joshua chamberlain

Category: reading

  • lessons from Mike Nichols

    I finally finished reading Mark Harris’s biography, Mike Nichols: A Life. A few takeaways: “I passionately believe that in art, certainly in theater, there are only two questions…The first question is: ‘What is this, really, when it happens in life?’ not what is the accepted convention…but what is it really…

  • listening to listen

    It seems like most of the time, when I listen to a podcast, it’s to get something out of it. I’m on the hunt for tidbits of creative advice, insight into a craft, or equipment for living life in these trying times. Rarely do I listen just to listen. Marc…

  • home in October

    I love the month of October. Each year, it feels like a return to someplace familiar. As Kerouac says in On The Road, “Everybody goes home in October.” Thomas Wolfe agrees: All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field…

  • learning vs. education

    I started reading Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing and twenty pages in, it’s already the most useful book on writing I’ve ever read. One of the hard truths from the book: The central fact of your education is this: you’ve been taught to believe that what you discover…

  • a poem or a prayer

    I’ve always loved how poetry comes from somewhere deep, almost as though it’s the language of the soul. Austin Kleon, in addition to being famous as the Steal Like an Artist guy, is known for his blackout poems. He takes newspaper clips and blacks out most of the words to…

  • “all shall be well…”

    Around this time last year, as Covid reared its head and we barreled into the political upheaval of fall, I was possessed by an idea. It kept appearing in my head over and over: “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well…”…

  • many things at once

    This morning’s Writer’s Almanac had an interesting quote from Raymond Chandler, discussing Philip Marlowe, the protagonist of his novel The Big Sleep: He must be the best man in his world and good enough for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a…

  • assembling yourself

    I’m slowly nibbling my way through Mark Harris’s new book, Mike Nichols: A Life, an account of the late film director’s life and career. There’s a whole slew of things I didn’t know about Nichols, from the circumstances of his childhood as a Jew fleeing Germany in the late 30s…

  • back to the well

    I’ve always been fascinated with the art of playing politics. I’m not talking the madness going on in Washington at the moment so much as the shrewd tactics used to maneuver against competitio; things like the classic Mad Men episode, “The Chrysanthemum and The Sword.” This of course had led…

  • a really good bucket

    In the process of listening to interviews with Jennifer Egan and Elizabeth Strout, I’ve been pondering the roll of the unconscious in writing and art making. Both Strout and Egan talk about how writing flows from someplace beyond the conscious mind. Speaking about her 2019 novel, Olive, Again, Strout says…