“[There] are futurists and there are fictioneers, and we excel at different things.” – Elizabeth Bear (While you are there, check out Charles Stross’ series of posts on “Common Misconceptions About Publishing.”) And their novels, of course, are very much recommended.
Crowdfunding or What?
So much of the future of media debate concludes with little evidence and much conjecture on how the latest idea or gadget will or will not “save” publishing. Therein lies the problem. The Internet presents us with limitless possibilities. How could anyone believe in a silver bullet?
If a savior is what publishing needs, the best thing anyone could hope for is that more people will draft their wills like Ruth Lilly (she left Poetry magazine 100 million.) Really, the goal should be business models as unique as our creative strengths, but sometimes that feels just as unrealistic.
The trouble I see with crowdfunding for creative projects is not that it doesn’t work, but that it couldn’t possibly work for everyone. First of all, the very act of crowdfunding requires a level of self-assuredness that does not often come naturally for artists and writers. Mikita Brottman, literature professor at Maryland Institute College of Art, talks about the problem her students have selling themselves to the public “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or great artist or a great musician, when if comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks.” This often comes at the expense of grants and other opportunities they are more than qualified to receive, but fail to articulate the need. That point reminds me of something I read about Dr. Suess. He was invited all the time to speak at schools but mostly declined. As a very shy, somewhat awkward person, he worried children would be let down as he does not appear as carefree and spirited as the narrator of his books.
The least remarkable novels I read seem written as though the author knows his mother will see it one day. Imagine an author who feels accountable to hundreds and hundreds of people — context collapse as the death of creativity.
My friend Ed Champion was once explaining the difference between writers who write to write, rather than write to have written. I worry crowdfunding works best for the latter — those who see writing as the means for prestige rather than a greater calling. When I look at my bookshelf, I don’t see a single author who was ever described as “salesman-like” or even “good with people.” In a country where 81% of the population “feel they have a book in them,” there’s already a problem of loud voices crowding out raw talent, with or without crowdfunding.
As Joseph Epstein once put it, “I wonder if the reason so many people think they can write a book is that so many third-rate books are published nowadays that, at least viewed from the middle distance, it makes writing a book look fairly easy. After all, how many times has one thought, after finishing a bad novel, ‘I can do at least as well as that’? And the sad truth is that it may well be that one can. But why add to the schlock pile?”
Last week there was an informal discussion about crowdfunding on Twitter, preserved here by Tim Maly. More from Maly, Michelle Pauli at The Guardian, PD Smith, and Paul Raven at Futurismic. Will Wiles expanded on some of his points in the debate, with a thoughtful post, “I Have Always Relied on the Strangeness of Crowds”. I like his footnote, “Here’s an idea for redistributing the risk in publishing – crowdpledging. How about a publisher says ‘get 1000 people to say they’ll buy a copy of your proposed book, and we’ll give you a contract?’ Could that be made to work?” I also like the idea of publishers, indie or otherwise, using Kickstarter and other crowdfunding methods to find new voices. A writer who is his own cheerleader, probably isn’t maxing out his talent. But so long as demand for outstanding work remains high, there’s still potential for alternatives.
“I am a novelist. That is how I wish to be remembered.” -Susan Sontag. Vivian Gornick considers Susan Sontag’s self-identification as a novelist in Bookforum. I’m similarly unimpressed with her fiction, as Gornick writes, “Sontag did not qualify for the job. Whichever way she turned, alone in that room, it was not inward.” But it’s interesting she’d wish to be remember for that which clearly was a struggle for her.
