.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

“Indeed, after witnessing the bold new kind of editorial work Perkins was undertaking with Wolfe, Mrs. Boyd worked up the courage to ask Max a question that had long intrigued her. ‘Why don’t you write yourself?’ she inquired in a letter. ‘I have a feeling you could write so much better than most of the people who do write.’ Perkins delivered his response when they next met. She recalled, ‘Max just stared at me for a long time and said, ‘Because I’m an editor.’” (Max Perkins, Editor of Genius. Berg.)

seashores of old mexico merle haggard

Hippocrates 39. English. “Σσπασμοὶ γίνονται, ἢ ὑπὸ πληρώσιος, ἢ κενώσιος: οὕτω δὲ καὶ λυγμός.”

λυγμός is “hiccups,” I will forget. Spasms arise either through fullness or emptiness; so too with hiccups. Something like that. “Through repletion or depletion” says the authorized translation, which also has “convulsions” for “spasms.”

Speaking of Σσπασμοὶ — not sure what that extra sigma is doing there; I cut and pasted from Perseus — I was diagnosed with trismus today; in this case, a partial and probably temporary lockjaw that was the unintended consequence of a dental procedure. Hurts to eat and brush.

I guess a rascal is someone who does mischief, as opposed to one who does actual crimes, or otherwise behaves maliciously. Wiktionary says that mischief is: “Conduct that playfully causes petty annoyance.”

Updating my “writers’ habits of spending” (which I wonder, too, why I didn’t call it “Writers’ Spending Habits”)… Fitzgerald looks to be another of these writers driven to spend well beyond their means, though he could pullback sometimes and was also a good earner, often at the expense of his art. Hemingway (so much more financially successful than Fitzgerald or Faulkner — For Whom The Bell Tolls was a very big seller) was a lot more prudent, complained about his taxes and had support from his wives too. (Hadley received money from a trust fund and the Pfeiffers were rich.)

Question: why do I care about this? I guess it’s because I think of having money as being like having a moat between writing and everything that would keep you from it. Anyone with a lot of money can just pull up the drawbridge and write. But the great writers don’t appear to have seen it that way, is my perception. Like Dostoyevsky playing roulette, there is a real do or die mentality at work.

“… the party was like a big fire laid out on the hill, generating heat and light in the falling darkness, growing molten and indistinct at its core.” (Rachel Cusk, In the Fold.)