Desk Space
As someone who once wrote a whole dissertation on writing as a physical process in space and time, I’m always interested to learn about the spaces where people write things. (Plus is it me, or is this an almost-inherently comic premise? I think Proust in the cork-lined cell is really close to already being funny.) So just imagine, dear readers, how excited I was to learn about Desk Space, a beautiful site devoted to the desks of various obscure writers whom nobody has ever heard of… now including me!
I spent at least an hour there looking at every single post, and was both touched and impressed by the great variety, within certain actually sort of narrow perimeters, of workspaces favored by my fellow D-list writers. David McGimpsey, for instance, likes to confront the blank page armed with 2.5 computers, a Colonel Sanders piggy bank, a 1994 edition of Gun Digest, and a television (top)… while the poet Souvankham Thammavongsa prefers a workspace to say, and I quote: “I’m in trouble and I’ve been sent away” (bottom).
I was also really impressed by Brian Joseph Davis, who works in some kind of a badass cave—kind of like St. Jerome, but with more audio equipment.
I, however, am the one with a miniature lion!
(He usually sits in that brown pillow… see here.) Anyway, speaking of writers in caves, with animals, I was recently commemorating a certain very happy occasion at the restaurant Incanto, where I was intrigued to notice a wall mural depicting a tiny Dante Alighieri lurking in a cave. I guess, like Souvankham Thammavongsa, Dante was one of those poets who liked his workspace to say he was in big trouble and had been sent away.
Tags: animals, cats, comparative literature, d-list, Dante, dissertation, Friday, furniture, poetry, St. Jerome
February 22nd, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Lovely!
I dig your giraffe.
And I’m sure you’ve seen the Guardian’s feature sometime ago: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/writersrooms.
My favorite is Will Self’s room (http://will-self.com/writing-room/) because he knows how to work his post-its.
Lions!
Tara
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:15 am
Did you already mention the daily routines blog?
http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/
February 24th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Dear Tara, dear Ben, thanks for the brilliant links. I was especially fascinated by the “daily routines.” When I visited, the top entry was about Auden:
“Constantly breaking down”… what does that even mean in the context of someone who takes Benzedrine every morning for 20 years (and then lives another 15 years after that)?
If anyone ever asks for my daily routine I’m gonna say I get up at 4, put on a wedding dress, shoot up, work on a first draft for 7 hours, run 12 miles, pick my kids up from school, edit a second draft for 3 hours, and am in bed with my thermos of vodka by 9.
March 16th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
I (rather belatedly) read your piece in Harper’s. Delightful! I’d really like to read your dissertation. How would one go about locating it?
May 19th, 2009 at 12:44 am
the internet brings to light strange coincidences, maybe this isn’t one of them.
As I’m reading an arbitrarily chosen article called Summer in Samarkand in this literary journal n+1 my creative writing student friend left in my apt, I google the author out of a common compulsion to need a picture of an author’s face to attach to anything new i read and I find that this author, Elif Batuman, not only lives in San Francisco, but, as related in this blog entry, ate once at that snazzy foodie temple Incanto, directly across the street from my own “desk space” where I craft my B level undergraduate work.
My usual, daily interaction with that restaurant is creepy guy who touches food with eyes, though every time my parents come to visit I make them treat me to it. I have eaten in the Dante Room too: local lamb neck on a bed of polenta and wilted rapini with a side of blood sausage. everything tastes better in hell.
May 25th, 2009 at 11:15 am
dear matt,
many thanks for your kind and fascinating message, and please forgive the delayed reply – i was actually in florence the last 2 weeks, researching a story about dante-mania. (i interviewed a forensic anthropologist who reconstructed dante’s skull and found that he didn’t really look like that guy in the cave, after all, he was botticelli’s invention… the same guy (forensic anthropologist, not botticelli) also exhumed count ugolino and proved he didn’t eat his own children (cf. Inferno xxxiii). Apparently he (ugolino, this time) was toothless at the
time of death, and hadn’t eaten any protein at all for the previous 3 months – not even a wilted lamb-neck.)
good luck with your undergraduate labors!
elif
June 11th, 2009 at 3:04 am
Hi. I just discovered your site from the New Yorker blog; I’m sure you have much better things to do than follow links, but in re: Desk Space, a while back, I asked some children’s writers to describe their workspaces — no pictures, please, you are writers — and they’re posted at http://tonyabbottbooks.com/blog/?cat=7 . Enjoy. And thanks in general for My Life and Thoughts. I’m happy to be a new reader.