“[Everyone] (with the least bit of inclination) should write a novel, and society would be much better off for it. Like so many forms of introspection (in many ways the enemy of fundamentalists and political zealots of all stripes), it can be one of life’s great pleasures, but (unlike many others) is not one that falls into the category of immediate gratification (like say, that mammoth black-and-white cookie I just scarfed down). It’s sort of like running a marathon; you have to train to build up to it and maintain some discipline, but ultimately, when you cross the finish line (even if you had to crawl the last __ miles or walk part of the way), you’re going to feel a great sense of accomplishment (even — or especially — if you didn’t win), and for at least a few seconds have some warm fuzzies about being alive and completing something that nobody will ever be able to take away from you. Whether the novel will be ‘good’ or not — much less successful, however you want to define that (but let’s think about it in crass, commercial terms as opposed to a sense of accomplishment) — is a completely different question, and I tend to think that not so many people have it in them to be ‘great’ novelists, much the way only a few runners can ever expect to win a marathon, because I think it requires a certain obsessive personality that falls way outside the boundaries of what most people would consider ‘normal’ and often borders on the psychotic.” – Matthew Gallaway
Accidental Storytelling
The world is split into two different kinds of people. When I moved into my flat, we were having all our kitchen goods delivered. My then girlfriend got off the phone and said to me, “we need to stay in because the fridge men are coming.” The world is divided into those who hear that and think, “I need to be in because I’m having a kitchen delivery” and those who hear the word “fridge men” and immediately conceive of a kind of cyborg creature with a big open door in his chest and stopping arms and legs and kind of freezing demeanor—a fridge-man hybrid.
Miguel Palma, Dream House (detail), 2003, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, (Art Fag City Flickr set)
As I mentioned the other week, I’m testing out the Dragon NaturallySpeaking iPhone app. This is my first experience using speech recognition software, but I’ve always had warm feelings about the brand since it is what Robert Conquest uses and well, who doesn’t love dragons? My hope was it would alleviate two major problems in my life right now: I have to drive many miles every day and I have very little time to write.
James Franco on General Hospital and I think on that of New York as a band being of what people think New York is her more every day lead when they were young that there is no New York has true iPod Andy Warhol imagination in his bed There is no need to work as true as the noon your hands me or call imagination on his background before you and being so general but all in the mid-the TV show General Hospital is written by someone who doesn’t know what a gallery show is really alive or what’s going in hard and really live it’s written by someone who was never there
In that particular paragraph, my actual comment was that New York is, at its best, a projection of Andy Warhol’s fantasies of New York from his bedroom in Pittsburgh. It’s a city with a rich history at odds with the fantasies of those who finally arrive after dreaming of living there. LA is the same way, like that wonderfully titled documentary “LA Plays Itself.” From that point, I said General Hospital’s “Franco” character is scripted like the writers have never met an artist, never gone to a gallery. It’s this fantasy element like the city itself. They might as well have dressed him in a beret and given him a French accent. If Dragon NaturallySpeaking worked better, I can’t says that any of these thoughts would make the cut to draft 2. It was just something I was considering at the time. I was talking out my ideas, which is very strange for me as I’m definitely someone who thinks before she talks — having the classic introverted tendency of holding back in conversation until developing a strong opinion, rather than shaping and creating opinions in the act of a conversation. Speech recognition seems to work for Fred Wilson and it probably works for certain type of talking — “to do” list transcription or very direct correspondence. Just speak clearly, with uncomplicated words and sentences. I’m amused Dragon recognized “Franco” of all the words — Conquest’s influence? Conquest, by the way, explained to WSJ, “my handwriting’s pretty bad and my typing is worse.” In the same interview he points out Henry James always dictated his novels. Miguel Palma, Dream House (detail), 2003, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, (Art Fag City Flickr set) As for the way I like to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking, it operates as a from-pollen-comes-honey word machine. “There is no need to work as true as the noon.” Now, I have a higher tolerance for purple prose than most, but that sounds lovely to me. Maybe I’ll turn that into a song lyric, a medium less stringent upon the precision of words and their meanings. I have no idea what I was saying when that line appeared on the screen. But I’ll take that and make something from it. I didn’t think it, but I created it. Either way it is mine. “your hands me / or call imagination / on his background / before you and being so general” … Well, I’ve written far worse song lyrics than that in the past. Now, I’m