Read Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up on the plane home last night. It belongs on the list, wherever on the Net that list is, of great testaments to the power of focus. Martin describes in detail how he arrived at the seemingly random, arsurdist style that dominated the late seventies, by bearing down and working at it fixedly. Also interesting that all of his books are so short, as if they were pruned to maximum precision. Shopgirls had the same quality, and must have also been, at least somewhat autobiographical. But then what isn’t.
