June 2011
12 posts
“Art is the inner experience cultivated by the artist and conveyed to his...”
– Hossain Sabzian before a judge in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up.
On beginning again.
William Maxwell’s novel So Long, See You Tomorrow has this passage about a boy who moves with his mother after a divorce snuggled inside of it:
“Having taken away the dog, take away the kitchen—the smell of something good in the oven for dinner. Also the smell of wash-day, of wool drying on the wooden rack. Take away the early-morning mist, the sound of crows quarreling in the...
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PS. I’ve also been thinking about ways to turn the MFA into part writing course and part adventure course. Therefore future “MFA-style writing” would be idea and language driven but would be about Papua New Guinea and almost dying from poison darts instead of about new faculty hires and divorce.
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I’m sure some of you have heard of Amanda Hocking, the writer of bestselling paranormal romance ebooks who just signed a two-million dollar book deal with St. Martin’s Press. She was profiled in the New York Times the other day, which my friend forwarded to me today, agog at the $2Mil number. (You can read it here.)
The article talks about how her early attempts at novels were all...
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Is impulsiveness growing because, maybe now (with many “family planning” options available) more than ever, impulsive people are more likely to have children than non-impulsive people, and therefore the children will be impulsive because of either genetic causes or from learning impulsiveness from their parents? Do shy people now have fewer children because they can take care of their...
I feel like things are disappearing. Like the present is persistent in erasing the past. I must say that I have barely left the house in the past year—after years and years of moves (Florida, Singapore) and activities—and that the day-to-day sameness becomes like screen burn in on a monitor or TV screen. It is hard to imagine anything ever having been different, that I at one point didn’t...
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A wonderful piece of writing by William James:
“Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the site of a crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that...
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Here’s a good quote about how linear plotlines work with the viewer’s imagination by Will Wright, creator of Sim City, The Sims, and Spore that comes from a talk he gave with musician Brian Eno for the Long Now foundation. (The talk is available at fora.tv.):
One of my favorite scenes from Indiana Jones is from the beginning of the movie, where he’s running out of the temple...