not recommending speech recognition for the moments that you badly need to capture an idea before it escapes. But if you just playing around some thoughts, ideas aren’t so committed to, this is a fun way to seek inspiration. We are so often presented with these kinds of quick fiction experiments. I can’t argue with my savings account interest rate but the credit union website makes me want to pull my hair out. For months, I was fine accessing my account through Mint.com. Then one day there was an error, I needed to re-answer the security questions about my first car and major in college. Well, I did and still generated error messages. I had to go to the credit union’s website, which presented me with an entirely different list of questions! On both sites there were a bewildering number of questions I had the option to answer. Here’s the catch, anything about me — my favorite food, my alma mater — was not available to answer on the Mint.com prompt. The only questions that were available to answer on both Mint and my credit union’s site were about my spouse’s favorite food, or my child’s preschool. Well, I have neither a child nor a husband, but for the purpose of accessing my accounts online, I’m happy enough to invent them. Remember Sarah Palin’s email hacking? All it took to get into her gov.sarah@yahoo.com account was answering “Where did you go to high school?” Even being quite private about these kind of details, were I married, just how hard would it be for anyone to figure out my “spouse’s occupation?” or where we met? LMGTFY. But who would ever guess that I do have a husband, his name is Nikolajs, we met in an airport in Abu Dhabi, and he works a pilot? The children are Omni and Jurate, we married in Riga, Latvia, and have a summer home on Saturn. For security purposes isn’t it better to invent a story? Otherwise, your password might as well be “123456″
Anyway, this is as good a place as any to announce an exciting event next week, I’m thrilled to take part in: Boston Bookfuturists: Introducing experiments in storytelling and The first ever Bookfuturists Meetup is this month at Microsoft New England Research & Development Center Boston Bookfuturists 1 Interested in presenting at future events? Please contact us: info@bookfuturists.com Please visit our website Host: Joanne McNeil, The Tomorrow Museum Presenting: Joshua Glenn, a Boston-based journalist and scholar, is coeditor of Hilobrow.com and co-curator of Significant Objects, an online experiment that pairs writers with secondhand junk, then sells the junk on eBay (using the story as an item description), in an effort to answer this question: “What makes things meaningful?” Peggy Nelson is a new media artist whose work encompasses film, augmented reality, performance art, and reenactments. In Search of Adele H is a Twitter movie, a re-imaging of the life and fictionalizations of Victor Hugo’s daughter Adèle. But as with a book, the moving images are intentionally missing. The Twitter movie happens in your head, much as the main character’s life happened in hers. Stona Fitch writes powerful novels that have earned an international following. His novel SENSELESS is now a UK feature film and a cult classic that critics often refer to as the most disturbing novel ever written. St. Martin’s is publishing his next novel, Give + Take, in April. He has been selected as one of the Boston Public Library’s 2010 “Literary Lights.” In 2008, Stona and other writers/thinkers founded the Concord Free Press, the world’s first generosity-based publisher, which publishes original novels and gives them away in exchange for voluntary donations to worthy causes or people in need. Matthew Battles has written about technology, language, and culture for such publications as the American Scholar, the Atlantic, and the Boston Globe. He’s cofounder of the blog Hilobrow.com and author of the book Library, an Unquiet History. Previously: Handmade Looking Writing Falero. Departure of the Witches, 1878 (via.) One of the best things about living in this era is that there are countless options available to capture ideas, digital or otherwise. You may have a moleskine in your pocket, but you still jot an idea down on your iphone, depending on what the idea is, the rhythm of it, and what you plan to do with it. The decision to type or handwrite usually boils down to how fast do I need something captured and searchable? If I know I’m immediately going to use an idea, I usually write it as an email to myself. I delete the email as soon as the text is integrated in the intended project, whether it is an article or blog post or short story I’m writing. When I come up with a somewhat poetic turn of phrase, I usually write it out on a paper notebook I always have with me. For years, I carried kraft brown Moleskine Cahiers, but now I’m obsessed with and never without Muji’s recycled paper note sets. (I also have the Chronotebook with me always, but mostly use it for mind mapping, rather than scheduling.) I title these notebooks something obscure (”Are you a sling shot or a snake charmer?) and date them with silver sharpie. It has to be silver sharpie or I really will not use the notebook. There’s probably a deeper rationalization for why I need silver titles on recycled brown paper covers — like how most of my work is about where the organic meets the inorganic, nature and technology at odds — but in any case that’s one area I’m uncompromisingly neurotic. Attending a lecture, I would much prefer to take notes on my iPhone, but because that action is so often misconstrued, I