Thursday's Flurry of Words

Your Editors Started At An Early Age

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – we’re sobering up here at the mag. Another long night has passed. It’s true, many authors have jumped on the wagon, or is it off? But did that actually change their work? Let’s investigate. Sherman Drexler got off the writing wagon at Berkeley. Maybe he, like Arthur Phillips, struggled to discover how to write about music. That might drive one to drink. Or feel small in the world. With a lot to say. No one will miss dying, but if you go in Paris, there is a good chance your grave will be a happening spot. Garcon, water, please. – Andrew Geer

– John Cheever was most unhappy to be picked up for vagrancy by the cops. “My name is John Cheever!” he bellowed. “Are you out of your mind?” Found sharing some hooch with the down-and-outs in downtown Boston, he was promptly admitted to Smithers Alcoholism Treatment Centre on Manhattan’s East 93rd Street, where he shared a room with a failed male ballet dancer, a delicatessen owner and a smelly ex-sailor. “The ballerina is up to his neck in bubble bath reading a biography of Edith Piaf,” he noted in his journal. He spent most of his time in group therapy correcting his counsellor’s grammar. — Writing & Sobriety in Intelligent Life

Untitled (Nude), 1968

– In my last visit at your studio you mentioned to me that you were once an aspiring writer, at least to the age of eighteen or nineteen, then you quoted Flaubert telling Maupassant, “Send each word as if it’s a telegram,” which compelled you to cut what was twenty-something pages of a short story to two and a half pages. – Sherman Drexler in The Brooklyn Rail

– I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I’ve heard the line frequently.  At first blush, the claim is a smugly dismissive one: verbal descriptions of music are doomed to be pointlessly, perhaps even ridiculously, inferior to actual music. As a reader, I resisted this idea; it just felt false, though I couldn’t quite say why. — Music Writing in The Believer

Miniature But Packs Some Serious Punch

– Tom Friedman’s work was exhibited at the New Museum here in New York during the fall of 2001 and winter of 2002. Friedman—not to be confused with the New York Times columnist—may be a relatively well-known artist, but I wouldn’t be familiar with his art if a friend hadn’t taken me to see it when it was in town. — Miniature Art in Guernica

– Flowers, love letters and lipstick kisses by the hundreds – all so apropos of Paris, the world’s capital of love and destination for romantics everywhere. But something was amiss. The scene was not a charming cafe, nor an elegant hotel room, nor a romantic walkway along the Seine. The flowers and letters were lying at the base of a giant slab of stone, its sides covered with red imprints of lips. We were standing at the grave of Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, in one of the most famous cemeteries in the world: Cimetière du Père Lachaise. — Celebrating in the Graveyard in Newsday

Video: Cimetière du Père-Lachaise