Monday 31 October 2016

Paris Review interview with Truman Capote

INTERVIEWER

Were you sure then that you wanted to be a writer?

CAPOTE

I realized that I wanted to be a writer. But I wasn’t sure I would be until I was fifteen or so. At that time I had immodestly started sending stories to magazines and literary quarterlies. Of course no writer ever forgets his first acceptance; but one fine day when I was seventeen, I had my first, second, and third, all in the same morning’s mail. Oh, I’m here to tell you, dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase!

INTERVIEWER

What did you first write?


CAPOTE

Short stories. And my more unswerving ambitions still revolve around this form. When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean exactly by “control”?

CAPOTE

I mean maintaining a stylistic and emotional upper hand over your material. Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence— especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don’t mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that’s all.

INTERVIEWER

How does one arrive at short-story technique?

CAPOTE


Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can’t generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.

INTERVIEWER

Are there devices one can use in improving one’s technique?

CAPOTE

Work is the only device I know of. Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Even Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman; he could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners. Too many writers seem to consider the writing of short stories as a kind of finger exercise. Well, in such cases, it is certainly only their fingers they are exercising.

INTERVIEWER
Did you have much encouragement in those early days, and if so, by whom?

CAPOTE


Good Lord! I’m afraid you’ve let yourself in for quite a saga. The answer is a snake’s nest of No’s and a few Yes’s. You see, not altogether but by and large, my childhood was spent in parts of the country and among people unprovided with any semblance of a cultural attitude. Which was probably not a bad thing, in the long view. It toughened me rather too soon to swim against the current—indeed, in some areas I developed the muscles of a veritable barracuda, especially in the art of dealing with one’s enemies, an art no less necessary than knowing how to appreciate one’s friends.

But to go back. Naturally, in the milieu aforesaid, I was thought somewhat eccentric, which was fair enough, and stupid, which I suitably resented. Still, I despised school—or schools, for I was always changing from one to another—and year after year failed the simplest subjects out of loathing and boredom. I played hooky at least twice a week and was always running away from home. Once I ran away with a friend who lived across the street—a girl much older than myself who in later life achieved a certain fame. Because she murdered a half-dozen people and was electrocuted at Sing Sing. Someone wrote a book about her. They called her the Lonely Hearts Killer. But there, I’m wandering again. Well, finally, I guess I was around twelve, the principal at the school I was attending paid a call on my family, and told them that in his opinion, and in the opinion of the faculty, I was “subnormal.” He thought it would be sensible, the humane action, to send me to some special school equipped to handle backward brats. Whatever they may have privately felt, my family as a whole took official umbrage, and in an effort to prove I wasn’t subnormal, pronto packed me off to a psychiatric study clinic at a university in the East where I had my I.Q. inspected. I enjoyed it thoroughly and —guess what?—came home a genius, so proclaimed by science. I don’t know who was the more appalled: my former teachers, who refused to believe it, or my family, who didn’t want to believe it— they’d just hoped to be told I was a nice normal boy. Ha ha! But as for me, I was exceedingly pleased—went around staring at myself in mirrors and sucking in my cheeks and thinking over in my mind, my lad, you and Flaubert—or Maupassant or Mansfield or Proust or Chekhov or Wolfe, whoever was the idol of the moment.

I began writing in fearful earnest—my mind zoomed all night every night, and I don’t think I really slept for several years. Not until I discovered that whisky could relax me. I was too young, fifteen, to buy it myself, but I had a few older friends who were most obliging in this respect and I soon accumulated a suitcase full of bottles, everything from blackberry brandy to bourbon. I kept the suitcase hidden in a closet. Most of my drinking was done in the late afternoon; then I’d chew a handful of Sen Sen and go down to dinner, where my behavior, my glazed silences, gradually grew into a source of general consternation. One of my relatives used to say, “Really, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was dead drunk.” Well, of course, this little comedy, if such it was, ended in discovery and some disaster, and it was many a moon before I touched another drop. But I seem to be off the track again. You asked about encouragement. The first person who ever really helped me was, strangely, a teacher. An English teacher I had in high school, Catherine Wood, who backed my ambitions in every way, and to whom I shall always be grateful. Later on, from the time I first began to publish, I had all the encouragement anyone could ever want, notably from Margarita Smith, fiction editor of Mademoiselle, Mary Louise Aswell of Harper’s Bazaar, and Robert Linscott of Random House. You would have to be a glutton indeed to ask for more good luck and fortune than I had at the beginning of my career.


INTERVIEWER

Have your best stories or books been written at a comparatively tranquil moment in your life or do you work better because, or in spite, of emotional stress?

