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Working conditions in my house, originally uploaded by 160507.

by Walter Benjamin

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea — but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

A memo posted inside the Serendra residential complex at Bonifacio on the day of the Eraserheads concert started: “Please be informed that the infamous band Eraserheads…”

What, you didn’t think we riffraff had moles in your establishment?

I passed this on to Serendra’s corporate overlord Jaime Augusto Zobel, who said, “They meant to say ‘the very “in” and famous band.” He added that the first rock concert he ever attended was in London in his teens, headlined by Mott the Hoople (All the Young Dudes) supported by Queen.

Because their boss has a sense of humor and actually set foot in a 70s glam rock concert, we will regard the lackeys’ apparent snobbery as a simple case of bad grammar. For now. Don’t be like that.

While we’re on the subject of language, there was a large crowd at the mall last Saturday, waiting for a visiting band called Boys Like Girls. Just curious: is “like” a verb, as in “Boys like girls”, or a preposition, as in “Boys (who are) like girls”. Which reminds me of that Blur lyric, “Girls who are boys who like boys to be girls who do boys like they’re girls who do girls like they’re boys.” I was pondering this when I passed in front of the menswear store Celio, which was touting its fall collection. (Noel and Ricky chorus in my head: “Like we had seasons.”) The window display contained this admonition: “Fall for men!”

Federer fans, repeat after me: My happiness does not depend on Roger winning grand slams. My happiness does not depend on Roger winning grand slams. My happiness does not depend on Roger winning grand slams. 

That said, Roger Federer just beat Novak Djokovic at their US Open semifinal, 6-3, 5-7, 7-5, 6-2. The Fed was brilliant in the first set, shaky in the second, and looked set to lose the third when he broke Djoko’s serve, and suddenly The Mighty Federer reappeared. He started flicking those casual backhands that no one can return, and invented this amazing overhead lob.

Djokovic played well, excellent defence, and (unless I missed it) did not summon the trainer for any of the 16 injuries Andy Roddick joked about that made him pikon. Not a good idea to complain about injuries when your opponent has been playing all year with mononucleosis. Also not a good idea to be pikon when you do funny impressions of other players. But he’s learning.

Holy Murray, Andy walloped Rafael Nadal 6-2. 7-6, 4-6, 6-4 over two days. I thought that when play resumed after the rain delay Nadal would recover, but the Scot never let up. The Federer v Murray US Open final airs very early Tuesday morning Manila time. Meanwhile, Serena Williams won her US Open final against Jelena Jankovic and retakes the world number one ranking. Post-Henin, we have yet to see if any of the women are in the Williams sisters’ league.

From the Anchorage (Alaska) Daily News:  Palin pressured Wasilla librarian

“WASILLA — Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so.

“According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn’t fully support her and had to go. Emmons had been city librarian for seven years and was well liked. After a wave of public support for her, Palin relented and let Emmons keep her job.”

Meanwhile, pundits such as Lindsay Lohan have decried the media circus over the pregnancy of Palin’s teenage daughter Bristol. Leave her alone, they say. That would be the charitable thing to do, but this is an election season and Palin is the VP candidate of the Republican Party that polices Family Values. If you talk the talk, and you walk another way, that’s Hypocrisy, and that makes you fair game for the raptors of the media. 

A reader wondered whether Sarah Palin was related to Monty Python’s Michael Palin, adding that Michael is the more qualified one (except for his being a British comedian and writer). I’m sure that Michael Palin (Everyone: “I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay…”), who has circled the globe many times to do his documentaries, would be far better informed on foreign relations. Fox News quipped—or maybe they meant it seriously, I can never tell when they’re joking—that Sarah Palin knows international relations because she is up there in Alaska right next door to Russia. Jon Stewart added that Alaska is also next to the North Pole so obviously she must also be friends with Santa. (We love you, Jon, and even more so in an election year.) In a demented world, the comics are the vanguard of sanity.  

In 2006, long after I’d moved out of the Eraserhead building, I was hanging out with two friends and we got to talking about places we had lived in. That’s when I discovered that we had all lived in the Eraserhead building, but at different times. Not only that, but we had occupied adjacent studio units: 914, 915, and 916. We had been neighbors, in a time-warp sort of way.

Cookie Monster lived in Apartment 916 at the turn of this century. He was working on a project at a nearby hotel, and after a particularly busy day, he asked his assistant to bring his bag back to the apartment. “Here’s the key,” he said, “It’s unit 916. Just leave the bag on the table, then come back here.”

The assistant went off with the bag and returned a half-hour later with the key. “Apartment 901, just like you said. The door right beside the elevator.” “I said 916! 916!” Cookie Monster cried. “But the key opened 901,” his assistant pointed out. So Cookie Monster hurried home, stood at Apt 901 and rang the bell. There was nobody there: it was an office and everyone had gone home. He put the key to 916 in the lock of 901, and true enough, it opened the door. He dashed in, retrieved his bag, and ran out, locking the door behind him. The last thing he needed was to be accused of stealing his own bag. Then it occurred to him: If the key to 916 also worked for 901, did it mean that it would work for all the other apartments on this floor? What about the apartments on other floors? What if all the locks on all the doors of all the apartments in the building were identical? That would make every tenant’s key a master key, and one could enter any apartment at will. He could pick any apartment, walk in, rearrange all the furniture and leave. He could systematically drive all the other tenants bonkers by pretending that a poltergeist or a pack of gremlins had been messing with their possessions. Once he had ascertained the daily schedules of the other tenants, he could even “live” in their apartments while they were away, and invent new identities to correspond with each different residence. . .

This was too much power for one person. The next day, Cookie Monster called the building administration and reported what he had found. He cannot remember if they changed the locks, but he never tried opening other apartment doors again. As for the building, it has been torn down, so this precious information is no longer of any use. Except for a story I’m writing.

The Vortex in Emotional Weather Report, yesterday in the Star.

“The Assassin Cult, a name that may be derived from the Arabic “hashashin,” meaning hashish user, is surrounded in mystery and legend. This is in part because they were secretive, but also because the historical record we have of their activities is written from many different and conflicting perspectives. One of the best known of these, and probably least accurate, is that of Marco Polo. He is supposed to have visited Alamut in 1273, seventeen years after it was destroyed by the Mongols. The Mongols, under Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis, had proceeded from Alamut to sack Baghdad in 1258 and Damascus in 1260.”

Iran’s Castle of the Assassins in the National Geographic. I first heard of the hashashin in Terry Jones’ series The Crusades.