DeLillo Meditation, Complete
6/20/2007
What I'm Listening To: I've been spending a lot of time lately with my new girlfriend, Amy Winehouse.

Here's the Don DeLillo passage on writing I quoted in part in the last blog. When asked by David Remnick about the influence of museums and art on him as a young artist, he repsonds that the influence is almost metaphysical. He's so right. I know my bus rides to the San Diego art museums and Zoo and library with my long-suffering mom were nearly occult in their possessive powers over me. The first time I saw a Dali changed me forever. Even worse when I actually saw Dali himself! Dali was the art! Oh, man--I was gone. DeLillo:

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I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everyhting you've read, and haven't read. It comes from all the things that are in the air. At some point, you begin to write sentences and paragraphs that don't sound like other writers'. And for me, the crux of the whole matter is language, and the language a writer eventually develops. If you're talking about Hemingway, the Hemingway sentence is what makes Hemingway. It's not the bullfights, or the safaris or the wars, it's a clear, direct, and vigorous sentence...I think my work comes from out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from. That's where my themes come from. I don't think it comes from othe rpeople. One's personality and vision are shaped by other writers, by movies, by paintings, by music. But the work itself, you know--sentence by sentence, page by page--it's much too intimate, much too private, to come from anywhere but deep within the writer himself. It comes out of all the time a writer wastes. We stand around, look out the window, walk down the hall, come back to the page, and, in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of daydreaming. It's too deep to be attributed to clear sources.


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