And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five
— James Merrill, born in 1926
.
“Piecemeal the summer dies;
At the field's edge a daisy lives alone;
A last shawl of burning lies
On a gray field-stone.
“All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer's final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.”
“Writers. Directors. Actors.”
Steve Martin looked out at the crowd at the Kodak Theatre. The joke that followed could only work at the Oscars: “If we’re stuck here tonight and run out of food, that’s the order in which we eat them.” 66 best monologues and opening numbers
INSTANT IKEA, JUST ADD ROBOTS: Our father who is now in heaven was a carpenter and he would find this concept exciting and scary at the same time ... MIT’s robotic carpenters help you create your own furniture
Delta Goodrem is said to have been paid $250000 to entertain Harry Triguboff
Books versus movie: Both versions of ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ lack bite and a moral core
A Toxic Friendship Turns Deadly in The Radicals | Vanity Fair.
“I have a certain contempt for people who write autobiographical characters that are really likable, always do the right thing, and are just so virtuous. I think, how dumb,” he said. “I’m pretty comfortable taking a personal avatar and making him or her do awful things. I get to do them in my fiction, and maybe that’s why I don’t do them in my life.”
A Toxic Friendship Turns Deadly in The Radicals | Vanity Fair.
“I have a certain contempt for people who write autobiographical characters that are really likable, always do the right thing, and are just so virtuous. I think, how dumb,” he said. “I’m pretty comfortable taking a personal avatar and making him or her do awful things. I get to do them in my fiction, and maybe that’s why I don’t do them in my life.”
La Rochefoucauld is a clever, careful writer. But before one can understand him rationally, I think, one must feel him viscerally; or rather, strive to experience and judge the veracity of his observations as they reflect against one's own soul.
STEVE KROFT: Well, I take the fact that you're still giving interviews that you're aging better than you thought you would.
JOHN LE CARRÉ: I think that's perfectly true. Each book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.
David Cornwell's not a functioning alcoholic but he's created a stable full of imperfect characters over the years as John le Carré, a name he does not answer to. It's an abstraction that exists in his writing studio, and on the cover of his books, like a spy's name on a phony passport
Grace Paley On Artists Engaging With Politics
Asked in the same Paris Review interview whether it’s good for a writer to be politically engaged in turbulent times, Paley registered the question’s absurdity, refusing the notion that politics might be a harmful distraction for an artist: "It certainly isn’t antithetical to a passionate interior life – all that noise coming in. You have to make music of it somehow." … Read More
An Interview with Denis Johnson: “I thought I’d never publish these things,” the late author said of his work. “I thought it was important for me to hide the fact that I’m not right in the head.”
Can Authors Make Up Their Memoirs?: Joseph Conrad invented a boat and H.G. Wells omitted his affairs. But does it matter if a little fiction reveals a different kind of truth?
All The Lies Great Novelists Have Told In Their Autobiographies
from The Guardian
Can Authors Make Up Their Memoirs?: Joseph Conrad invented a boat and H.G. Wells omitted his affairs. But does it matter if a little fiction reveals a different kind of truth?
How Did The Centennial Of Mexico’s Greatest Writer Pass With No One In The US Noticing?
from New York Review of Books |
from The Guardian
Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives
A writer betrays their craft if they do not push themselves.
The intersection, the questions, and the work in progress.
“I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains along with the imprints of coral and plants and seaweed usually found in the sea. Why the thunder lasts a longer time than that which causes it, and why immediately on its creation the lightning becomes visible to the eye while thunder requires time to travel. How the various circles of water form around the spot which has been struck by a stone, and why a bird sustains itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena engage my thought throughout my life.”The reality about making money as a writer is you hustle the fuck out of freelance pieces like this one. Or you teach. Or you drive a bus. Or someone supports you. Or you’re independently wealthy. The reality is that somehow you have money, and somehow you write.↩︎ Marie Claire
An Ode to Hard Work
Alternative Ageing: 68-year-old woman runs blog to show that style ...
In 2007, the East Bay Times profiled a 21-year-old Ryan Coogler, director of Creed and Black Panther.
He graduated this year with honors from Sacramento State University. Next month, he begins a three-year master’s program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.He wants to write and direct movies and he wants to direct them in Richmond and Oakland, the nation’s fourth most dangerous city. He lived in Oakland with his family until he was 8.“My goal is to start a (film) business in this area, something that can employ people,” he said. “It will be something the people can point to and kids can see it, saying ‘I can do that,’ instead of doing things that are glaring to the environment.”
Ryan and his father Ira were interviewed for the story at the Century Hilltop 16 theater, “where they hope Ryan’s films will be shown one day”. I’m sure Creed and Fruitvale Station both played at the Hilltop 16 when they came out, but a look at today’s showtimes at the theater reveals that Coogler has achieved the dream of his youth many times over:
R.A. Lafferty: "The Greatest Catholic Novelist You Never Heard Of" - Benedict XVI Institute
Via http://benito-cereno.tumblr.com/: “Okay, so: Latin has this word, sic. Or, if we want to be more diacritically accurate, sīc. That shows that the i is long, so it’s pronounced like “seek” and not like “sick.” You might recognize this word from Latin sayings like “sic semper tyrannis” or “sic transit gloria mundi.” You might recognize it as what you put in parentheses when you want to be pass-agg about someone’s mistakes when you’re quoting them: “Then he texted me, ‘I want to touch you’re (sic) butt.’” It means, “thus,” which sounds pretty hoity-toity in this modren era, so maybe think of it as meaning “in this way,” or “just like that.” As in, “just like that, to all tyrants, forever,” an allegedly cool thing to say after shooting a President and leaping off a balcony and shattering your leg. “Everyone should do it this way.” Anyway, Classical Latin somewhat lacked an affirmative particle, though you might see the word ita, a synonym of sic, used in that way. By Medieval Times, however, sic was holding down this role. Which is to say, it came to mean yes…. [keep reading the posting here – enjoy!]