CAPOTE

I feel slightly as though I’ve never lived a tranquil moment, unless you count what an occasional Nembutal induces. Though, come to think of it, I spent two years in a very romantic house on top of a mountain in Sicily, and I guess this period could be called tranquil. God knows, it was quiet. That’s where I wrote The Grass Harp. But I must say an iota of stress, striving toward deadlines, does me good.

INTERVIEWER

You have lived abroad for the last eight years. Why did you decide to return to America?
CAPOTE

Because I’m an American, and never could be, and have no desire to be, anything else. Besides, I like cities, and New York is the only real city-city. Except for a two-year stretch, I came back to America every one of those eight years, and I never entertained expatriate notions. For me, Europe was a method of acquiring perspective and an education, a stepping stone toward maturity. But there is the law of diminishing returns, and about two years ago it began to set in: Europe had given me an enormous lot, but suddenly I felt as though the process were reversing itself—there seemed to be a taking away. So I came home, feeling quite grown up and able to settle down where I belong—which doesn’t mean I’ve bought a rocking chair and turned to stone. No indeed. I intend to have footloose escapades as long as frontiers stay open.

INTERVIEWER

Do you read a great deal?

CAPOTE

Too much. And anything, including labels and recipes and advertisements. I have a passion for newspapers—read all the New York dailies every day, and the Sunday editions, and several foreign magazines too. The ones I don’t buy I read standing at news stands. I average about five books a week—the normal-length novel takes me about two hours. I enjoy thrillers and would like someday to write one. Though I prefer first-rate fiction, for the last few years my reading seems to have been concentrated on letters and journals and biographies. It doesn’t bother me to read while I am writing—I mean, I don’t suddenly find another writer’s style seeping out of my pen. Though once, during a lengthy spell of James, my own sentences did get awfully long.


INTERVIEWER

What writers have influenced you the most?


CAPOTE

So far as I consciously know, I’ve never been aware of direct literary influence, though several critics have informed me that my early works owe a debt to Faulkner and Welty and McCullers. Possibly. I’m a great admirer of all three; and Katherine Anne Porter, too. Though I don’t think, when really examined, that they have much in common with each other, or me, except that we were all born in the South. Between thirteen and sixteen are the ideal if not the only ages for succumbing to Thomas Wolfe—he seemed to me a great genius then, and still does, though I can’t read a line of it now. Just as other youthful flames have guttered: Poe, Dickens, Stevenson. I love them in memory, but find them unreadable. These are the enthusiasms that remain constant: Flaubert, Turgenev, Chekhov, Jane Austen, James, E. M. Forster, Maupassant, Rilke, Proust, Shaw, Willa Cather—oh the list is too long, so I’ll end with James Agee, a beautiful writer whose death over two years ago was a real loss. Agee’s work, by the way, was much influenced by the films. I think most of the younger writers have learned and borrowed from the visual, structural side of movie technique. I have.

INTERVIEWER
 
What are some of your writing habits? Do you use a desk? Do you write on a machine?

CAPOTE

I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.

INTERVIEWER

You seem to make a distinction between writers who are stylists and writers who aren’t. Which writers would you call stylists and which not?

CAPOTE

What is style? And “what” as the Zen Koan asks, “is the sound of one hand?” No one really knows; yet either you know or you don’t. For myself, if you will excuse a rather cheap little image, I suppose style is the mirror of an artist’s sensibility—more so than the content of his work. To some degree all writers have style—Ronald Firbank, bless his heart, had little else, and thank God he realized it. But the possession of style, a style, is often a hindrance, a negative force, not as it should be, and as it is—with, say, E. M. Forster and Colette and Flaubert and Mark Twain and Hemingway and Isak Dinesen—a reinforcement. Dreiser, for instance, has a style—but oh, Dio buono! And Eugene O’Neill. And Faulkner, brilliant as he is. They all seem to me triumphs over strong but negative styles, styles that do not really add to the communication between writer and reader. Then there is the styleless stylist—which is very difficult, very admirable, and always very popular: Graham Greene, Maugham, Thornton Wilder, John Hersey, Willa Cather, Thurber, Sartre (remember, we’re not discussing content), J. P. Marquand, and so on. But yes, there is such an animal as a nonstylist. Only they’re not writers; they’re typists. Sweaty typists blacking up pounds of bond paper with formless, eyeless, earless messages. Well, who are some of the younger writers who seem to know that style exists? P. H. Newby, Françoise Sagan, somewhat. Bill Styron, Flannery O’Connor—she has some fine moments, that girl. James Merrill. William Goyen—if he’d stop being hysterical. J. D. Salinger—especially in the colloquial tradition. Colin Wilson? Another typist.

INTERVIEWER

You say that Ronald Firbank had little else but style. Do you think that style alone can make a writer a great one?