usually write things down on whatever pamphlet was handed out before the event. I could never type a journal. I always write them in ink, partly because my handwriting is so terrible, it may as well be in cyrillic. Handwritten, the secrets in my journal are safe from others, sometimes indecipherable even to myself just a few years later. When I do type out my ideas, it’s because I need it fast. If I’ve got a story beginning to end in my head I will cancel anything to get straight to my laptop because otherwise key elements will escape from my brain between the time I’m going about my day and the time my fingers are typing it out. Lately, I’m experimented with voice recognition like the DragonNaturallySpeaking iPhone app, and I’ll explain that in an upcoming post. I get a lot of use out of Simplenote on the go, but because typing on an iPhone presents hiccups, I dont ever bother with articles or conjunctions. Usually these notes result in lists of scattered nouns and verbs, to remind me of the original idea. Reading about Cormac McCarthy’s Olivetti and knowing JG Ballard only used a typewriter, made me think about getting one. Just to mix things up and see what kind of writing might result from the introduction of a new tool to deliver it. When I have a rough idea I need time to stretch out, I create a file and type a loosely structured outline. I use TextEdit, Google Reader, MarsEdit, or something else, depending on how much time I have to type it, whether it is going on the blog or to an editor, and a bunch of other deciding factors. And Ommwriter is a dream come true for the book of essays I’m writing. I’ve got this blog, a tumblr, a twitter, a posterous account. The choice I make over what goes where is based on similar kids of decision — whether it’s social, private, a first draft, etc. I also have a long file in Google Wave, I’m using as a project timeline. When it comes to preserving facts, quotes, reference material, it’s just as much a matter of how this information is being used. For a while, when I was working on a novel, I would cut out relevant articles and put them in labeled green folders in a wire sided cabinet on casters (again, really particular about colors for some reason.) I’m afraid the last time I filed something was about a year ago, as I read fewer and fewer print publications, and don’t print out articles as often as I did in the past. That’s not to say, I wouldn’t start doing it again if a new project called on it. I use del.icio.us is spurts, either tagging several things a day or ignoring it for three months at a time, instead saving links in text files with full quotes. Search is really the key reason I feel digital storage is the best place to save other people’s ideas I want to build on. However well I label paper folders, I still can’t plug in “beijing” and “shoe design” or whatever and come up with several results in a snap. It’s also partly why I subscribe to as many blogs as I do. I can search for “Tiger Woods” and the results come from my little globe of blogs and publications I like, rather than, well, what happens when you search for “Tiger Woods” in Google. I hadn’t realized my number of subscriptions (now 752) was at all unusual until the Bygone Bureau’s Best New Blogs post went up. And Nav at Scrawled in Wax responded with a post, How Many Feeds is Not Enough? Robin at Snarkmarket commented: [William Gibson] said it’s like dipping a finger into the zeitgeist. It this river roaring past, and you’re just taking its temperature. The reason to go for scale—to subscribe to 700 feeds, not just 70—is to increase the chance of weird combinations, of unexpected collisions that reveal something new & interesting. To pile it all into your brain and wait for interesting things to happen, not necessarily on the conscious level! Warren Ellis talks about this too: about throwing it all in the brain-pot and letting mysterious things happen And it’s not just the odd combinations that result; it’s essential for trend spotting. When all of a sudden everyone is talking about Rodarte, not just the fashion bloggers, but the design bloggers, even the boy bloggers, well, then you know it’s happened: it’s tipped. Farhad Manjoo once wrote: RSS started to bring me down. You know that sinking feeling you get when you open your e-mail and discover hundreds of messages you need to respond to—that realization that e-mail has become another merciless chore in your day? That’s how I began to feel about my reader. RSS readers encourage you to oversubscribe to news. Every time you encounter an interesting new blog post, you’ve got an incentive to sign up to all the posts from that blog—after all, you don’t want to miss anything. Eventually you find yourself subscribed to hundreds of blogs, many of which, you later notice, are completely useless. It’s like having an inbox stuffed with e-mail from overactive listservs you no longer care to read. But…it’s not email. It’s not directed at you. You don’t have to read it all or respond to any of it. Folders are key to keep from feeling overwhelmed. I have four must read folders “friends,” “daily,” “boston new&events,” and “ballardian” (pretty much every blog on Ballardian’s list of links.) I have about a dozen other folders marked by subject, but everything else is subject to “Mark All Read” depending on the time I have to scan through it. Since I don’t have much time to read blogs during the day, I usually glance at Google Reader and star whatever looks interesting for reading later. At the end of the day, I go through whatever I starred, unstar