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Books on writing: I think books on writing are mostly a waste of time. I make exceptions for Mr McKee and Ms Dillard, however.
Story, by Robert McKee.
The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard: "A well-known writer got collared by a university student, who asked, 'Do you think I could be a writer?' 'Well,' the writer said, 'I don't know... do you like sentences?' The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I liked the smell of paint.' "
"It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away. A painting covers its tracks. Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left. The latest version of a literary work begins somewhere in the work's middle, and hardens towards the end."
Fiction:
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Big Sleep / Farewell, My Lovely / The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler. The two pages on blondes from The Long Goodbye are peerless.
A Hero of Our Time, by Lermontov
Master & Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino
Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino
The Castle of Crossed Destinies, by Italo Calvino. An experiment in automatic storytelling, led by the random layout of tarot cards: "'You must ascend to Heaven, Astolpho' (the angelic Arcanum of The Last Judgement indicated a superhuman ascension) 'up to the pale fields of the Moon, where an endless storeroom preserves in phials placed in rows' (as in the Cups card) 'the stories that men do not live, the thoughts that knock once at the threshold of awareness and vanish forever, the particles of the possible discarded in the game of combinations, the solutions that could be reached but are never reached...'"
"'Where do you think you are going, silly girl? No cities, no empire
exists any longer! Roads no longer lead from anywhere to anywhere
else! Look!' The yellow and stunted grass and the sand of the desert
cover the asphalt and the sidewalks of the cuity, jackals howl on the
dunes, in the palaces abandoned beneath The Moon the
windows stand open like hollow eye sockets, rats and scorpions spread
from basements and cellars. And yet the city is not dead: the
machines, the engines, the turbines continue to hum and vibrate, every
Wheel's cogs are caught in the cogs of other wheels,
trains run on tracks and signals on wires; and no human is there any
longer to send or receive, to charge or discharge. The machines, which
have long known they could do without men, have finally driven them
out; and after a long exile, the wild animals have come back to occupy
the territory wrested from the forest: foxes and martens wave their
soft tails over the control panels starred with nanometers and levers
and gauges and diagrams; badgers and dormice luxuriate on batteries
and magnetos. Man was necessary, now he is useless. For the world to
receive information from the world and enjoy it, now computers and
butterflies suffice."
A couple of ripping yarns: The Complete Richard Hannay by John Buchan and the Raffles The Gentleman Thief stories by E.W. Hornung.
Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant: "He was one of those many-faced politicians without any strong beliefs, with no great resources, no backbone and no real knowledge of anything, a country lawyer with provincial good looks, craftily walking the tight-rope between any extremist parties, a kind of republican Jesuit, a sort of dubious liberal mushroom such as flourish in their hundreds on the popular dunghill of universal suffrage."
"Du Roy halted in his tracks, his pulse quickening. 'Now that's real luxury, he said to himself. 'That's the sort of house to live in. Others have managed it, so why shouldn't I?' He started imagining how to set about it, failed to think of any way immediately, and was vexed at being so powerless."
Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Poems & Sketches and One Man's Meat, by EB White: "It is my belief that no writer can improve his work until he discards the dulcet notion that the reader is feebleminded, for writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar... a writer who questions the capacity of the person at the other end of the line is not a writer at all, merely a schemer. The movies long ago decided that a wider communication should be achieved by a deliberate descent to a lower level, and they walked proudly down until they reached the cellar. Now they are groping for the light switch, hoping to find the way out."
Plays:
Naked Masks: Five Plays, by Luigi Pirandello
Caligula, by Albert Camus (but the best translation is the one David Grieg did for the Donmar Warehouse in 2003)
Faust Part One, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Walter Kauffman, translator.
Pretty much anything by Edward Albee.
Non-Fiction:
Chamfort, Reflections on Life, Love and Society: "Someone asked a bishop to lend him his house in the country, which he never went to himself. The bishop refused, explaining: "Don’t you know that we must always have a place where we never go, but where we think we’d be happy if we did?"
Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy, by Dave Hickey: "Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us - simpatico dudes that we are - while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. [...] Rock and roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us - as damaged and anti-social as we are - might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune, and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited."
"[Chet Baker Sings] spoke to me then of a certain kind of elegaic cool; it dispensed with all pretension to musical heroism without repudiating the idea of heroism itself; it muffled the sentiment of the sung lyrics without denying the possibility that somewhere, at some time, for someone, such sentiments might have had a certain validity. Today, having written some songs myself, I see that Baker knew what all songwriters know, what singers like Judy Garland and Patsy Cline and Karen Carpenter knew most profoundly, that all songs are sad songs, borne as they are on the insubstantial substance of our fleeting breath."
"I've always believed in Peter Schjeldahl's advice on how to become an artist: 'You move to a city. You hang out in bars. You form a gang, turn it into a scene, and turn that into a movement.' "
Prince of Europe by Philip Mansel. The biography of the Prince de Ligne, a late 18th century nobleman and bon vivant. The Prince writes to Voltaire about the death of Louis XV: "Versailles provided the most bizarre magic lantern ever seen here... How can the land of graces be that of horrors? It was raining bishops and enemas. People were rushing to the death of the King as to the death of a stag... Poor Mme du Barry... She was almost the only person who was not acting. She is the only Minister who can perhaps flatter herself that she is leaving her post without having done any harm."
Hello, He Lied, by Lynda Obst. A charming, honest, brutal, intensely useful guide to Hollywood, written by one of the town's foremost producers. They should hand out copies of this at LAX to starry-eyed wannabe screenwriters as they stumble off their planes from Palookaville.
Between Silk & Cyanide, by Leo Marks. Gripping account of codemaking (and breaking) at SOE during the Second World War.
The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene. String physics is fascinating, and Greene writes at just the right level of complexity.
The Golden Bough, by James Frazer.
The Hero With A Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell. On modern tragedy: "...the magnitude of an art of tragedy more potent (for us) than the Greek finds realisation: the realistic, intimate and variously interesting tragedy of democracy, where the god is beheld crucified in the catastrophes not of the great houses only but of every common home, every scourged and lacerated face. And there is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed from the womb only to fail."
On the symbolism of images of Shiva: "Briefly: the extended right hand holds the drum, the beat of which is the beat of time, time being the first principle of creation; the extended left holds the flame, which is the flame of the destruction of the created world; the second right hand is held in the gesture of 'fear not,' while the second left, pointing to the lifted left foot, is held in a position symbolising 'elephant' (the elephant is the 'breaker of the way through the jungle of the world', i.e. the divine guide); the right foot is planted on the back of the dwarf, the demon 'Non-Knowing,' which signifies the passage of souls from God into matter, but the left is lifted, showing the release of the soul; the left is the foot to which the 'elephant-hand' is pointing and supplies the reason for the assurance, 'Fear not.' The God's head is balanced, serene and still, in the midst of the dynamism of creation and destruction which is symbolised by the rocking arms and the rhythm of the slowly stamping right heel. This means that at the centre all is still. Shiva's right earring is a man's; his left, a woman's; for God includes and is beyond the pairs of opposites. Shiva's facial expression is neither sorrowful nor joyous, but is the visage of the Unmoved Mover, beyond, yet present within, the world's bliss and pain...
"The dance posture of the God may be visualised as the symbolic syllable AUM, which is the verbal equivalent of the four states of consciousness and their fields of experience. (A: waking consciousness; U: dream consciousness; M: dreamless sleep; the silence around the sacred syllable is the Unmanifest Transcendent). The God is thus within the worshiper as well as without.
"Such a figure illustrates the function and value of a graven image, and shows why long sermons are unnecessary among idol-worshippers. The devotee is permitted to soak in the meaning of the divine symbol in deep silence and in his own good time... in this way, the whole of life is made into a support for meditation. One lives in the midst of a silent sermon all the time."
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