drmstream[writing]

The film­maker Erroll Mor­ris asked the ques­tion on Twit­ter, “I am inter­ested in assem­bling a col­lec­tion of sto­ries of peo­ple destroyed by read­ing (Any sug­ges­tions?)” and I wanted to make a smart con­tri­bu­tion but couldn’t shake a faint mem­ory of some­one wrapped in a blan­ket wan­der­ing Easton’s Beach with a tat­tered copy of Far From […]

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do any­thing really good. — William Faulkner I’m fin­ish­ing a story right now that is frus­trat­ing me. First, I should be work­ing on the long project.  I’ve set myself a dead­line and need to keep on it. Sec­ond, the story is […]

16 Cold Moun­tain is a house With­out beams or walls. The six doors left and right are open The hall is blue sky. The rooms all vacant and vague The east wall beats on the west wall At the cen­ter noth­ing. Bor­row­ers don’t bother me In the cold I build a lit­tle fire When I’m […]

Pond in sum­mer, taken with iPhone4, retouched with pho­to­gene I Wan­dered Lonely As A Cloud I wan­dered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daf­fodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Flut­ter­ing and danc­ing in the breeze. Con­tin­u­ous as […]

Argu­men­tum Ornitho­log­icum I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a sec­ond or per­haps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the num­ber of birds def­i­nite or indef­i­nite? The prob­lem involves the exis­tence of God. If God exists, the num­ber is def­i­nite, because God knows how […]

Ham­mett is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he him­self thought the most of is the record of man’s devo­tion to a friend. He was spare, fru­gal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writ­ers can ever do. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written […]

How do you know that? Have you been there to see? And if you had been there to see, and had seen none, that would not prove that there were none … And no one has a right to say that no water babies exist till they have seen no water babies exist­ing, which is […]

A writer is some­one who spends years patiently try­ing to dis­cover the sec­ond being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writ­ing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or lit­er­ary tra­di­tion, it is a per­son who shuts him­self up in a […]

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in oth­ers but give them life, and not only life, but that great con­scious­ness of life.“ — Jack Ker­ouac The first time that I read On the Road, it took days for the roar to sub­side. The world Ker­ouac painted […]

I would hurl words into this dark­ness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no mat­ter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to cre­ate a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. Imag­ine you’d been given a voice that you couldn’t con­trol, that […]