CAPOTE

No, I don’t think so—though, it could be argued, what happens to Proust if you separate him from his style? Style has never been a strong point with American writers. This though some of the best have been Americans. Hawthorne got us off to a fine start. For the past thirty years Hemingway, stylistically speaking, has influenced more writers on a world scale than anyone else. At the moment, I think our own Miss Porter knows as well as anyone what it’s all about.

INTERVIEWER

Can a writer learn style?

CAPOTE

No, I don’t think that style is consciously arrived at, any more than one arrives at the color of one’s eyes. After all, your style is you. At the end the personality of a writer has so much to do with the work. The personality has to be humanly there. Personality is a debased word, I know, but it’s what I mean. The writer’s individual humanity, his word or gesture toward the world, has to appear almost like a character that makes contact with the reader. If the personality is vague or confused or merely literary, ça ne va pas. Faulkner, McCullers—they project their personality at once.

Source

www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4867/the-art-of-fiction-no-17-truman-capote

Wednesday 19 October 2016

Pete Doherty - I Don't Love Anyone (But You're Not Just Anyone) + Étretat


Paris, je t'aime

I've gained so much weight in Paris and I'm spending too much money (money I don't have). I'm so broke already. Eating baguette with jam and chocolate spread, croissants, chocolate and drinking sugary coffees in pretty and not so pretty restaurants and drinking so much wine, taking pictures, sitting in little bars near Bastille. I bought some books and a vintage dress too. Now I have just a little bit of money left. Paris, I like it so much. I'd love to move to Paris. I've been so many times and I remember that I loved it the first time I went when I was younger but then I've been thinking - every time I returned : it's not that great, is it? Maybe I was too cynical for Paris. Somehow I fell in love again with it. I used to be quite fluent in French and now my French is so bad because I wasn't interested in speaking French (silly me) and now I of course regret it.

Bises.

Monday 17 October 2016

Paris and London

I've been following some blogs and people on Instagram from the US and Canada and it's so cute but also a little weird when they say they're going to Paris, France or London, England or they are, right now, in Paris, France. I think for most Europeans there is only one Paris or London and why would you call it Paris, France? Of course it's in France. I understand why they do it but it just sounds so funny.

Europe is home and you're so used to everything here and it's funny to have people say something like: ''Europe is so cute. Everything's so old.'' Multiple North Americans online and Americans I've talked to told me that they think that 'everything's so old' in Europe. I personally never even considered Europe that old. There are a lot of much older cities or populations than Europe. It's interesting to hear those 'foreigners' talk about Europe and it makes me like Europe more. I'd love to travel to the Americas and I'd probably say things like: ''Everything's so new here.''

Paris, France 

It makes me think of Paris, Texas with the beautiful Nastassja Kinski

Sunday 16 October 2016

Morrissey's letters to

Music magazines
Click

Friends
Click

Solange


Solange Knowles new album is great and needs some of your lovin'

It girls / Germany


                                               French it girl Jeanne Damas


It-girls don't necessarily have a 'real job'. Yes, some of them go to photoshoots or they design clothes - usually with a design team -  but it's not the kind of work a teacher has to do or a coal miner, a cashier in a busy supermarket, a housewife or a manager with a 60-hour-week - it's work and maybe you sometimes feel stressed but it's not hard work. If you're famous, you'll get photographed and you won't have as much privacy as a non-famous person but if it all gets too much for you - as an 'it girl' - you can always shut yourself away in your (or one of your) luxurious flat(s) or mansion(s) or you can go to a 5 star hotel or to a resort in the Caribbean or fly first class or with your private jet to a city where no one knows you because you're not famous over there or not as much as in your home country or wherever you're residing or you buy an island for yourself. Most of all the it girls are rich girls with rich and mostly famous parents. You can call them spoilt, vapid or whatever you want to but you can like them too if you want. Sometimes it girls do have a job - they're actresses, models or singers. It's not as stressful as any blue collar job but it's a job and you're not just getting paid for making an appearance. Some it girls are getting paid for going to a club or they're advertising brands on Instagram or other social media. I wouldn't say that this is 'hard work'.

I am somewhat interested in it-girls. It girls like Alexa Chung, Gigi Hadid, Bella Hadid, Jeanne Damas, Paris Hilton, Caroline de Maigret, Charlotte Kemp Muhl, Lily-Rose Depp, Iris Apfel, Chloë Sevigny, Léa Seydoux, Cat Marnell, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lou Doillon etc.

I must admit that I prefer 'French it girls'. It's so cliché but they are fashionable. I like 'Instagram famous it girls' too. A lot of them are Scandinavian or from France.

Well, since I moved to Berlin I wanted to check out some German it girls too and get inspired. I did not get inspired. I got angry.

