Notes transferred (in Stanley Fish's words)

I think these are the words of Stanley Fish, from his book on how to write sentences (and appreciate the gems).

In college I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page.

[To me] these were a handful of words artfully arranged to stop time, to conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimension.

From James Joyce's Araby:

The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.

The sentence is measured, unguarded, direct and at the same time transcendent. It distills a precise mood; radiates with meaning, yet sensibility is discreet. The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.

Only certain sentences breathe and shift about like live matter in a soil.

Not sure who wrote the following:

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in grammatical relation to one another, is the most basic, ongoing impulse in my life.

On days when I am troubled, when I am grieved, when I am at a loss for words, the mechanics of formulating sentences, and of stockpiling them in a vault, is the only thing that centers me again.

Contrasting a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: Press the button, wait for something to emerge.

Notes transferred (on David Foster Wallace)

For some time, I've been transferring notes I had hand-written, on to my blog.

To me, this sort of action is like a potent brain-therapy, as I believe, when I write and rewrite, even when the activity of the rewriting is a mere copying of stuff I had written, my brain cells are enlivened.

Some things somebody had said about the novelist David Foster Wallace:

He has an astounding voice that is "hyperarticulate" and "plaintive." He is self-mocking, diffident, overbearing, needy, ironical, almost pathologically self-aware.

Says Wallace of his own writing voice, "The voice is in your own head; intimacy is an errection of the heart, as the importance of bearing witness bumps up against the danger of trivialization and exploitation."

Notes 1

I had made some random notes in a paper notebook. Here I am transcribing them on to the other "medium".

In Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabakov's description of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering Muzskiks, has an astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.

How to build a working airplane out of coconuts.

Good writing isn't just about forming the technical guts of a good sentence. It's also about figuring out how to hew serviceable planks in one set of tasks and then in other duties, build syntactic confections that don't taste like wood.

Straightforward envy over everyday objects grew into a kind of existential restlessness.

Andy Warhol once wanted the word "figment" engraved on his tomb.

Capitalism and Christianity conflates into a single ideology.

The narrative freight.

Twenty years ago, Irvine Welsh roared onto the British literary novel that traced the exuberant depravities of Scottish drug fiends. What marked the book wasn't its subject--artists have been mining the manic energies of addiction since the unlikely poetry of its language, a droll brogue relish transcribed in precise phonetics.