The past two and a half years have been really rough for me. Issues of love and work, health and mortality have pushed me into places I’ve never been before. Yet through all this balagan (chaos, in Hebrew), I’ve produced some of the best work of my life. I think there’s a connection. It’s a myth, in my opinion, that we need to have our ducks in a row to produce good work. When I first started writing seriously, in my late twenties, I would work for ten hours a day, in the prime of health, with nothing to distract…
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Shakespeare, Milton and Dante all understood villains. They loved villains. Their villains are their greatest creations. Directors savor villains because villains light up the screen. Actors love to play bad guys. What could be more memorable onscreen than crushing a half-grapefruit into your wife’s face, as James Cagney did to Mae Clarke in Public Enemy, or, as Richard Widmark did in Kiss of Death, push an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs? But what every bad guy needs most of all is a great Villain Speech. From our own era, it’s tough to top the “Greed…
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I was in Israel for most of the past month, doing research for a book. That’s why I haven’t been able to deliver a new Writing Wednesday each week. My apologies! The sojourn in the Holy Land produced mucho grist for future WWs, however. But we can bang one post out immediately: Product Recommendations. Stuff I took with me that actually worked. I offer the following consumer report (with NO connections, financial or otherwise, to any product recommended or reviled below) for my fellow aspiring journalist/novelist globetrotters … 1. SwissGear IBEX laptop backpack. I had noticed, doing book signings at…
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The piece below comes not from Seven Pillars of Wisdom or from the David Lean movie or from Michael Korda’s wonderful new book, Hero. It’s from a letter written by T.E. Lawrence during the WWI revolt in the Arabian desert, when he led what the British called “Bedouin irregulars” against the Turks. Alas, I can’t recall the date of the letter or the circumstances of its writing or even the person it was written to. I cut it out and saved it as an example of vivid, immediate, riveting prose. I used to copy these two paragraphs over and over…
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[This post first ran in July but, reading it over recently, I felt E.B. Sledge’s thoughts were particularly pertinent again, as close-combat wars continue to proliferate. See if you agree.] E.B. Sledge was a Marine mortarman on Peleliu and Okinawa in WWII. His first-person memoir, With The Old Breed (which he reconstructed from notes scribbled in a New Testament he carried with him throughout the fighting) stands with the very best combat narratives not just from World War II, but from any war in history. Ken Burns (who drew extensively from Sledge’s text for his celebrated PBS documentary, The War)…
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I’ve been out of the country for the past two weeks, in England and in Israel. (In fact I’m still overseas—and will be for two more weeks.) That’s why I haven’t put up any current posts. I’ve been so far out of my comfort zone, I couldn’t make myself sit down and write. How far out? Panic out. Serious freak-out out, just because I couldn’t figure out how to get online, or make my phone work, or read street signs, or even, for one memorable twenty-minute stretch, get my Hertz car out of an underground parking garage. It got me…
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In Parts One and Two we have learned—from Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, translated by Walter Miller—of Panthea, the most beautiful woman in Asia, who was captured by Cyrus the Great but treated with such exemplary honor that she volunteered to bring her husband, the chariot commander Abradatas, over to Cyrus’s cause. Indeed Abradatus, out of gratitude to Cyrus for the noble restraint he displayed toward Panthea, has joined forces with Cyrus and been granted a post of honor in the great battle with Croesus of Sardis. Fighting in the forefront, Abradatas has been slain. Cyrus, as we pick up the…
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[In Part One from last week, we learned—from Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, translated by Walter Miller—how Cyrus the Great had captured the beautiful Panthea but refused to violate her honor. Out of gratitude for Cyrus’s nobility, Panthea proposed to bring her husband Abradatas over from the enemy and enlist him and his thousand charioteers in Cyrus’s cause. Abadatas gladly acceded to this and was welcomed warmly by Cyrus. Now the day of the Great Battle has come. Abradatas has been granted a post of honor in the forefront of Cyrus’s army … ] And when Abradatas was armed in his panoply he…
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When I was living out of the back of my ’65 Chevy van, there was a kind of dude I used to run into from time to time. A hard-core road character, burnt brown by the sun, unbathed in months, living on dimes a day. I probably met and spent time with a dozen guys like this in places like Texas and Louisiana, northern California, Washington state—giving them rides, working day-labor jobs, staying up all night talking. They carried guitars and no-hope dreams. I used to ask myself, listening to their tunes in a stoned haze some place that I…
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The following romance (in three parts) comes from one of my all-time favorite books, Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus a.k.a. the Cyropaedia. Xenophon was an extraordinary character—an Athenian aristocrat and devotee of Socrates, who became a great friend to Sparta and died an exile from his native land. The March of the Ten Thousand, also known as The Anabasis, is probably his most famous work (see my earlier post “The Sea, The Sea!”). Xenophon’s Reflections on Socrates, while it pales alongside Plato’s dialogues, is still extremely illuminating, and his wonderful short works, On Hunting (meaning the pursuit of boars and hares, using hounds),…
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