Bonnie Strange and Palina Rojinski are two German it girls (I think Bonnie has Polish and Palina has Russian parents and they're therefore of Eastern European descent but famous in Germany) and I like them. They're colourful and cute and seem to be nice. I wanted more and came across some 'it girls' who are considered 'intellectuals' because they're journalists and writers.

I came across two writers from a German conservative newspaper. I can't believe that people who are working there are considered 'it girls' in Germany. One of the writers at that newspaper wrote an article called ''I'm homophobic and I like it''. Just to give you an idea of what kind of German newspaper I'm talking about. The newspaper (if you could call it that) is the German version of the Daily Mail or Fox News but probably worse. They bullied a disabled refugee girl from Palestine into saying that she doesn't like Israel and Jews but the girl said they twisted her words and the girl and her family had to get a lawyer and had to sue the newspaper. Quality journalism, eh. German people tend to say - when you ask them why they read this horrible newspaper: ''Yeah, I mean, some of the articles aren't that great but it's a good newspaper. Why should I avoid it just because they post so many controversial articles?'' - ''You support financially them if you do?'' - ''Yeah but they do have good articles, you know. Some of them are good and not all of them are rude and inflammatory and sensationalist and not all the writers are mean.''

One of the 'it girls' from that 'newspaper' wrote an article about people with depression and borderline. She visits a friend with borderline in a mental institution and writes in her article that her 'friend' and all the other people should 'whine less and just get over it already' because they're taking the easy way out and aren't working or studying and they don't feel the pressure people are feeling who want to achieve something and have a career and they're just making excuses. In another article she writes that she thinks feminism is disgusting because it's 'for poor women' and she's selfish and doesn't care and if women think that a lot of ads with half-naked women are sexist, she objects because people just want to see naked women, so what?
This writer is 24 but she's like a spoilt 14-year-old brat, really.
I've read her articles because I'm fascinated, in a negative way, with all the drivel she has written. She wrote in one of her 'splendid' articles that she feels so sorry for a man she sees on the street because he's wearing a cheap suit and she wants to get drunk and cry because that's so sad... You couldn't make it up. This is a real person, not a caricature.
To make things even 'better': she got a book deal and people are praising her because she has so many 'controversial opinions' and she's so 'brave' and 'cheeky'. She even got invited to read at a prestigious literature competition where German speaking writers are given the possibility to read a short story and a jur, some (self-)important literature people, decides who wins. She wrote in her story that other girls hate her because she's so pretty (she's cute but she's no Victoria Secret Model or actress from the 60's, let's be real) and that she smudges her mascara on purpose because she tries to make herself look ugly, so some girls at a bar won't hate her. She 'suggests' that an 'ugly girl' she sees at the bar should wear a burka because she's so ugly.
'Nice'.

The second 'it girl' is a German writer (she's 28 or 29) who wrote that she doesn't need feminism because she's white and rich.
Again, you couldn't make it up. She got a book deal too.

Another German 'it girl', her mother is a well-known actress, also doesn't need feminism (who would have thought) because she wants to look good - unlike feminists- and she just got into trouble because she posted the following statement on her social media accounts as a 'social experiment': ''Refugees are like small tits- nobody wants them'' She wanted to see how people will react to her posts.

The other German it girls are 'glamour models'. They're not interesting - to me - but at least they haven't said anything controversial. One of those models accused two men of raping and filming her whilst under the influence (drugs and alcohol). They tried to sell the tape and put it online. The model sued the men and what did happen? The (female) judgle thought she's lying (despite the tape where she looks so out of it) and she had to pay a fine of 20 000 €.

Germany is more or less a nice country but sometimes it just seems so backward. You have stupid people in every country but people in other countries stilly people aren't considered to be the 'intellectual elite' like in Germany. They had good writers and philosophers and now they have arrogant fools. Germany, stop making stupid people famous.

Dani - Etoiles et revers (Ce n’est rien)


                   with Lou Lesage

*

A nice flat in an European city with a balcony and plants everywhere, the furniture is pretty; there's a rug, a velvety sofa, a piano, a fireplace, wooden floors, flowers, bookshelves and lots of books, wine, sunshine, music. You're chatting with your friends and you're eating some fruit. You went to a café earlier on and had coffee and a nice piece of cake. You gained weight. You're getting ready to go out. You put a vintage dress on and some pretty shoes. Tonight you'll drink champagne and maybe you'll dance on tables and you won't be so silly and sentimental.

Friday 7 October 2016

"I don't know how many, like, white people having brunch I can deal with on a Saturday afternoon. I walk around New York now and get upset."

Julian Casablancan

Monday 3 October 2016

"Don’t let them get you down. Be bold and wild and wonderful."
Astrid Lindgren