Muriel Spark
She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.
I have decided that I will be directing an adaptation of Spark’s fantastic The Driver’s Seat for my advanced directing class - I’m very excited!
Scottish authoress Muriel Sarah Spark.
Daniel Handler says of Muriel Spark's Not To Disturb: ”Servants gather outside a locked door to make sure a murder goes smoothly. My favorite episode of Downton Abbey that sadly does not exist.”
Literary Birthday - 1 February
Happy Birthday, Muriel Spark, born 1 February 1918, died 13 April 2006
Five Quotes
If you’re going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you’re going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.
For concentration you need a cat…And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give you back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence is enough.
It is difficult for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young.
[My novel] took up the sweetest part of my mind and the rarest part of my imagination; it was like being in love and better.
The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.
Spark was a prolific, award-winning Scottish novelist. Her darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was considered her masterpiece, and was made into a stage play, a TV series, and a film. In 2008 The Times newspaper named Spark in its list of ‘the 50 greatest British writers since 1945’, at #8.
by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write
“Maybe that is all the driver’s seat provides, the illusion of control, the illusion that one can escape the inescapable: death, and the world’s raw core of fear.”
Alice Bolin on Muriel Spark, empty vessels, and mansplaining.
“Being in love is something like poetry. Certainly, you can analyze and expound its various senses and intentions, but there is always something left over, mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.”
The Crime of Blackness: Dorothy B. Hughes’s Forgotten Noir - The New Yorker →
Dorothy Hughes 1963 noir about a black doctor who picks a white teenage female hitchhiker in a lonely desert road
“The most revolutionary ideas are not sellable, but only mind - changing.”
Marina Abramovic
“A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.”
(via theparisreview)
Reading Alberto Moravia in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy →
Gerrard Square, Toronto, 2016