Barbara Adde > Recent Status Updates

Zangwill: “America is the land of refuge, but it is also the ‘melting pot.’ No people in history has ever been able to live unmelted in the bosom of a bigger people, except when safeguarded by a separate religion. And the religion of American Jewry is not strong and separate enough to save the American Jews from absorption. Even the East Side of New York speaks Yiddish with a twang.”

“I infer from Quixano’s rhapsodies that the Jew will no longer be a Jew. I protest against his pronouncement of our doom.”

Bernard Richards, American Hebrew
“We shall be melted whether we like it or not. All our ancient traits and characteristics, our ‘hankering for the past’ and even our religious beliefs shall vanish in the great process of the crucible. There is no use arguing about it. What spiritual identity will the Jew have when he emerges out of the ‘melting pot’?”

Bill Nye, 10 May 1891
If you feel yourself getting conventional and pokey, and stiff and morbid, and the moss is beginning to grow on the north side of your soul, light out for Texas.

“It has transpired that the heat of Mesopotamia is terrific and the population hostile.”

“Australia is Zangwill’s new ITOland.”

“But imagine an Itoland established and Mesopotamia acting as a refuge against the evil days that may come.”

“But imagine an airplane established and Mesopotamia acting as a refuge against the evil days they may come.”

Zangwill, 1909 “We are coming into a period of history when gigantic problems occupy the world’s attention. What time has the world to trouble itself with the Jewish question? And what right have we to expect that the Jewish people will emerge from all these coming frictions any less battered than before? Who shall say what the whirligig of time has yet in store for us?”

Israel Zangwell: A race of some 12 million people has no square inch of land that it can call its own. Just as plants cannot thrive unless they have water, so people cannot thrive unless they have land.

Grover Cleveland: Every American humane sentiment has been shocked by the attack on the Jews in Russia. There is something intensely horrible about the wholesale murder of offending, defenseless men, women and children. Such things give rise to a distressing fear that even the enlightenment of the 20th century has neither destroyed nor subdued the barbarity of human nature.

“… as one character in the book says, ‘It’s never inevitable at the time.’”

“I know what Delilah really did to Samson to make him as weak as a baby. She didn’t have to cut his hair off. All she had to do was break his concentration.”

“Here’s what I think the truth is: we are all addicted to of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.” From “Man Without” ch 4

Every sentence must do 1 of 2 things - reveal character or advance the action (short stories)

Then, attend to the finer points of line editing:
Revise for clarity.
Revise for words that are more accurate, concrete and alive.
Revise sentences so their sound and structure yield the most bang for the buck you intend.
Proofread for glitches of punctuation, typos, misspellings, and so on.

“Le mot juste is the one that hits the nail on the head with sense/sound/cadence all together.”

“Interaction between a given personality and a situation of conflict that arises, provoking choice and action — consequently revealing, changing, or deepening a character — is what storytelling is all about.”

“True action combines realization - when a character is ‘impressed’ - and acting on it in a way that makes a difference to the character’s life or others.”

“The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:
ETC.
And it is in order to acknowledge the continuity of this polymer that I begin so many sentences with ‘And’ and ‘So’ and end so many paragraphs with “… and so on.”

Vonnegut’s ‘Creative Writing 101’ Rule #3:
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

“It’s not your story that matters. It’s how you tell it.”

“Any artist of any kind has to be able to stomach falling short of the mark, continually, in kinds of ways….

As the poet William Stafford often said to students: You’ve got to lower your standards! You can’t compare yourself either the most renowned writers in the history of literature, for example.”

“I keep suspecting I’m out of business and better become a rock star or buy a greenhouse or something. Right now I don’t feel particularly in business, but I m ow how to get in business - It’s a little like an Ouija board. I will try to get a clue to what my intelligence wants to talk about, and then I will try to talk about it more and more.”

“As a writer, I share a problem…with most human beings: a tendency to lose contact with my own intelligence. It’s almost as if there were a layer of fat upon the part of us that thinks and it’s the writer’s job to hack through and discover what is inside.”

“If you’re a writer or an artist of any kind, your self-expression will ring a bell with some other self. You can count on that.”