professionals

Nathaniel Hawthorne[1804-1864]

"In fact, the more you look, the more reasons writers give for being writers. Many writers say that they become writers because they simply could not do anything else. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: 'I don't want to be a doctor, and live by men's diseases; nor a minister to live by their sins; nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So I don't see there's anything left for me but to be an author.' T.S. Eliot, who had been a boxer in college, noted: 'I was too slow a mover. It was much easier to be a poet.' And George Bernard Shaw pointed out a practical advantage of the writing life that still holds true: 'My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.'"

- Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease, pg. 214

smart

"If you don't find it in the index, look very carefully through the entire catalog."
- 1897 Sears Roebuck & Co. Catalogue. Order a reprint here.

being inspired by the muse

Harmony in Red [La desserte], Spring 1908

"Here is the painter Henri Matisse, describing what happened when, after having to take a leave of absence from his occupation in the legal profession, he took up painting as a hobby: 'I had become possessed by painting and could not abstain. When I started to paint, felt transported to a kind of paradise ... Something drove me, I do not know what, a force, something alien to my normal life as a man.' Mozart reportedly wrote down symphonies as quickly as if he were listening to them and transcribing. Nor is the idea of the muse especially Western. The Indian mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan said that his equations were whispered to him by the Goddess Namagiri."

- Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease, p.237

An earlier reference to Matisse here.

Man's Man

"As a writer, I'm a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don't give into their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can."

- Ernest Hemingway

Of the seven U.S. Nobel laureates in literature, five have been diagnosed as alcoholics.

An earlier reference to Hemingway here.

declarative memory

The extensively studied amnestic patient H.M.

has lost his declarative memory after sustaining damage to both temporal lobes. After hearing of his father's death for the hundredth time, he is piteously distressed as he was the first time. But he can still learn habits and nondeclarative motor skills, such as riding a bicycle.

- Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease, p.100

Image source here.

routine

W. Somerset Maugham [1874-1965], 1942

[His] day began at 8 A.M. with breakfast on a tray and the morning papers. He shaved in his bath, consulted with his Italian cook about the day's menus and then repaired to his den, where he wrote with a special fountain pen until precisely 12:45 P.M. "My brain is dead after 1 o'clock," Maugham decreed. The rest of the day unfolded with a one-martini lunch, a nap, golf or tennis, the cocktail hour and then a formal black-tie dinner, always with champagne. This rarely varied routine produced 74 novels, plays, collections of essays and short stories in 65 years at his writing desk.

- Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease, p.99

madness-mad

"The eighteenth century saw a fad among the rich of hiring someone to personify melancholy in their estate parks. The person was usually instructed to dress like a hermit, to refrain from cutting his hair or nails, and to live in a picturesque grotto provided by the employer. When hermits were scarce, statuary or clockwork figures were used instead."
- Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease, p.65

Image source here.