Daily Routines focuses mostly on writers and how they spend their days. I find it fascinating to know how accomplished people get through their day. Are they very different than the slackers I know?
Reading about John Updike (I'm not a huge fan) - I realized one of the things I most respect in an author or poet is if their careers span more than just sitting behind a desk and writing. For example, Williams Carlos Williams, one of my favorite poets, was a doctor all his life. I feel like his "day time" profession, infused a lot of his work, gave it meaning and perspective he others would not have, sitting at home constructing his poems out of thin air. Had he not practiced medicine, his writing would have lacked the depth and the keen observation his worked exposed him to. Imagination is important, but so is living among the mere mortals.
That's another phenomena I've observed when a some indie-director makes it big in Hollywood and then makes crappy movies. My theory is that these directors (and actors for that matter) have forgotten what it's like to have a daily routine, to not just focus on art and yes-men that surround them. Art is the bone marrow of life, living in a ivory tower makes for some very dull, uninspiring, and lifeless art. Of course drugs help and reading others for inspiration doesn't hurt, but nothing like life experience gives a great piece of art its juice.
Here's on of my favorite poems of Carlos Williams Carlos:
Complaint
They call me and I go.
It is a frozen road
past midnight, a dust
of snow caught
in the rigid wheeltracks.
The door opens.
I smile, enter and
shake off the cold.
Here is a great woman
on her side in the bed.
She is sick,
perhaps vomiting,
perhaps laboring
to give birth to
a tenth child. Joy! Joy!
Night is a room
darkened for lovers,
through the jalousies the sun
has sent one golden needle!
I pick the hair from her eyes
and watch her misery
with compassion.
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