and I can tell you exactly why a particular book is still there, never culled as space grew limited, even if there is no chance I’ll ever read it again.

When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.

— Margaret Renkl, from “In Praise of Overstuffed Bookshelves” (NY Times, August 26, 2024)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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MN: Not a day goes by when I don’t feel grateful that my formative years were all lived without the internet. […]

MD: Maybe part of the fatigue (and potential bulimia) of the internet comes from knowing that ‘everything’ is available to us at the touch of a finger. It’s all there to read instantaneously, or it can be on your doorstep in two days.

— Maggie Nelson & Moyra Davey, in Maggie Nelson’s from “A LIFE, A FACE, A GAZE. Conversation with Moyra Davey” in Like Love: Essays and Conversations. (Graywolf Press, April 2, 2024)

Notes: Book Review from The Guardian: “Like Love by Maggie Nelson review – music, passion and friendship“

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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My job is clear: I must protect the transmission, smuggle it out of the theater, to examine it later in my room, see if it still glows. If it does, I might start to think in sentences about it. If the sentences get bossy enough, I might start to write them down. This much I’ve learned—you put enough in, and eventually, if unpredictably, something will come out.

— Maggie Nelson, Like Love: Essays and Conversations. (Graywolf Press, April 2, 2024)

Notes: Book Review from The Guardian: “Like Love by Maggie Nelson review – music, passion and friendship“