12 songs a year

Over three decades I've averaged about 12 songs a year. There have been a couple of fallow years and the odd bumper crop but generally I've written between 10 and 15. And by writing, I mean finishing something that was started several days, several months or several years before.
If you've written three or four hundred songs you get called prolific. But a dozen songs a year is not a lot.
Somehow the songs turn up, one by one. Or so far they have. I never know where the next one's coming from. There may never be a next one. I take comfort from the words of Thomas Mann: "A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
I wake up every morning and hope there's still one more tune ambling towards me down the road.

Paul Kelly

Summer Hours

I am more interested in how people try to deal with difficult situations — situations of crisis and grief — in the most decent possible way. When I’m dealing with this family I want to be close to every single one of them. I want to be able to understand their reasons. If at some point I don’t understand what one of my characters is doing and why, then there’s something flawed about what I’m doing. In theoretical terms I can’t analyze why I’m closer to this or that character in this or that respect, but in human terms I am with them, to me they are the center of the film whenever they are onscreen, and I can share in whatever they are saying. The characters in the film are, hopefully as we are, smart enough to understand that the forces that drive them apart are the forces of the transformation of the world, the transformation of society. And sadly it’s not things that we voted for or against, it just happened. It’s the way the modern world functions. It changes on its own. It changes like the sky changes, and we kind of have to grin and bear it.


Olivier Assayas

Unreasonable Drives

What we are is not the same thing the world requires us to be. We are full of appetites, unreasonable drives. This internal system of impulse and desire tests itself against the reality of social law — what the people with whom we live expect and require of us. This push and pull is part of the process that makes us human, and makes us interesting, too. You need some opposing force to measure yourself against and to define yourself either in accordance with or in opposition to. It could be the law, it could be the church or God, but you need something to be the Other and something to represent what is expected of you in contrast to what you sense you really are.


Scott Spencer

Novel

In the days after the memorial service, as my brothers and I went from room to room and handled things, I came to feel that the house had been my mother's novel, the concrete story she told about herself. She'd started with the cheap, homely department-store boilerplate she'd bought in 1944. She'd added and replaced various passages as funds permitted, reupholstering sofas and armchairs, accumulating artwork ever less awful than the prints she'd picked up as a twenty-three-year-old, abandoning her original arbitrary color schemes as she discovered and refined the true interior colors that she carried within her like a destiny. She pondered the arrangement of paintings on the wall like a writer pondering commas. She sat in the rooms year after year and asked herself what might suit her even better. What she wanted was for you to come inside and feel embraced and delighted by what she'd made; she was showing you herself, by way of hospitality; she wanted you to want to stay.


Jonathon Franzen The Discomfort Zone - House For Sale

Webb

What keeps you writing still? What’s the motivation to write?

I think I can still do it better. I never take it for granted that I’ve mastered songwriting. I don’t think one ever does. Usually what I do is end up hearing a song that I’ve written before on the radio and thinking I wish I could write that line again. Unfortunately, you can’t do that. Once you’ve recorded a song, it has a tendency to stay that way! I can almost always think of ways to improve songs, even songs that were big hits. I’m always working on them. I never stop working on them, which sometimes people find out when they come to my live shows. Sometimes people are very irritated by that. They come to the dressing room and say, “Why did you change ...?” People like to hear things the way they heard them the first time. You learn that you can’t really do that. You just sort of have to leave them alone, leave the mistakes in place.
What keeps me writing is the notion that I can still do a better one, that I could do a Broadway show, that I got the chops for that, that I would like to, for my own satisfaction, demonstrate that I can do that, that life goes on after 30 and 40 and 50 and that it’s okay. You can keep working and continue to contribute to the community and be creative. You can still exercise those talents that God gave you in your golden youth and maybe you can even do it a little bit better than you did then. It seems harder to get people’s attention as you get older but I think that most people do continue to mature and improve in their craft, even airplane pilots. There are guys in their 60s and 70s flying better than they’ve ever flown in their lives. I do it because I can and because I’m still pretty good at it and even now I think I can be better at it.



Jimmy Webb

Machismo

"machismo is not the easiest cloak to wear, the easiest role to assume in life. Machismo is a ladder, and there's always a guy who's more macho than you coming up that ladder. I've never had any illusion that I was high up that slope, and it's a desperate slope, because if you get to the top, you're dead. Macho means taking the dares that come your way, and if you take every dare that comes your way, sooner or later you're gonna be dead."

