It had something to do with death...

“To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies.  The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.” ― Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them <3

“To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies.  The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.”

― Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

<3

(via oliveryeh)

Source wordpainting

Reblogged from Word Painting

via Insane art formed by carving books with surgical tools:

Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed.

Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures. He also folds, bends, rolls, and stacks multiple books to create completely original sculptural forms.

“My work is a collaboration with the existing material and its past creators and the completed pieces expose new relationships of the book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception,” he says.

“The richness and depth of the book is universally respected yet often undiscovered as the monopoly of the form and relevance of the information fades over time. The book’s intended function has decreased and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. By altering physical forms of information and shifting preconceived functions, new and unexpected roles emerge.”

Dettmer is originally from Chicago, where he studied at Columbia College. He currently lives and works in Atlanta, GA.

More here: http://karanarora.posterous.com/insane-art-formed-by-carving-books-with-surgi

Reblogged from Better to live out one's absurdity

The Writer’s Job by Tim Parks

(Click above to read the full article.)

“It’s rather as if the spontaneous Romanticism of the nineteenth-century poets had become a job description; we know what a romantic is (his politics, his behavior patterns), we know that is the way to literary greatness, so let’s do it…In the first half of the twentieth century the decline of the gentleman publisher coincided with a rapid growth in the number of writers seeking to storm the citadel…The emergence of the agent signals an awareness that there is a clash between the idea of writing as a romantic, anti-establishment vocation and the need for the professional writer to mesh with a well-established industrial and promotional machine…It was at this point, in the 1980s, that the creative writing course took off and the figure of the career writer began to assert itself.

…

Again and again when reading for review, or doing jury service perhaps for a prize, I come across carefully written novels that “do literature” as it is known. Literary fiction has become a genre like any other, with a certain trajectory, a predictable pay off, and a fairly limited and well-charted body of liberal Western wisdom to purvey…Whatever in the future masquerades as a canon for our own time will largely be the result of good marketing, self-promotion, and of course pure chance…Is all this bad news? Only if one is attached to dreams of greatness…As Halliday concluded such ideas were simply not compatible with the era of the career writer.”  

“And for this it is a good idea to have some
Friends who write as well as you do, who know what you are doing,
And know when you are doing something wrong.
They should have qualities that you can never have,
To keep you continually striving up an impossible hill.
These friends should provide such competition as will make you, at times, very uncomfortable.”

Kenneth Koch, from “The Art of Poetry” 

Of course Henry Chinaski in Bukowski’s Women would disagree:

                   

Reblogged from Hours of Wealth

“The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” (USA) from William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, an Oscar short nominee, really touched upon the importance of this particular tumblr’s goal: the magic and power of story-telling. The animated books are personified into sensate bird-like creatures that the protagonist, an unlikely curator, sends out to people in the town who desperately need stories. A tornado’s wrath has torn down their town and sapped their well of hope. There is an adorable bit where a woman walks a book home on a leash.

The short was inspired by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton and The Wizard of Oz. I can see the inspiration of these three things at play - and it’s set in Louisiana so the background has that lovely french-southern decor. I got to see all the Oscar-nominated shorts at the IFC theater, but since these complete showings are a rare find, you can also view this one for free on iTunes or Vimeo, if you’re interested. ”Dimanche/Sunday” (Canada) was another good one, with a unique minimalist drawing style to express a child’s point of view. Italo Calvino’s “The Distance of the Moon” inspired the Pixar pick, “La Luna” (USA).