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I thought this might be interesting for Litsters as we do seem to put an emphasis on sig and tag lines, and quotes. - Perdita
ON WRITERS AND WRITING: I Wish I Had Said That, and I Will - Margo Jefferson - NY Times, 4.11.2004
I used to wish I could live through the words of other writers. Unpleasant questions would be parried with crisp couplets and song lyrics; strong feelings and opinions would be given third-person protection. I wouldn't have to censor myself because my own prose wasn't up to the mark. Unreliable or omniscient, I would be the narrator in control.
So I kept notebooks of quotations. Lots of people do. Reading them over lets you scan your own temperament. The words of writers you admire provide a trustworthy language for your desires and for how you'll feel when life ambushes them. They relieve you from being brave enough to say what feels unsayable. Notebooks like this are an informal history of your reading. If you forage through books instead of reading one at a time, the order of entries can look random. Rereading reveals -- or imposes -- a structure, a map of associations. In a 1971 notebook of mine a line from a 1921 essay by W. E. B. Du Bois is followed by a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald's journals:
Du Bois: ''We fear that our shortcomings are more than merely human.''
Fitzgerald: ''When I like men I want to be like them -- I want to lose the outer qualities that give me individuality and be like them.''
The first pained me. I grew up feeling that for black people only perfect virtue would do. The romantic abjection of the second embarrassed me, and then the boundary blurred: Du Bois's scholarly tone was tinged with abjection; Fitzgerald's frankness with self-hatred. Both implicated me. What good were my ideals and ambitions if I wasn't suitable for anything I'd gotten myself into?
Here is a bleak little trio from later in the decade:
''What can be the reason that all flourishes there and all languishes here?'' (Anna Brownell Jameson).
''I wonder why it is I have this strange feeling of not living out myself'' (Charlotte Forten).
''Very often knowing yourself isn't really going to lead you anywhere. Sometimes it's going to leave you kind of blank'' (Diane Arbus).
I was trying to describe depression. I didn't understand then why it was not cured by self-awareness.
I read women writers obsessively in those years. Reread too: it was thrilling to meet Charlotte Bronte or Edith Wharton as an ardent young feminist not an adolescent. ''Reader, I married him,'' writes Jane Eyre: the triumph of the poor girl with character (plain, too, but Bronte doesn't fully accept that and neither do we).
Every white woman writer of the 19th century responded vehemently to Bronte's novel. So did Harriet Jacobs, an African-American slave. She hid in an attic for seven years, plotting her escape, fighting off the kind of madness that destroyed Bertha Rochester. Once free, she published a memoir, ''Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.'' The correspondences continued. Both women used pseudonyms at first. (Bronte was ''Currer Bell''; Jacobs was ''Linda Brent.'') Both described events and feelings that were thought incendiary -- ''unwomanly.'' Many 19th-century critics claimed that no woman could write as Bronte wrote. Well into the 20th century, some historians were dismissing Jacobs's narrative as fiction. It was fact. But her revision of Jane Eyre was intentional. ''Reader,'' she wrote, ''my story ends with freedom; not, in the usual way, with marriage.''
Quotations can loose you from the confines of your own taste. If a line from some writer you couldn't care less about shows up at the right time, you're branded. Why did I record this phrase from John Dryden: ''And thrice he slew the slain''? The alliteration pleased me; so did the violence inside those well-ordered beats. Something else pleased me too. With a bit of tweaking this phrase could become one of the ''Characteristics of Negro Expression'' cataloged by Zora Neale Hurston in the 1920's. Here's my Dryden gloss on a Hurston scene: Two black men sit in a bar, watching some ludicrously mismatched fight on television. ''Talk about slaying the slain,'' says one as the weak opponent crumbles. ''Uhmmnn'' says the other. They laugh, shake their heads and return to their drinks.
A few pages farther on I find Shaw, holding forth at his swashbuckling best: ''If I were God I should try to create something higher than myself. I do not wish to be uncomplimentary, but just think about yourselves, ladies and gentlemen: can you conceive God deliberately creating you if he could have created anything better?''
Why did I follow this with a passage from Louise Bogan about madness and evolution? ''People do everything,'' her psychiatrist told her. ''And that is true,'' she mused. ''All those odd things they do, like falling in love with shoes and sewing buttons on themselves and hearing voices, and thinking themselves Napoleon, are natural: have a place. Madness and aberration are not only parts of the whole tremendous setup, but also (I have come to believe) important parts. Life trying new ways out and around and through.''
I dislike vanity that passes for piety; who better than Shaw to express that? But he has his own ''master and commander of the cosmos'' complex. Bogan struggled through depressions and breakdowns. I distrust the haughty misanthrope in me. I wanted a corrective.
How do we collectors live? We steal. I once heard Stravinsky declare that his love for Mozart gave him the right to steal from him. And a friend just sent me these lines from Fanny Lewald, a 19th-century German Jewish novelist who arduously copied out passages from her uncle's books. Looking through them, she marveled at ''how many unlikely pieces laboriously collected from the most diverse corners and ends formed the mosaic of my life and rounded it into an independent whole.''
Margo L. Jefferson was appointed critic-at-large, covering theater, at the New York Times in 1996.