Norman Mailer

You grow up, and they bury you

"It's a real simple story. You grow up, and they bury you. They keep throwing dirt on you, throwing dirt on and dirt on, and some guys they bury so deep they never get out. Six foot, twelve foot down. Other guys, something comes along and they're able to get some of it away. They get a hand free or they get free one way or another.

I don't think you ever really blow it all off, but the idea is to keep charging. It's like anything. Everybody can't make it. You can see the guys on the street who aren't going to make it, and that's a frightening thing.

That's what I'm talking about. That some people get dug in so deep that there's a point where it stops getting shovelled on them and they roll over and start digging down. They literally roll over and start digging down themselves.Because they don't know which way is up. You get down so deep that you don't know which way's up. You don't know if you're digging sideways, up, down, you don't know... until something comes along, if you're lucky, and shakes you 'til all of a sudden you have a certain sense of direction and at least know where you're going.

A lot of people don't ever get that. You go into the bars and you see the guys wandering around in there who got the crazy eyes. They just hate. They're just looking for an immediate expenditure of all this build-up. They're just screaming to throw it all off. But you can't and it turns into, like, death throes. A guy walks into a bar, a little guy, and he walks up to another guy, a dome, and the little guy's looking to get creamed. Looking to get massacred. He wants to. 'Look,' he's saying, 'I'm dying here and I don't know what the fuck to do.' It's a scary thing when you see the guys that ain't gonna get out, just ain't gonna get out.

But I guess it comes down to... You just see too many faces, you just see too many... It's a funny kind of thing. It's the kind of thing where you can't save everybody, but you gotta try."

Bruce Springsteen 1978

Generations

"So what is striking about contemporary Auckland writers - make that New Zealand writers - is their detachment from the matters of social justice or the fundamental political and social freedoms and concerns of their fellow citizens. Poets and novelists, both realists and satirists, have their scrutinising place in Britain and America but most here show indifference to dealing with the live issues of public concern, not only in their work but as writers within the community.
Apart from a few satirical journalists, the quarrels with the world of our contemporary writers and their fictional characters seem mostly confined to stories of middle-class bickering and angst; and among themselves they expend much energy on silly, internecine spats... Are too many current writers unwilling to offend the establishment in the way their 1930s forebears would have done? A question that must be asked is whether this lack of engagement with the world is because they have been lulled by the largesse of too much patronage?"

Gordon McLauchlan Auckland Our Story - August 2010

Identity Block

"It took me another ten years to realize... that my academic inability to write, this "writer's block" as I described it, was in fact a creative method in which my unconcious was desperately trying to tell me something. The message was simple: I do not like or recognize this R.A. Gekoski: he is not pursuing ends that are good for him, he is inauthentic and his efforts are those of an unhappy person manifesting his unhappiness. His tones are strangulated, pompous and unreal, a pretend voice and not a real one. I won't let him write like this, not without a fight. Every word he tries to write I will resist every letter of the way. And that is how it felt. I didn't have writers block, I had identity block."

Rick Gekoski Outside of a Dog p.259

Doc

"The fighters always have a shot at turning a corner, and if you holler loud enough, sometimes somebody hears you. And truth and love always separate the greats from the neverwases and the neverwillbes."

Doc Pomus, from his liner notes to RETURN TO MAGENTA by Mink DeVille (1978)

A firewall against the void

“Nobody, nobody,” Kerouac writes in the closing lines of On the Road, “knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.” But it is also true that those rags—ghosts from the inevitable future, time bombs woven into our very DNA—are with us even when we’re at our most transcendent. If, in some sense, that’s a form of failure, it’s the same failure we all face, the failure to sustain ourselves in the face of eternity, to build a firewall against the void. No one ever tried harder—making his friends into mythic figures, turning his adventures into heroic legends, creating a cosmology around the essence of the self. It’s a remarkable achievement, or it would be if we could see it, if we could clear away our preconceptions and misreadings, if we could recognize that it is precisely the contradictions (the road warrior who lived with his mother, the “happy, sheepish imbecile” who became an alcoholic) that make him so compelling after all. “Kerouac,” Burroughs pointed out, “opened a million coffee bars and sold a million Levis . . . [but] Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only real thing about a writer is what he’s written, and not his life.”

Or as Kerouac himself said, in that Paris Review interview: “It’s our work that counts, if anything at all.”

David Ulin