a bunch of things that at second glance doesn’t seem interesting, and read what is left. The best thing about Google Reader is it is so multi-use. The sharing and liking fuction isn’t really as well used as it could be, but the potential is there. If I had really thought about the question, I might have listed Zach Seward’s shared items as the best new blog this year, since he seems to read just about everything and leaves insightful notes. This is really just what works for me. Having the information stored and searchable matters more to me more than seeing the full design of a blog or coming across it in a serendipitous way. Although, I really get what Michael Surtees has pointed out about wanting to read blogs at the original sites. Even if I already subscribe, I definitely go the URLS of my favorite sites a few times a week, whether to click on the archives, check out the comments or just view them in a more aesthetically pleasing format. And I understand I’m in the minority here, but I really don’t like Twitter as a link aggregator. I wish more people used it for the epigrammatic rather than an arrow to elsewhere. Yeah, I miss what you had for breakfast, ok? Your “must read article on architecture” bit.ly link may be my “already saw it on Metafilter three weeks ago, and six other blogs.” For the most part, bloggers title posts relevant to the post, but there’s not much space on Twitter to explain what the link is about. I might use it more if there were sites where you could search your friends’ feeds. Again, I’d much rather search just my friends for “Tiger Woods” than all of twitter. The funny thing about this, is just a few weeks ago I dumped a couple hundred RSS feeds and stopped following a number of Twitter accounts to clean house. I feel like I could comfortably follow twice as many blogs without feeling fatigue as the number I follow has more to do with what I enjoy reading rather than a limit to what I can control. Google Reader just makes my life a lot easier and if there were only one Previousy: Survival Creativity
Dragon NaturallySpeaking best delivers as a game giving clues to help you remember something you once said. It takes your words and scrambles them. No idea how the desktop version fares, but the app is very selective in what is chooses to recognize. Or my accent is indecipherable. But it’s free, so I can’t complain about that. Just take a look at what happened when I tried to get thoughts down for a review of James Franco’s “performance art” on General Hospital:
Another storytelling experiment for fiction writing block: reCAPTCHA. “Looming hours” …”helium years”…”hobnails out.” If you are the sort of person like China Mieville describes, you can make something out of that. Not that these accidents are exclusive to the screen either. Someone I met the other night had mistaken my name for “Japan.” In a flash I fantasized about how my life could have turned out… “Japan” studied visual anthropology at Goldsmiths, wears clear frame glasses, and drinks Talisker on ice. I could get away with another level of pretentiousness with a name like that. 
publishing — exploring the intersection of books and technology.
near the MIT campus in Kendall Square. Come listen to presentations on
experiments in storytelling and publishing. The event is free. Please
RSVP:
7-9pm
January 29
Microsoft New England Research & Development Center
One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA How to Capture an Idea
thing I’d ask of it, it would be an auto import to Instapaper.
Ugh, exasperated. The other world, the one where I live more that 50 hours a week, is steadily tightening its tether. But I haven’t forgotten the tomorrow museum. Almost every night I get a paragraph or an outline of something I would like to be an essay but never have the time to complete. Some of the titles and subjects of these drafts: A Defense of self portraiture, the curious origin of corporate storytelling, whether the internet is killing serendipity, books as fetish objects, a review of James Franco on General Hospital, the post-RSS blogosphere, “The writing of the body” (not going to tell you what that is.) In the meantime, please enjoy some past hits: Graffiti in the Wilderness: Rock Climbing in a Granite Museum, Survival Creativity: Return to Pencil and Paper, Rules for an American Fantasy Road Trip, Handmade Looking Writing, The Overexamined Life: Finding Bits of Ourselves in Digital Ghost Towns, Save or Delete: Post-Scarcity vs e-Clutter, Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men, Where Are the Renaissance Women?, Five Books I Recommend to Everyone, The Annotation Impulse: Graffiti and Social Media, Finders Keepers? When a Found Object is a Lost Object of Emotional Value, and Why Read at All?
Twitter Copywriters and the l33terati
Today on the internet, I’m trying to figure out the origin of the “If you lived here, you’d be home now” sign. The kind that 80s development utilitarian high rises in the fartherst corners of the city limits sometimes display outside.
Seems like it’s a Boston thing. I first came across the phrase reading Susanna Kaysen’s memoirs of MacLean when I was eleven or twelve. And I clearly associate it with the apartment complex by the often gridlocked Storrow Drive on-ramp to 93 South. A friend of my mother once lived there. It’s the Kevin Bacon of real estate in New England and iconic enough for Mass General Hospital to use as a landmark on their directions page. This article suggests it started as a 60s citywide campaign to reverse the flight to the suburbs.
