I have these videos in my "Watch Later" list on YouTube.
What follows is what I listened to and found helpful.
Note From Anna Dahland (Substack)
Typewriter interview with Laura Lippman (Austin Kleon)
WRITING MOTIVATION - Do you really want to be a writer?:
David McCullough Reflects on a Life of Writing and Learning
You will have to hang with this one, until McCullough explains what motivates him.WRITING MOTIVATION: WHY WE WRITE
More hard talk, because the work is hard.THIS VIDEO WILL MOTIVATE YOU TO WRITE
Have you gotten the point yet: writing is not easy, but if you have the itch, then scratch it. Scratch it hard. That is my goal now, to get back into things and work. Last night, I revised again, a very old story. I will be laying off the politics - for all that the subject worries me.
I hope these help you, too.
sch 7/10
What Trotsky? I ran into the following quote from Unsentimental Education: Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance (Liberties),a nd it seemd a good idea adding it here:
... For the Modernists, certainly, the relationship between radical politics and radical aesthetics was obvious. More still, many revolutionaries recognized it to be urgent. In 1923, barely a year after the Russian Civil War and with the new Soviet economy in shambles, Trotsky wrote Literature & Revolution in an attempt to address this very matter. Economic problems, Trotsky makes clear in his introduction, are “the problem above all problems” but stresses that a new society cannot understand itself, let alone survive, without art: “In this sense, the development of art is the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch.”
Now, isn't that motivational?
(BTW, Peter Weiss’s trilogy of novels, The Aesthetics of Resistance, reviewed in the above link was the subject of another review that I noted in my Doing What I Can: Naps, Resistance, Rejecting Psychotic Ape, Books, Euripides. Which I think I will need to read this book - if I still have time in this life:
Engagement with art and literature is a way of turning towards the world, towards reality, even in a state of captivity or desolation. “But this path” as the narrator says — that is, the path to art — “only remains open so long as there is a willingness to address the outside world… The border between closing oneself off and opening oneself up, which bears the promise of a cure, is always present in art…” We know that aesthetic experience and expression can survive in even the most hostile and dehumanizing conditions. There was literature in the gulag, there was painting in Auschwitz, there was poetry in the trenches. “Imagination lived so long as human beings who resisted lived,” as the narrator says. “However, the adversary aimed not only at material devastation but also at the snuffing-out of all ethical foundations.” And therein lies the essence of the aesthetics of resistance — rather than simple resistance: there is the tacit recognition that any triumph over fascism is ultimately incomplete if it doesn’t recover the fundamental moral supports of human existence, without which not even the past is safe. Weiss’ novel shows that not only can one not live in such times without art, but that aesthetic education is necessary for survival, especially when the brutality and misery of political life threatens its existence, when the space for aesthetic contemplation shrinks, or seems secondary to more immediate concerns. Even though it is a chronicle of defeat, demoralization, murder and calamity, The Aesthetics of Resistance, as an act of remembrance, as an engagement with the past, with art and literature and the things that exist under the umbrella of eternity, nevertheless opens up an inspired space for thinking about the future of humanity. Memory, after all, is the Mother of the Muses.
sch 7/12