Andrew Roe

Do you ever look up which font was used in a book?

I do. Sometimes.

Here are a series of videos featuring book designers from Penguin talking about fonts. Pretty cool, if you’re into fonts…

Writers can be hard on themselves. At least this one can. I definitely have my self-pugilistic tendencies. I am, as they say, aware of the issue. Yet the issue remains an issue.

Actors are the same way. See, for example, this New York Times profile of John Goodman, published when he was appearing as Pozzo in a new production of Waiting for Godot.

A couple of paragraphs:

“In person Mr. Goodman is not the stereotypical jolly fat man. For all his success, he remains full of self-doubt. Compliments make him wince, and his conversational default mode is self-deprecation. He sometimes seems to be eyeing himself with suspicion.

“Mr. Goodman’s friend Tom Arnold, whom he got to know during the years he starred on ‘Roseanne,’ said: ‘John is much too hard on himself. He’s got that thing. I have it too. That fat kid thing. No matter what, we look in a mirror, and that’s what we see. It comes out in a lot of different ways. I’ve seen him pounding walls over a line in a sitcom. Probably it wasn’t even a good line, but John thinks he should have done it better.’”

I was a chubby kid. So maybe there’s something there. Eyeing myself with suspicion? You bet. And I think I inherited the perfectionist gene from my parents.

Whenever a story gets published, my wife will ask how it feels. When I see a story in print or online, I’ll start to squirm, I see everything that’s wrong, that could have been better. I have to look away. Most of the time, I can’t even bring myself to read the words. Once something is published, I rarely look at it again.

It’s a good thing in that I’m always trying to do better, to get it right, to be a better writer.

But it’s a bad thing when I can’t even enjoy the small successes I’ve had.

A writer friend once told me: “Be nicer to yourself.”

I’m trying, trying…

I’ve never been to Austin. I hear it’s a cool town. It’s known for its music, of course — and that’s reason enough for me to visit.

Another reason to visit is the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, which houses the archives and papers of writers like Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Doris Lessing and James Salter, as well as stuff from Joyce and Beckett.

Now there’s word that the Ransom Center has acquired the archive of David Foster Wallace.

From the press release:

“The archive contains manuscript materials for Wallace’s books, stories and essays; research materials; Wallace’s college and graduate school writings; juvenilia, including poems, stories and letters; teaching materials and books.

“Highlights include handwritten notes and drafts of his critically acclaimed ‘Infinite Jest,’ the earliest appearance of his signature ‘David Foster Wallace’ on ‘Viking Poem,’ written when he was six or seven years old, a copy of his dictionary with words circled throughout and his heavily annotated books by Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and more than 40 other authors.”

And here’s what Wallace’s longtime agent Bonnie Nadell had to say:

“[W]hat scholars and readers will find fascinating I think is that as messy as David was with how he kept his work, the actual writing is painstakingly careful. For each draft of a story or essay there are levels of edits marked in different colored ink, repeated word changes until he found the perfect word for each sentence, and notes to himself about how to sharpen a phrase until it met his exacting eye. Having represented David from the beginning of his writing career, I know there were people who felt David was too much of a ‘look ma no hands’ kind of writer, fast and clever and undisciplined. Yet anyone reading through his notes to himself will see how scrupulous they are.”