It’s like “A diamond is forever,” classic and to the point. It’s so clever it could be twittered. Something you memorize without thinking.
Since I started the blog in April of last year, I’ve had a halfworked post titled “l33terati” waiting as a draft. It’s not that I can’t quite figure out what to do with it, as I’ve certainly posted plenty of “blog essays” without any real point or unifying theme. It’s that the idea behind it is entirely false but something I really want it to happen. It’s my own fiction. I want for there to be a generation of authors whose love of writing was born from years of geekery, starting in chat rooms and message boards.
So in my post-long alternate history of book culture in the aughties — “l33terati” — there’s a generation (1978-1986, mainly) writers with a rough, punchy way of writing that is not without aesthetic merit. The fiction doesn’t take place on the Internet necessarily, but the narrative is clearly influenced by it. It is a literary movement that is a total rejection of the purple teased out prose of MFA-speak that needlessly prattles on about memories of grandmother’s house and the smell of sugar cookies and carpet cleaner or whatever.
So there is no geek literary movement. There are geeks that write, some even embrace their geekiness, but no work is about to oust “Eat, Pray, Love” or “The Corrections” as the dominant publishing ideal. Maybe the reason “l33terati” never happened is all the geek writers value tl, dr above everything else.
If there is a “l33terati,” they aren’t writing novels or even short stories. They are writing flash-super-super-flash fiction or flash-super-super-flash creative nonfiction. That quick evocative half-poetry, half-advertising that is “A diamond is forever” or “if you lived here, you’d be home now,” well you can find it on Twitter every day.
This generation considers the way words look and sound together, without necessarily a care for their actual meaning. I think of the time I spent deliberating on a handle for my AIM account when I was a teenager. I was really proud of how clever it was (and I won’t tell you what it is, least anyone uncover the sprawl of terribly embarrassing high school lonesome usenet posts Google has idexed…forever.) It was like that for most teenagers in the 90s, a mix of emo and self-promotion in the “losthelecopter,” “vixengoverness,” “cakelike” and others. Back there there were no photos or real names, so the handle was the way you stood out in an internet community. There were straightedgers who had their handles between x — “xdollfacex” or such. And if you took a conventional handle, one with your age, hobby, or hometown, well that was another form of signaling.
I’m not quite sure how to write this, but I think technology makes
young people proficient in copywriting, more so than literature. The ultimate pop culture reference of the year: Don Draper, as he proclaims the new Kodak invention isn’t a wheel… but a “Carousel.” It seemed like a Twitter epiphany:
“”Technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in house at a fur company. This old-pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy … Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is ‘new.’ It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of Calamine Lotion. We also talked about a deeper bond with the product — nostalgia. It’s delicate but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship; it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called ‘the wheel’; it’s called ‘the carousel.’ It lets us travel the way a child travels, around and around, and back home again to a place where we know we are loved.”
I studied economics in college and my favorite professor said we should never turn in a report longer than two pages. Anything more than that would be digressing from the assignment. While, I’m well aware my writing could be smoother and flow more pleasantly, I count myself as lucky to never be bogged down with “qualifying the signify” academic-ese, I’d inevitably need to un-learn. Actually, when I come across academic papers seeped in such language, I think it looks so… middlebrow. Like a kid playing dress up.
Which reminds me of the lecture I attended at Frieze last month, “Scenes from a Marriage: Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart?” It’s worth listening to the podcast, especially to hear the scuffle between the panelists and an artist who sees nothing wrong with using words like paint or clay. While I sometimes appreciate an artist’s vague language, when an academic speaks without clarity, I see it as their own shortcoming. It’s bluffing, it’s failure to communicate. You might as well say nothing at all.
“What is more visually appealing, (a) a Pall Mall butt floating in a coffee mug, or (b) those new Pop Art place mats in the Crate & Barrel catalog? If you answered (a), do we have a genre for you.” – My favorite tweeter, Colson Whitehead, on what to write next.
“I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone. I was struck a few years ago when a friend of ours — an actress — was having dinner here with us and a couple of other writers. It suddenly occurred to me that she was the only person in the room who couldn’t plan what she was going to do. She had to wait for someone to ask her, which is a strange way to live.” – Joan Didion (via.)
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