Doing everything but writing

*Hemingway with cat, from here

About a non-typing night by Charles Bukowski 

(thanks to The Cat Ladies for sharing)

She phones, "You done any writing?"

"No", I say 

"What ya been doing?"

"Nothing." 

"Is there anybody there with you?"

"Just the cat."

"And you haven't done any writing?"

"No."

"Do you feel all right"?

"I 'm ok."

"How come you haven't phoned?"

"I did", I tell her.

"That was earlier" (Pause)

"And you haven't done any writing?"

"No".

Writing is not a God damned job.

I 've had lots of God damned jobs.

And if writing ever gets to be a 

God damned job,

I ll look for another one.

I know she means well,

I do too.

Serendipity

quatre.

Thank you Shuen-Yi for the restored edition of Sylvia Plath's Ariel - reading the collection in its original order and manuscript sheds light on Plath's creative process, techniques and more powerfully, how she painfully battled with the inner demon and transcended it all.

My all time favourite is the Morning Song, written when her second son Nicholas was just born.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

i like my body when it is with your

body. It is so quite new a thing.

Muscles better and nerves more.

i like your body. i like what it does,

i like its hows. i like to feel the spine

of your body and its bones, and the trembling

-firm-smooth ness and which i will

again and again and again

kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,

i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz

of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes

over parting flesh ... And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

- e e cummings

Cinematic Writing 0

Lina Scheynius

Of all four floors, in, out, the love-struggle

In all its acts and scenes, a snakes and ladders

Of intertangling and disentangling

Limbs and loves and lives. Nobody was Old.

- Ted Hughes, 18 Rugby Street from the Birthday Letters