"Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust,
and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins
of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond
the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat:
shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed,
wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod,
creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch,
butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a
morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek."
-- David Foster Wallace,
The Pale King
"In the smaller room is a large bed he makes up himself, several record albums he rarely plays, a telephone that seldom rings." -- Gay Talese, "The Loser" via Damon Brown
"So you end up maximizing, rather than minimizing, the risks."-- "Woman's Work"
"After that, he's, well, a collector of experiences."
Pavilion, Chicago, Illinois
"Yet I don’t feel like a real writer. Both a screenplay based on a true story and a novel based on my own early life came grinding to a halt. Without being egotistical, I’ve been around long enough to know they are both excellent topics, great stories. But I just freeze up after three chapters or a couple of acts. I can’t seem to keep going. The bio-novel made me incredibly anxious, bringing up memories I don’t want to deal with but must to get them on the page. So I tried it as nonfiction, a pop-culture documentary, switching the focus somewhat and looking at events from a more journalistic angle. Nup." -- "Is Journalism Killing My Creativity?"
"You should never use camera to make your pictures.
You use yourself, your experience, to make the pictures with the camera.
Not the other way around." -- Antonin Kratochvil via The Click
Graffiti, Chicago, Illinois
"But writing a novel is an inherently strange exercise. It’s surreal to
work for years and years on a project very few people have seen.
Sometimes I feel like I’m in the grips of an incredibly intricate and
time-consuming delusion. So it’s comforting to know that some of the
novelists who inspire me also, of necessity, take their time." -- "Some Company for Slow Writers," Maud Newton
Porn Star, Las Vegas, Nevada
The most important thing you can do is write awesome stuff, no matter where it is published. Seriously, when people tell me they want to write profiles for the New Yorker, I’m like, "THEN GO DO IT. Have you heard of Blogger.tumblr.com?" I mean, there is absolutely nothing stopping any of us from spending three months with a subject and writing the definitive 10k word piece proving why they are important and fascinating. Except Homeland, bourbon, and laziness. So, shit, write a profile about a lazy alcoholic who watches too much TV. BOOM. Problem solved. (See: Susannah Breslin’s They Shoot Porn Stars, http://theyshootstars.com/). -- Alexis Madrigal, The Believer
"You don't get credit for being safe in life." -- Ice-T
"These are crucial questions for Harvard. But there are also other questions we need to ask ourselves: Do we value mostly students who resemble us in talent and personality and choice of interests? Do we remind ourselves to ask, before conversing with a student with artistic or creative interests, what sort of questions will reveal the next T.S. Eliot? (Do we ever ask, 'Who is the poet you have most enjoyed reading?' Eliot would have had an interesting answer to that.) Do we ask students who have done well in English which aspects of the English language or a foreign language they have enjoyed learning about, or what books they have read that most touched them? Do we ask students who have won prizes in art whether they ever go to museums? Do we ask in which medium they have felt themselves freest? Do we inquire whether students have artists (writers, composers, sculptors) in their families? Do we ask an introverted student what issues most occupy his mind, or suggest something (justice and injustice in her high school) for her to discuss? Will we believe a recommendation saying, 'This student is the most gifted writer I have ever taught,' when the student exhibits, on his transcript, Cs in chemistry and mathematics, and has absolutely no high-school record of group activity? Can we see ourselves admitting such a student (which may entail not admitting someone else, who may have been a valedictorian)?" -- "Writers and Artists at Harvard," Helen Vendler
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IMAGE]
I'm not haunted by what happened to me. I never had any
desire for vengeance. I never felt any need, even, for justice. Now I
feel if I say something about it, people try and use it in certain ways
and make it something that it's not. It is what it is to me. It
happened. And actually, I got breast cancer a year after, and I think
that scarred me worse than what happened in Egypt. When Egypt was over,
it was over. I got on a plane, I came home, and I was thousands of miles
away, and I had a choice. My choice was very rational. Are you going to
take the life that you've been given, or are you not going to live it?
Are you going to live it fully, freely — or are you not? Are you gonna
be a victim — or are you not? -- Lara Logan
But what really interests me ultimately is not to record the past, so much as how people live with the past and get on with it. There’s a kind of fetishization of memory in our culture. Some of it comes from the experience and the memorial culture of the Holocaust—the injunction to remember. And it also comes from the strange collision of Freud and human rights thinking—the belief that anything that is not exposed and addressed and dealt with is festering and going to come back to destroy you. This is obviously not true. Memory is not such a cure-all. On the contrary, many of the great political crimes of recent history were committed in large part in the name of memory. The difference between memory and grudge is not always clean. Memories can hold you back, they can be a terrible burden, even an illness. Yes, memory—hallowed memory—can be a kind of disease. That’s one of the reasons that in every culture we have memorial structures and memorial days, whether for personal grief or for collective historical traumas. Because you need to get on with life the rest of the time and not feel the past too badly. I’m not talking about letting memory go. The thing is to contain memory, and then, on those days, or in those places, you can turn on the tap and really touch and feel it. The idea is not oblivion or even denial of memory. It’s about not poisoning ourselves with memory.
-- Philip Gourevitch
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READ]
"Never look back unless you are planning to go that way." -- Thoreau
"It's really not fit for women," the media-affairs guy had said. "There's nowhere for you to sleep."
"Then we'll go," we'd said.
"That's where we wanted to be: the place not fit for women."
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LINK,
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Why stress out in some office wearing clothes you hate, when the REAL stress lies ahead, as we face an inescapable grave. *
You just have to keep on breathing because tomorrow the sun will rise and who knows what the tide will bring. -- "Cast Away"
"They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!" -- Lord Jim
