craft
A craft is a kingdom!
1001 Yiddish Proverbs, by Fred Kogos (Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books, 1970), 19.
Slowly now, nice neat letters:
the point is to do things well,
not just to do them.
Antonio Machado: Selected Poems, trans. by Alan S. Trueblood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 183.
There is difficulty involved in going from the basic sentence that’s headed in the right direction to making a fine sentence. But it’s a joyous task. It’s hard, but it’s joyous. Being raised rural, I think work is its own satisfaction. It’s not seen as onerous, or a dreadful fate. It’s like building a mill or a bridge or sewing a fine garment or chopping wood—there’s a pleasure in constructing something that really works.
“The Art of Fiction No. 199,” interviewed by Christopher Cox, in Issue 188 of The Paris Review, 2009.
Cultures that may seem as durable as stone can break like glass, leaving all the things that held them together unattended. I believe that the craftsman, the artist, the cook, and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace; they lull the world to calm.
“Remembering Anthony Shadid,” by Philip Bennett, Frontline website, February 17, 2012.
I would like to make solid wood clocks if the opportunity came up. I like glue, and I like to cut with saws.
“Bob Dylan in Conversation with John Elderfield,” Spring 2011.
Making something to hold out of a very hard material that feels so soft is a slow and rather good tactile pun.
The Hare with Amber Eyes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), [prologue] 13.
I have made many, many thousands of pots. I am very bad at names, I mumble and fudge, but I am good on pots. I can remember the weight and the balance of a pot, and how its surface works with its volume. I can read how an edge creates tension or loses it. I can feel if it has been made at speed or with diligence. If it has warmth.
The Hare with Amber Eyes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), [prologue] 16.
Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry…Both are very hard work. Writing something is almost as hard as making a table. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work are involved.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. II (New York: Picador, 2007), 190.
When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around, and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.
Written in a letter to Philip Roth, letting him know his stories are the “real thing,” dated December 12, 1969, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 290.
The most interesting thing about wood for me is that it has a grain, as people do. That is, each piece of wood has a personality and, as we know from our relationships with people—trying to work with them, live with them—personality could almost be defined by the way resistance (to what I want) is expressed in it. In wood the recalcitrance of the grain, little whorls and eddies like cowlicks that won’t be combed down, the fixed expressions of its accustomed shape, give each piece of wood its own face. Resistance is only resistance, however, in reaction to a force brought to bear on it—there would be no resistance if I weren’t there chopping away with chisel and mallet. Everyone is easy to get along with if you let him have his own way, but there is no relationship without difficulties. In like manner the wood resists me, it resists my plans for it, and it does so in a way that is particular to it, so that the relationship is always personal.
Carla Needleman, The Work of Craft (London: Arkana, 1986), 87.