Alice Munro, “Miles City, Montana”: “In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide—sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real […]
Author Archives: James Mustich
The Lost Art of Conjuring
On the letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. A few weeks back, under The Next 1,000 rubric in Newsletter No. 28, I wrote about As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. The reader who’d added it to the ever-growing list of titles at the website was my wife, Margot, and […]
On Light, First and Last and Lingering
Sunrise, sunset, and J. M. W. Turner’s book of hours. That voice, at the start, could have stopped with the light, left heaven and earth glad in its glow. But so lithe was light’s beauty, so playful its touch, that the voice quickly conjured the rest of creation, indulging light’s longing for things to caress. […]
Campaign Update from Madame de Staël
On public opinion and the imaginative void of our modern moment: a historical glance. Oscar Wilde defined public opinion as “an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.” I took special note of that description when I came across it in Adam Phillips’s Unforbidden […]
“. . . independent, freelance, female . . .”
My romance with Madame de Staël. I fell in love with Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) the first time I met her. We were introduced by Richard Holmes, biographer of Shelley and Coleridge and author as well of two of the most marvelous books I know: Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer and The Age of […]
Commponplace Book 02.11.20
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.” ❦ Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking: “. . . the mind is also a landscape of sorts and . . . walking is one way to traverse it. A […]
On the Altars of Attention
Looking at the sculpture of Louise Nevelson. I spent an hour Sunday morning, while the house was quiet, turning the pages of—paying my respects to is probably a better description—a book that looks something looks more like a totem that a volume. Large and nearly square (it’s roughly 12×13 inches), it’s bound in deep black […]
Walking and Thinking
A path to ideas on a walk in the woods. I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau I walk to most of my ideas, and walking, I’d wager, is the most ingenious instrument in a writer’s toolbox. […]
Under the Spell of Sentences
On writing—and on writing about writing that’s a joy to read. I spend an inordinate amount of my waking life turning sentences around. Come to think of it, it’s not just my waking hours: I often fall out of slumber in the middle of the night to find a phrase tickling my mind. In such […]
Commonplace Book 01.30.20
January 30, 2020 From the aphorisms of Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort: “All that I’ve learned I’ve forgotten; the little that I still know, I’ve guessed.” ❦ Marcel Proust on anticipation, from Within a Budding Grove: “I continued to wait, alone or with Swann, and often with Gilberte, come in to keep us company. The arrival of […]