Designer Michelle Rial makes these clever and charming charts and posts them to her Instagram account. Some of the charts are hand-drawn but my favorite ones are made using real world objects, like the ones above. Reminds me ofXKCD, Christoph Niemann, and Mari Andrew. Rial has posters, mugs, tote bags, and other items featuring her charts for sale on Society6.
Writing is one of the best ways to connect with other people and become influential.
Headline of the week? “Animals Are Losing Their Vagility, or Ability to Roam Freely.”
Welcome to social storytelling
David Beard and Anne Glover bring you the new and notable.
It’s part photo gallery, part video snippet — and shaped like
your smartphone.
The Washington Post has a new storytelling vehicle that combines
text, photos and video — and reporter Jason Rezaian, for one, loves it. Rezaian
scripted and spoke on one of the Post’s first “AMP Stories” late last week — on
journalists who have been imprisoned.
On this social storytelling experiment, Rezaian, himself
imprisoned by Iran in 2014 on phony espionage charges and freed 544 days later,
looks right into the camera and says these cases “are more common than you may
think.”
This game is about playing one small part in a much larger story. You only live an hour, but time and space in this game is infinite. You can only do so much in one lifetime, but the tech tree in this game will take hundreds of generations to fully explore. This game is also about family trees. Having a mother who takes care of you as a baby, and hopefully taking care of a baby yourself later in life. And your mother is another player. And your baby is another player. Building something to use in your lifetime, but inevitably realizing that, in the end, what you build is not for YOU, but for your children and all the countless others that will come after you. Proudly using your grandfather’s ax, and then passing it on to your own grandchild as the end of your life nears.
Jason Rohrer, one of the most well-regarded indie video game makers out there (he made Passage, which is incredibly poignant for a video game that lasts only 5 minutes), has just released his latest game, One Hour One Life. Rohrer bills the game as “a multiplayer survival game of parenting and civilization building”.
And looking at each life as a unique story. I was this kid born in this situation, but I eventually grew up. I built a bakery near the wheat fields. Over time, I watched my grandparents and parents grow old and die. I had some kids of my own along the way, but they are grown now… and look at my character now! She’s an old woman. What a life passed by in this little hour of mine. After I die, this life will be over and gone forever. I can be born again, but I can never live this unique story again. Everything’s changing. I’ll be born as a different person in a different place and different time, with another unique story to experience in the next hour…
That sounds kind of amazing, like a cross between Passage and something like Spore or Everything. And dare I say it’s a little Game Neverending-ish as well?
And check out the “thinking behind One Hour One Life” section at the bottom of the home page. It includes links to videos on the meaning of human life, Milton Friedman’s views on market capitalism (a riff on I, Pencil), and the Primitive Technology guy. (via andy)
His story intersperses brief video clips by Rezaian with data
and maps from Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders and images of
journalists who have been imprisoned in Myanmar, Turkey, Egypt and yes, the
United States. Take a look,
listen and read.
Rezaian, who had written previous stories about these
journalists, came to the design team with the suggestion, says Greg Manifold,
the Post’s design director. He wrote the script, did the short video snippets
and was able to use the photography and maps from his previous stories.
“He came to us, excited about that platform. We need people in
the newsroom coming to us,” says Manifold, leading a team of two video
journalists, a photographer and a reporter on the Google-coordinated
experience. Other social storytelling efforts have included pieces on cold-brewing
coffee, the
week in editorial cartoons, Curling
101 — a balance between evergreen stories and developing lines of coverage,
as Manifold puts it. The
Post is one of eight news outlets, including Vox Media and Hearst, doing
early experimentation with the Google product, Manifold says.
To Rezaian, if social storytelling can get a casual crowd
interested in freedom of the press worldwide, “that would be a great victory.
No everyone is going to read 1,000-word stories on these topics.”
His social story from
Friday already has been used again, Rezaian noted sadly, as an accompaniment to
his story on Monday — on
the fatal shooting of a journalist in Slovakia who reported on tax evasion
among that European nation’s elite Some things have changed over the years, of course: the uses of technology, the openness about sex, and, notably, the treatment of religion. Where a kind of delicate deference once ruled, popular fiction now seems typically to present churchgoing characters as suspects—thanks, as near as I can tell, to the notion that devotion is pretty suspicious, all by itself, and what's a little homicide on top of religious mania? The quantity of casual anti-Christianity in contemporary mysteries and thrillers is more than a little disturbing, their pages full of duplicitous televangelists, fundamentalist cult leaders, and serial killers enacting complex Catholic rituals. Pick up Henning Mankell's Before the Frost for a good example: a 2005 book that essentially equates all religion with the Jonestown suicides, from a Swedish writer whose worldwide sales are now over thirty million. (One dreads the novelisitc uses to which the news from Norway will be put.) When in doubt about the murderer in an old Agatha Christie story, always guess that it's the doctor. And when in doubt about the murderer in a recent mystery novel, always guess that it's the Christian. Detectives versus Gods - Agatha