Tag: writing

~ Mark

There are cases were poetry creates itself. […] Let us take the title of one of the most famous books in the world, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. […] “De la Mancha” – now this sounds noble and Castilian to us, but when Cervantes wrote it down he intended the word to sound perhaps as if he wrote “Don Quixote of Kansas City” […]. You see how those words have changed, how they have been ennobled.

Jorge Luis Borges in “The Riddle of Poetry” segment of his Norton Lectures. File under Borges.
~ Mark

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

Flannery O’Connor. (via)

Art Bollocks – Bryan Ashbee

~ Mark

The art market is not a free market. It’s rigged; hugely distorted by the presence of public subsidy – the grants and funding available to organisations and individuals deemed to be producing “significant” work. To get access to this, it’s even more important that artists create the right theoretical discourse to surround their work.

Also known as bullshit. A handy guide for writing your own art bollocks:

A useful catch-all formula can be applied to all of this work, which I freely offer here, without charge:

“X’s work
{wryly/mockingly/cunningly/innocently/intelligently}
{deconstructs/subverts/disrupts/parodies/appropriates/undermines}
{popular notions/stereotypes/archetypes/conventions/the mythology/strategies}
of
{gender/representation/style/sexuality/commodification/identity}
by …”
followed by a nod at whatever images or objects are assembled.

(via)
Art Bollocks – Bryan Ashbee

Portrait Of The Bagel As A Young Man

~ Mark

Bike messenger, gallery assistant, office temp. I took these jobs to make money, but there was also an aspect of penance to them. I don’t know exactly for what sin I was repenting. Maybe the sin of having gone to graduate school for writing. On some level, I saw these jobs as a kind of Karma insurance. It was a way of testing myself: You want to be a writer? Can you handle this? How about this?

Portrait Of The Bagel As A Young Man

Behind the Paywall: How New York Times Articles End | VF Daily | Vanity Fair

~ Mark

“Here is a list of popular endings to New York Times pieces. It’s totally free.” A few of my favorites… (via)

  • The apartment is really that small, and people really do live there, but somehow it just works for them.
  • The old restaurant/bar is unaffected by changes to its neighborhood.
  • Though restaurant’s use of sustainable ingredients attracts a young, creative clientele, buttoned-up, more conservative patrons will also enjoy the food.
  • The neighborhood’s recent gentrification has not always been a smooth cultural and economic transition for longtime residents.
  • The situation in that country you’ve been hearing about is even worse than you thought.
  • It’s not worth it to spend 36 hours in a place to which roundtrip airfare is $2,500.
  • Maureen Dowd disapproves.

Behind the Paywall: How New York Times Articles End | VF Daily | Vanity Fair

~ Mark

Before we learned to tell stories, we learned to read them. In other words, we learned to track. The first letter of the first word of the first recorded story was written–“printed”–not by us, but by an animal. These signs and symbols left in mud, sand, leaves, and snow represent proto-alphabets. Often smeared, fragmented, and confused by weather, time, and other animals, these cryptograms were life-and-death exercises in abstract thinking. […] The notion that it was animals who taught us to read may seem counterintuitive, but listening to skilled hunters analyze tiger sign is not that different from listening to literature majors deconstruct a short story. Both are sorting through minutiae, down to the specific placement and inflection of individual elements, in order to determine motive, subtext, and narrative arc.

John Vaillant in his excellent book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. Great storytelling and lots to learn about tigers and Russia. I also liked this bit:

Evidence suggests that the reason tigers and their kind continue to capture our attention is because, over time, this has proven the most effective way to prevent them from capturing us. Maybe this is why it is impossible not to wonder what Markov and Khomenko saw and felt in their last moments–an experience so aberrant and alien to us, and yet strangely, deeply familiar: there is a part of us that still needs to know.

The Problem With Memoirs – NYTimes.com

~ Mark

There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.

The Problem With Memoirs – NYTimes.com

The Simple Art of Murder – Raymond Chandler

~ Mark

Chandler on the detective story and how it resists criticism. This bit reminded me of Joan Acocella’s recent article about Stieg Larsson:

The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway.

A bit cynical, but there you go. Also provocative:

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.

And of course:

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. […] I hold no particular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.

See also Woody Allen on escapism. The next-to-last paragraph about the nature of the crime/detective story hero is also worthwhile.

The Simple Art of Murder – Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler – The Simple Art of Murder

~ Mark

Chandler on the detective story and how it resists criticism. This bit reminded me of Joan Acocella’s recent article about Stieg Larsson:

The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own business, solving its own problems and answering its own questions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway.

A bit cynical, but there you go. Also provocative:

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.

And of course:

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. […] I hold no particular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.

See also Woody Allen on escapism. The next-to-last paragraph about the nature of the crime/detective story hero is also worthwhile.

Raymond Chandler – The Simple Art of Murder