“I’m so, so tired of reading about how writing should be demystified, how it doesn’t work the way Cortazar describes at all, how you toil at it slowly like you’re scrubbing a toilet, how the important parts are rewriting everything (preferably with the help of a gaggle of fellow workshop women) and killing your darlings and not getting personally attached to your work, how “good rejection letters” are a cause for celebration, and how you should take a class at Mediabistro or teach one at Barnes and Noble.”
At Bookslut, Elizabeth Bachner, true to form, has a long, thoughtful and lyrical essay about Michael Greenberg’s new book, the work of Julio Cortazar and how we’ve compromised the magic of writing to our own detriment.
3 responses
This made my day.
lovely piece. time to dust off that well-worn edition of “hopscotch” and sink inway
Bachner quotes Cortazar quoting Rimbaud: “The symphony stirs in the depths.” But the whole passage, depending on the translation, goes something like this:
“For I is an other. If the brass wakes up a trumpet, it isn’t its fault. To me this is evident: I watch over the opening out of my thought. I watch it, I listen; I strike with my bow: the symphony stirs in the depths, or leaps suddenly onto the scene at one bound.” — from Lettre du Voyant
It can stir all it wants to, but if it doesn’t leap…
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