ON WRITERS AND WRITING: I Wish I Had Said That, and I Will - Margo Jefferson - NY Times, 4.11.2004
I used to wish I could live through the words of other writers. Unpleasant questions would be parried with crisp couplets and song lyrics; strong feelings and opinions would be given third-person protection. I wouldn't have to censor myself because my own prose wasn't up to the mark. Unreliable or omniscient, I would be the narrator in control.
So I kept notebooks of quotations. Lots of people do. Reading them over lets you scan your own temperament. The words of writers you admire provide a trustworthy language for your desires and for how you'll feel when life ambushes them. They relieve you from being brave enough to say what feels unsayable. Notebooks like this are an informal history of your reading. If you forage through books instead of reading one at a time, the order of entries can look random. Rereading reveals -- or imposes -- a structure, a map of associations. In a 1971 notebook of mine a line from a 1921 essay by W. E. B. Du Bois is followed by a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald's journals:
Du Bois: ''We fear that our shortcomings are more than merely human.''
Fitzgerald: ''When I like men I want to be like them -- I want to lose the outer qualities that give me individuality and be like them.''
The first pained me. I grew up feeling that for black people only perfect virtue would do. The romantic abjection of the second embarrassed me, and then the boundary blurred: Du Bois's scholarly tone was tinged with abjection; Fitzgerald's frankness with self-hatred. Both implicated me. What good were my ideals and ambitions if I wasn't suitable for anything I'd gotten myself into?
Here is a bleak little trio from later in the decade:
''What can be the reason that all flourishes there and all languishes here?'' (Anna Brownell Jameson).
''I wonder why it is I have this strange feeling of not living out myself'' (Charlotte Forten).
''Very often knowing yourself isn't really going to lead you anywhere. Sometimes it's going to leave you kind of blank'' (Diane Arbus).
I was trying to describe depression. I didn't understand then why it was not cured by self-awareness.
I read women writers obsessively in those years. Reread too: it was thrilling to meet Charlotte Bronte or Edith Wharton as an ardent young feminist not an adolescent. ''Reader, I married him,'' writes Jane Eyre: the triumph of the poor girl with character (plain, too, but Bronte doesn't fully accept that and neither do we).
Every white woman writer of the 19th century responded vehemently to Bronte's novel. So did Harriet Jacobs, an African-American slave. She hid in an attic for seven years, plotting her escape, fighting off the kind of madness that destroyed Bertha Rochester. Once free, she published a memoir, ''Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.'' The correspondences continued. Both women used pseudonyms at first. (Bronte was ''Currer Bell''; Jacobs was ''Linda Brent.'') Both described events and feelings that were thought incendiary -- ''unwomanly.'' Many 19th-century critics claimed that no woman could write as Bronte wrote. Well into the 20th century, some historians were dismissing Jacobs's narrative as fiction. It was fact. But her revision of Jane Eyre was intentional. ''Reader,'' she wrote, ''my story ends with freedom; not, in the usual way, with marriage.''
Quotations can loose you from the confines of your own taste. If a line from some writer you couldn't care less about shows up at the right time, you're branded. Why did I record this phrase from John Dryden: ''And thrice he slew the slain''? The alliteration pleased me; so did the violence inside those well-ordered beats. Something else pleased me too. With a bit of tweaking this phrase could become one of the ''Characteristics of Negro Expression'' cataloged by Zora Neale Hurston in the 1920's. Here's my Dryden gloss on a Hurston scene: Two black men sit in a bar, watching some ludicrously mismatched fight on television. ''Talk about slaying the slain,'' says one as the weak opponent crumbles. ''Uhmmnn'' says the other. They laugh, shake their heads and return to their drinks.
A few pages farther on I find Shaw, holding forth at his swashbuckling best: ''If I were God I should try to create something higher than myself. I do not wish to be uncomplimentary, but just think about yourselves, ladies and gentlemen: can you conceive God deliberately creating you if he could have created anything better?''
Why did I follow this with a passage from Louise Bogan about madness and evolution? ''People do everything,'' her psychiatrist told her. ''And that is true,'' she mused. ''All those odd things they do, like falling in love with shoes and sewing buttons on themselves and hearing voices, and thinking themselves Napoleon, are natural: have a place. Madness and aberration are not only parts of the whole tremendous setup, but also (I have come to believe) important parts. Life trying new ways out and around and through.''
I dislike vanity that passes for piety; who better than Shaw to express that? But he has his own ''master and commander of the cosmos'' complex. Bogan struggled through depressions and breakdowns. I distrust the haughty misanthrope in me. I wanted a corrective.
How do we collectors live? We steal. I once heard Stravinsky declare that his love for Mozart gave him the right to steal from him. And a friend just sent me these lines from Fanny Lewald, a 19th-century German Jewish novelist who arduously copied out passages from her uncle's books. Looking through them, she marveled at ''how many unlikely pieces laboriously collected from the most diverse corners and ends formed the mosaic of my life and rounded it into an independent whole.''
Margo L. Jefferson was appointed critic-at-large, covering theater, at the New York Times in 1996.
I loved this article, and I typically quote what amuses or makes me think - a sharing with those who can appreciate, a part of what I enjoy. 
