Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. – Virginia Woolf

I’m reading The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf and enjoying it a good bit but I’ll leave the expounding to clever types like Flynn.

I find, more and more these days, that I’m one of Woolf’s commoners. On Saturday I read Silence of the Lambs. It left no impression on me whatsoever. Demme’s interpretation swallowed it whole.

We drove eight hours and listened to Footloose and blew bubbles. We climbed a mountain. Twice. Traveled through fog. Sucked strawberry and banana through a straw. We played with rubber foots – FOOTS – fingers and snakes. We ate these apple things that looked like cakes.

“I trained as an actor in New York, and one discipline I studied was the Stanislavski technique, the basis of which is to live truthfully in the imaginary circumstances. That is what I try to do when I write. I set up an imaginary world, and try to let the characters live truthfully in that world.” DeLauné Michel

The Euro and I talk a lot about the interplay between acting and writing. It was the Chekhov-Stanislavski connection that finally made him realize what I was trying to do as a writer wasn’t so very different from what he was trying to do as an actor. And that, maybe, I wasn’t as nonplussed by his art as he imagined me to be.

His emotional engineering and mechanics of expression are much more concrete, much more tangible than mine. He uses his body, his face, his physical voice. Engages the real eye and not just the mind’s eye. He’s all about immediate interactions and reactions and sussing out wants and needs and objectives. In this last regard he’s become freakishly Freudian.

I don’t have his talent. His stage presence, or his life presence. And when it comes to certain communications, I don’t do physical or verbal very well. Lines drawn on paper and algorithmic keystrokes that turn 1s and 0s into meaning…those are my choice emotional mediums. I accomplish more with writing than I ever do with speaking. With writing, I can make you understand. When I speak I often lose all train of thought and any eloquence I might possess. I may as well beat both our heads against a brick wall. It would be more satisfying and we could get on with things quicker.

So, we talk a lot about acting and writing these days. The truths that join them both. And agree even through our disagreeance that he is perfectly suited for one and I the other. We also eat a lot of chocolate.

Major Amberson had “made a fortune” in 1873, when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then.

“The artist’s only responsibility is his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one…If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.”

– William Faulkner

I avoided Twilight phenomena because, to be frank, I didn’t want anything to pollute my image of a shirtless, ageless David Boreanaz. Still, I’ve always had a thing for British Boys, and Robert Pattinson has a superbly fascinating face. So, on Sunday I stole into a screening of Eclipse.

Today I read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. I’ve had this book laying on my bedside table for almost a year, and only picked it up because of the Pattinson connection. I’m sorry I’ve left it so long because this lady can write the socks off some of the authors I’ve been reading lately.

It’s not very often that I anticipate the movie over the book – but with a cast that includes Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson (He looks like he just stepped out of the Salford Lads Club circa The Smiths – that’s enough for me to think he’s hot) and the formidable Christoph Waltz (If there’s a better August out there, I’ve not seen him), Director Francis Lawrence is gonna be hard pressed not to make the adaptation better than the book itself.

Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working place
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The pleasant drives through a land of farms,
Are good to a newcomer.

–Auden

On Thursday, 1 July 2010, Martin Amis will be discussing literature and violence at The Martin Harris Centre with guests Blake Morrison and John Gray. They’ll be mulling over…

The psychological and cultural roots of violent acts, and the ways in which writers from Shakespeare to JG Ballard depict and respond to it.

I’ve always read a great deal by and about Professor Amis but I never seem to find time to sit down and write about him properly. Ce la vie. I’m sure this discussion, like all the others, will make for good copy. If you’d like to attend, tickets are £7 from the venue – the University of Manchester’s Martin Harris Centre (0161 275 8951 / boxoffice@manchester.ac.uk) located on Bridgeford Street just off Oxford Road.

Flynn and I are going on a mini-break next month. The last time we were together we were both living in the North of England. I was working for the Crown Prosecution Service and she was studying literary criticism and pulling pints in the Northern Quarter. I have some vague recollection of looking at bones and mummies…anthropological brain candy.

- Journal, September 2009

“One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.” – Carl Sandburg

Images, compliments Flynn and me, were all taken at Carl Sandburg’s home, Connemara. There’s something very comforting about Connemara. Like it’s waiting to be someone’s Walden Pond. Like it was.

When Sandburg died, his wife, Paula, just up and left. She took nothing with her. The house remained as it always was, donated to the National Park Service.

When I was about twelve I decided there was nothing to it but I had to learn Russian. (I often took on grand ideas during my summer holidays.)

Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky. If these wonderful writers could be transliterated so beautifully into English, imagine how wonderful they must be in their own language.

I still haven’t done it. Learned to read Russian. Though I still think I should. What I’m doing now, right this moment, is leafing through Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. Next, I plan to move on to Anna Karenina. I’ve had it laying by my bedside for some months now. I’ve only read it once. I was still in high school and imagine a lot of the subtext was well over my head.

My sister insists I get to it already. “Go read Anna,” she says, “so that we can have a proper discussion.” She really does heart the socks off old Leo and rereads what she sees as his great masterpiece whenever she has time to do it.

Me, I fancy Chekhov. (I’ve told you this before.) There’s a fair number of books out on how to imitate the man, including “How to Write Like Chekhov” which is quite good. But if you really want to learn from the master, read his correspondence.

Below, Chekhov, in a letter to D.V. Grigorovith, critiques a story called “Karelins Dream”.