Random Excellence: Jill Krementz

Photo by Jill Krementz

...And speaking of keyboards, as I also was in the "Blog Notes" post below...here's E.B. ("Andy") White, author of Charlotte's Web and prose stylist primus inter pares, at his.

I've been reading several books about writing recently, and this is the photograph that William Zinsser talks about in the opening pages of his book On Writing Well.

One of Jill Krementz's best, and I appreciate a lot of her work. She specializes in portraits of writers, many of which are among the best of their respective subjects. (She is the widow of a writer—Kurt Vonnegut). William Zinsser points out that the barrel in the foreground has to be one of the essential, elemental, and irreductible tools of writing on paper—namely, the wastebasket.

Mike

"Random Excellence," a regular feature on TOP, presents excellent photographs encountered at random.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Kent Phelan: "That's Eggemoggin Reach out the window. E.B. White summered annually in Brooklin, Maine. There, his son Joel White lived on the water all summer, in a Nathanael Herreshoff '12 1/2' sloop named 'Shadow.' Joel went on to MIT, became a naval architect, and founded the Brooklin Boat Yard, which his son Steve runs today. Brooklin is at the center of the Wooden Boat revival in the United States, due in large part to Joel White's contributions.

"That is a fabulous part of our country, and I can only imagine what a clearing, calming effect it would have on a writer. I am not a writer, but I occasionally fake my way around a tiller."

Comments

[Dave Van de Mark]

My "barrel" wasn't round but it had to be Big! Just a great photo, by the way, with B&W working really well here.

[Thomas R. Gummel]

How ironic. I'm reading E.B. White's "One Man's Meat" with Jill Krementz's above photograph on the cover.

[Ed Kirkpatrick]

I have to wonder if the frame of the image is tilted off level (at least based on the horizon) on purpose. I appreciate displaying an image off kilter for artistic reasons as I do that frequently but it always catches my eye when water levels are involved. I feel like the water is going to run off the edge.

[John Camp]

I had no money when I went to the University of Iowa the first time, but I realized early-on that I could graduate in seven semesters instead of the usual eight if I maxed out the allowable semester hours each semester -- if I took nineteen instead of the usual sixteen as a full load. But it wasn't easy to figure out how to hit nineteen right on, until I discovered the Iowa Writers Workshop. You could get one to six credits from the workshop, any way you wanted to do it, for a maximum of six credit hours. If I couldn't get exactly nineteen hours in a semester, I would sign up for one or two credit hours (however many I needed) from the workshop, and do the same in the other semesters. If I did hit nineteen right on, I wouldn't sign up for the workshop at all. In the court of doing that, I had Kurt Vonnegut as an instructor twice. He wasn't very good; it was like trying to learn writing from a talk show. He'd pace up and down, laughing and joking with his favorites, wearing an apricot-colored mohair sweater. The most important influence he had was actually writing: you could hear him in his quonset hut, banging away on a typewriter, seemingly endlessly. This was fifty years ago, and I remember that to this day: a really powerful influence. And such a simple point: you write books by writing. Or as Dorothy Parker put it, "The art of writing is applying the ass to the seat."

[Adam Richardson]

Speaking of keyboards and photography, you might enjoy my photography project about "vintage" (mostly mid-century/70's) products including classic typewriters from Olivetti: www.massmadesoul.com

[Jim Henry]

@Ed Kirkpatick: me, too.

[Lynn]

"William Zinsser points out that the barrel in the foreground has to be one of the essential, elemental, and irreductible tools of writing on paper—namely, the wastebasket."

Mike, this gives me an idea - make a keyboard just for writers, with a super-size DELETE key complete with large bold red wastebasket graphic!

[Lynn]

...and on a similar theme, a dedicated "submit to publisher" key programmed to display a screen message "Proofread ONE MORE TIME" on the first press, "are you sure?" on the second press, and "too late now" on the third and final press.

[John Krill]

One of my favorite photo books is: On Reading by Andre Kertesz. It's what we all do once the writer is done.

[Peter Croft]

I can't look at this with the tilted horizon. It just makes me want to look away, like a person's deformity. As a friend said, we have "built in spirit levels". Is it necessary to the picture?

[Brian Taylor]

Another wonderful photographer who started off by specialising in portraits of writers was Fay Godwin, though in her case she's, deservedly I think, better known for her politically engageed work on land/scape.

[Chris]

...and don't forget Joel's 'Unit of Water, Unit of Time'. As a Maine sailor, one of the best books I've read.

[Tim Auger]

Not sure this would have looked any more arresting ...
https://timauger.smugmug.com/organize/Miscellaneous-bits-and-pieces/i-7hVF29G

[Rob Campbell]

"The most important influence he had was actually writing: you could hear him in his quonset hut, banging away on a typewriter, seemingly endlessly. This was fifty years ago, and I remember that to this day: a really powerful influence. And such a simple point: you write books by writing. Or as Dorothy Parker put it, "The art of writing is applying the ass to the seat."

Posted by: John Camp

......................

As John says, you write books by writing. You could also say: it's the same with being a photographer; just take the darn pictures!

Rob