The Small Demons Blog: Maugham/Nietzche/Ledger -
Maugham/Nietzche/Ledger
I saw that Roy was not inclined to be amused. I was not annoyed, for I am quite used to people not being amused at my jokes. I often think that the purest type of artist is the humorist who laughs alone at his own jokes.
Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale
Our supreme insights must—and should!—sound like follies, in certain cases like crimes, when they come impermissibly to the ears of those who are not predisposed and predestined for them.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Why so serious?
Heath Ledger, as the Joker, in The Dark Knight
“One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It’s one of the oldest urges in mankind. It’s a way of stalling death.” — Carlos Fuentes (via booklover)
[video]
Poem by Larry Eigner.
(poetsorg)
Literary bad girl KOLA BOOF on race, writing & being Bin Laden’s mistress
(Photo by Senza Porter)
nthWORD: The Sexy Part of the Bible is one of the boldest, most original novels I’ve read over the past year. It’s heroine, Eternity, is an African supermodel cloned from an activist who was brutally murdered opposing unnatural skin pigmentation procedures similar to those used on Michael Jackson. How did you conceive this story?
KOLA BOOF: When my birth parents were murdered, my Egyptian grandmother Najet Kolbookek put me up for adoption because my skin was chocolate, so that was the beginning of an unusually intense and lifelong dance with Colorism and Eurocentrism as the norm. Many years later, when I learned about the Michael Jackson Skin-Bleaching pill being used by African teenagers, I felt very strongly that I had to write about it. The whole phenomenon of Black people trying to erase themselves—and the world’s denial of it—became a constant reminder of my adoption process with Unicef and my grandmother. Writing the book was my only way of having distance and perspective. Decades from now, people will claim they were against this form of subtle intra-racism. But today, most of us in the arts community deny it’s even going on. The average filmmaker or writer would prefer that Black beauty be represented by a lighter, usually mixed race image. Read more at nthWORD Shorts…
“The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free. That’s true creativity.” — David Mamet from On Directing Film
The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered.
W. W. Norton: Why do you think “consumed” is an ugly term? -
I think it’s an ugly term when applied to information. When you talk about consuming information you are talking about information as a commodity, rather than information as the substance of our thoughts and our communications with other people. To talk about consuming it, I think you lose a…
(Source: thebrowser.com)
“The infinitely small, when it reaches a certain point of perfection, is as great as the infinitely large.” — Jaun Ramón Jiménez from The Complete Perfectionist (trans. by Christopher Maurer)
“Writing is gratitude. It is like writing a thank you note to the world.”
— Pam Houston
read the full interview at full-stop.net (via wwnorton)
(via acandleandawick)
Our new tote bags are finally in! 100% cotton and a flush left logo. And yes, they’ll be available for purchase at AWP!
They considered emblazoning a Leonid Tsypkin sentence on this tote bag, but they ran out of fabric-space.
“…You run through your top ten erotic fantasies, ambition fantasies, revenge fantasies, global ratification fantasies. You run through them all until you bore yourself to death, basically, and the faculty that produces opinions and snap judgments and unrealistic scenarios for your own…
Vanessa Veselka (author of Zazen, pictured above) and Lidia Yuknavitch (author of The Chronology of Water) had a conversation for The Believer on the subject of writing violent female characters. Part 1/3.
VANESSA VESELKA: A woman once told me that she loved Zazen but that it suffered for want of “women’s mysteries.” She thought Della should be doing something crafty, like sewing, knitting, or embroidery, which could represent the “feminine space” within the world she was creating. Has anyone ever asked you to have your female characters knit?
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH: As it happens, on several occasions. I’ve been advised to employ tropes or devices of “women’s ways of knowing” that have indeed included quilting, weaving, and other forms of the magical/domestic craft-space. I do think there can be something magically subversive about domestic private spaces, but the feminine forms we have inherited from sanctified literature pretty much make me want to punch someone in the face. What’s deemed unsanctified is when women writers select scenes of violence or explicit sexuality to manifest “women’s mysteries,” whatever that is. There’s a great book called Shoot the Women First, which is a collection of interviews with women terrorists and resistance fighters. I wrote a short story called “Blood Opus” based on those interviews, and the story actually made a woman reviewer cry.
VV: Cry because of the deep joy she felt when she recognized herself? Or because you are a Satan Lady who says scary things?
LY: Satan Lady.
VV: That’s what I thought. Okey dokey, then.
LY: Psychic territories of violence, physical territories, psychosexual territories – are so under-represented in women’s literature as to be almost invisible. It’s odd, too, since so much of world literature is filled with these amazing women like Medusa, Eurydice, Lysistrata, Artemis and Kali, who could be great wells of inspiration for artistic production. It pisses me off that they aren’t more. For instance, birth is one of the most profound violences of life. The reproductive moment is the beginning of life at a death moment – the death of both sperm and egg to “create” the third term. So it isn’t that archetypes bursting with possibility don’t exist around us. It isn’t that we’re incapable of writing it: look at Marguerite Duras, Kathy Acker, Mary Shelley. Look at your book, Zazen. The market and readers don’t want to have it. I keep coming back to the idea that we have to teach readers how to read us.
VV: Duras is still far too unsung. I discovered her late. I’ll never get those pre-Duras years back.
LY: Duras insisted that desire and violence and sexuality are always already available in language. The sanctioned spaces of violence for women in American culture seem to be either sexualized, like the vixen or criminalized and insane, or women who kill their children. There are non-demonized spaces rising, too, like the soldier’s story, or the woman lawyer or politician, crap like that. But the spaces of violence which individual women artists create completely that disrupt those norms – where are they? Marni Kotak is great. She just gave birth to a baby boy in a gallery space.
VV: I feel like someone should have done that before now, don’t you? I mean, what took so long? And what if there had been a problem with the kid? Would people have blamed it on home birth or art?
“The only way is to annihilate all that’s been written. That can be done only through writing.” — Kathy Acker from My Mother: demonology, a novel
