Kaustab Choudhury > Recent Status Updates

Day 77: David Lynch. "For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee—with lots of sugar. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas!" Lynch’s other means of getting ideas is through Transcendental Meditation: “I have never missed a meditation in thirty three years.”

Day 76: Woody Allen. "I’ve found over the years that any momentary change stimulates a fresh burst of mental energy. So if I’m in this room and then I go into the other room, it helps me. If I go outside to the street, it’s a huge help. If I go up and take a shower it’s a big help. So I sometimes take extra showers... It breaks up everything and relaxes me."

Day 75: Umberto Eco. He once told an interviewer: “This morning you rang, but then you had to wait for the elevator, and several seconds elapsed before you showed up at the door. During those seconds, waiting for you, I was thinking of this new piece I’m writing. I can work in the water closet, in the train. While swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the bathtub, but there too.”

Day 74: Martin Amis. Unlike his father, Martin Amis does not approach his writing with a feeling of dread: “I seldom have that kind of squeamishness”.

Day 73: Kingsley Amis. "Do you have a daily routine?"

"Yes. I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter."

Day 72: Wallace Stevens. “I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me. It introduces discipline and regularity into one’s life."

Day 71: WB Yeats. “I am a very slow writer. I have never done more than five or six good lines in a day.” So, a lyric poem of eighty or more lines took Yeats about three months of hard labor. Fortunately, Yeats was not so careful about his other writing, like the literary criticism he did to earn extra money. “One has to give something of one’s self to the devil that one may live,” he said. “I give my criticism.”

Day 70: Louis Armstrong. “It’s been hard goddam work, man. Feel like I spent 20,000 years on planes and railroads, like I blowed my chops off.… I never tried to prove nothing, just always wanted to give a good show. My life has been my music, it’s always come first, but the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public.”

Day 69: John Cheever. “I must convince myself that writing is not, for a man of my disposition, a self-destructive vocation,” he wrote in his journal in 1968. “I hope and think it is not, but I am not genuinely sure.”

Day 68: Sylvia Plath. She wrote to her mother in October 1962, four months before she would take her own life, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” The darkness and ache in her poetry is felt. It functions like a dagger through one's heart, especially the self-reports of her mood from the times just before she took her life.

Day 67: Joseph Cornell. The solitary artist's life.

Day 66: Graham Greene. At one point he was writing 2000+ words every morning, working on two books at a time. But by the time he reached his sixties, he was no longer as ambitious about his daily writing goals. In 1968, an interviewer asked if he was “a nine-to-five man.” “No,” Greene replied. “Good heaven, I would say I was a nine-to-a-quarter-past-ten man.” He became content with just 200 words each morning.

Day 65: Somerset Maugham. “When you’re writing, when you’re creating a character, it’s with you constantly, you’re preoccupied with it, it’s alive,” he said, adding that when you “cut that out of your life, it’s a rather lonely life.”

Day 64: Agatha Christie. Even after she had written ten books, Christie didn’t really consider herself a “bona fide author.” When filling out forms that asked for her occupation, it never occurred to her to put down anything other than “married woman.” “I never had a definite place which was my room or where I retired specially to write.”

Day 63: Henry Green. Green led a double life. He was born and lived his working life as an aristocrat, under the covers he wrote with a different name, and with originality.

Day 62: Dmitry Shostakovich. "I always found it amazing that he never needed to try things out on the piano," his younger sister recalled. "He just sat down, wrote out whatever he heard in his head, and then played it through complete on the piano." But this was preceded by hours or days of mental composition—during which he "appeared to be a man of great inner tensions."

Day 61: TS Eliot. "I am sojourning among the termites."

Day 60: Jean-Paul Sartre. "Three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening. This is my only rule." That makes the Sartre's life sound relaxed, but misleadingly. His diet over a period of 24 hours included 2 packs of cigarettes and several stuffed with black tobacco, more than a quart of alcohol, 200 milligrams of amphetamines, 15 grams of aspirin, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee, tea and rich meals.

Day 59: Pablo Picasso. Who hasn't heard of Picasso? But who has heard of the fact that, in the company of people, he would oscillate between gregarious and anti-social? However, painting never bored or tired him. Even after three or four hours standing in front of a canvas, he did not feel the slightest fatigue. “That’s why painters live so long,” he said. “While I work I leave my body outside the door."

Day 58: Erik Satie. The scholar Roger Shattuck once proposed that Satie’s unique sense of musical beat, and his appreciation of “the possibility of variation within repetition,” could be traced to this “endless walking back and forth across the same landscape day after day.” He did so wearing the same colour and style of velvet suits with matching hats, every day. Regularity and rhythm do seem to have a link.

Day 57: Igor Stravinsky. An eccentric composer. He required solitude for the task, and always closed the windows of his studio before he began: “I have never been able to compose unless sure that no one could hear me.” If he felt blocked, the composer might execute a brief headstand, which, he said, “rests the head and clears the brain.”

Day 56: Samuel Beckett. His best works were conceived in a period of intense creative activity that Beckett would later refer to as "the siege in the room", which began with an epiphany at the end of the pier one winter. "It was spent largely in his room, isolated from the world, coming face to face with his own demons, attempting to explore the workings of his mind."

Day 55: Marcel Proust. Yet another author whose works I haven't yet had the gall to pick up. "It almost seems as though a writer’s works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his heart."

Day 54: James Joyce. An author whose works I haven't yet had the courage to pick up. "A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism" is how the Irish novelist once described himself.

Day 53: Franz Kafka. One of the biggest names in literature, his life was not as illustrious as his achievements. He often had to work overtime, lived in a cramped apartment with family, and could only write at night. “Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.”

Day 52: Henry James. A man of habits, both short-term and long-term. For instance, he habitually started working on a new book the instant he was finished with the previous one.

Day 51: William James. James argued that we must make our nervous system our ally instead of enemy. This is to be done by forming "habits of order". “Recollect,” he noted, 'that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action—and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser—never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number."

Day 50: Immanuel Kant. One of the most important philosophers. Kant adopted what he called "a certain uniformity in the way of living and in
the matters about which I employ my mind". At the core of one’s character, he thought, were maxims: a handful of essential rules for living that, once formulated, should be followed for the rest of one’s life. But alas, we do not have a written list of Kant’s personal maxims.

Day 49: James Boswell. A moody biographer. On a good day, his "affairs are conducted with the greatest regularity and exactness". On a bad day, he woke in a foul mood, "dreary as a dromedary", convinced that "everything is insipid or everything is dark". There was little he could do to control these moods. He concludes: “Life has much uneasiness; that is certain. Always remember that, and it will never surprise you.”

Day 48: Samuel Johnson. Apparently, Johnson was a night dweller. He would be out until 2AM, and only thereafter would he start working (while the rest of London slept). "My reigning sin, to which perhaps many others are appendant, is waste of time, and general sluggishness" Yet, he added, he was temperamentally ill-equipped for the battle: "I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together."