The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
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Kiana Khansmith
$LAYYYTER

roma★
NASA
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styofa doing anything
almost home
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cherry valley forever

Janaina Medeiros
Peter Solarz

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Today's Document
YOU ARE THE REASON

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One Nice Bug Per Day

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@mightblowup
The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972, dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
–Margaret Atwood
A 1966 profile of Cy Twombly in Vogue, showing the artist at his Roman palazzo, noted that in “certain quarters, where it is assumed that avant-garde American artists should live in avant-garde American discomfort,” he was “suspected of having fallen for ‘grandeur,’ and somehow betrayed the cause.” Two years earlier, Twombly had shown “Nine Discourses on Commodus,” an immediate response to Kennedy’s death in which gored and dripping roses, paired up like entrance and exit wounds, figure huge; and had been dismissed as a messy, reactionary, basically irredeemable classicist by those in favour of material austerity. His detractors, like the artist-critic Donald Judd, believed they saw the future in the spirit of minimalism, but Twombly saw through the future to the spectacular decline, and turned out to be right.
on Cy Twombly, who has been my favourite painter I guess since I fell for his grandeur seven years ago
Happy birthday, Cy Twombly
(via snpsnpsnp)
“The British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott believed artists were people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
Mary Ruefle, “On Fear” (via rabbitinthemoon)
“And yet I am starting to feel like life is not for having experiences so that therefore one can make deductions about life and one’s personality and then make up rules for the future by which one can live and therefore attain happiness and perfection.”
—Sheila Heti, From My Diaries
And another.
Hilton Als in conversation with T. Cole Rachel
I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life — not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.
Eileen Myles, “Universal Cycle.” The Importance of Being Iceland. (via winesburgohio)
do you have any tips for young writers?
Read widely, and deeply, and over again. Reading is not an avoidance of writing; I think it’s study. The more you read, the better you understand what language is capable of — specifically on a technical level, how it functions, or might be worked into functioning, in the telling of X. And discerning how someone else’s sentences work, or someone else’s poems break, or why precisely you need to go for a walk after reading someone else’s essay is not copy or emulation, but apprenticeship. (Frank McCourt: ”He says, Ah, boys, boys, You can make up your own minds but first stock them. Are you listening to me? Stock your minds and you can move through the world resplendent.”) Surround yourself with evidence of what language can do and it will agitate and add to your own perspective, which is the seat of your own voice.
Don’t think too much about audience. Write first of all for yourself, on behalf of what moves and matters to you, and maybe second of all for a few people you love. I think write to them, rather than for or at or, strictly speaking, about them? While I’m sure these are, in some sense, four distinct actions, I also suspect — I mean, I personally find — there’s a lot of overlap. These people you love might be writers, too, whose work and minds you admire, and whose reactions you trust; they might not be writers at all. But it helps to have a small, grounding faction outside of yourself: a spotting mechanism, not for approval but as a gauge of your own patterns.
Be prepared for rejection, of course. I would not put—especially in the context of just starting out—too much emphasis on publication, or really much at all. Don’t be in a rush. (Having said that, I’ve been in a rush before; it’s a good lesson and a good feeling, but learn it and move on.) Don’t bother trying to decode shades of rejection in a response. Instead, do try to sit through several stages of thinking something is Done. I don’t know if I know when something is done, but I’ve learned to ride out the exhilaration of having written a piece: to expect the doubt and not short-circuit it, to go back and reconsider, and to do this maybe, probably, several times. And on the question of rejection: it will happen a lot, and you can’t know the reason in each instance. A lot of extremely-competant-to-unimpeachable-to-truly-great writing is turned down because of space or length or outside/contractual deadline or notable similarity to something else recently accepted. When you are sending your work out, try to keep both these things in mind: that it may not be about your work, and that your work may not be ready.
Keep a list of passages from literature that move you. Make playlists of songs that round out or score what you’re trying to write, if that feels like a natural and adjacent organizing point re: themes and feeling – a mutable soundtrack to your narrative-in-progress, an inexact mirror. (But maybe don’t listen to the playlists while you write; I don’t know about that.) (I’m extremely unmusical, and not even adept at expressing what I’m responding to in music or why, but a song can lay me out for a day or more. Once, a friend who is widely artistically talented said she thought she might be so enamored of music in part because it eludes her creatively. I think this is right: the marooning comes about precisely because I lack musical talent or inclination, because I am so inarticulate about how other people’s talent operates and affects, because it would seem I am never able to do anything about [the feeling]. I am unequipped to respond; my reaction gets lodged. So on one hand, when I’m writing I’m often trying, in the context of my subject, to pin down, put words to, this actual feeling — the visceral lodging/dislodging — that music sometimes generates. On the other, I’m challenged by the dubious prospect of cultivating the feeling for effect, of learning how to generate it and deliver it to the page myself, from scratch or somewhat at will.) What I mean to say is music might be another check, like people. And this other check may not be music, but painting or photography or fabric or—.
This is advice is never far from me:
Eileen Myles
Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille
Elena Ferrante
Octavia Butler
On that last bit: make writing a daily habit, no matter how little time you may be able to give it. You will have to learn for yourself when to push through blockage or malaise or distractibility, and when to go for that proverbial or actual walk. Whatever your habit entails, keep at it. I’m excited for you. xo
I should say I’m thinking about this from the perspective and background of someone who writes, at least right now, mainly poetry and fiction. Hence the suggestion to take your time with publication, hence the emphasis on process over practicalities. It’s not that there are no practicalities attached to fiction or poetry; it’s just so unlikely that one is going to make a living at it — especially out of the gate, and even when you do get published (poetry!). So for a lot of people it’s inherently a side-joy (or, a main joy that dwells in the wings), whereas in nonfiction and journalism it’s arguably more possible, if still exceedingly difficult, to support yourself with that work.
If you’re writing nonfiction and are interested in freelancing, I can only say that I am also interested in those things and am not a person who could answer you how to do it. I hear it’s a good idea to train yourself to write quickly on things you might not care much about, in order to compile clips for a portfolio, to get paid; and to continue incubating the long work that does matter to you, the wings-dwelling main joy, on the side.
If you have a job, or jobs, that already allows you to make rent, that helps; consciously utilize the time outside of work to develop the aforementioned habits in whatever kind of writing you do. For what it’s worth and to whatever extent it’s a concern, I’m not convinced it’s important or necessary that that job be in media or publishing or the humanities or “the arts.” Of course connections can help, but they aren’t guaranteed by proximity, for one thing. Sometimes there’s clarity to be harnessed in being far away from other people’s writing during the day, too. And anyway, among the poets featured in the The New Yorker there are career writers and professors and editors; there are also surgeons and lawyers who have established poetry careers in tandem, and first-time contributors (to anywhere).
Oh how the prosaic, when given time to breathe instead of rushed into action — like chatter between two characters, for instance — can disclose life’s most electric pursuit: connection.
Durga Chew-Bose on Abbas Kiarostami (via lamuneca)
detail from Caravaggio’s Saint John in the Wilderness // 1604
How did everything go so wrong? How can I get myself out of this mess? Do something Do something Do something
Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963 (via luthienne)
Some writing doesn’t brush up against sentimentality as often as other writing. But whatever ‘bad’ edge your writing brushes up against, I think it’s important to touch it. You can always pull back from it, but at least you know where it is. It’s like when I was a dancer, we were always encouraged to fall in rehearsal, so that you could know what the tipping point of any given movement was. That way, when you did it on the stage, you could be sure you were taking it to the edge without falling on your face. It sounds like a cliché, but really it’s just physics — if you don’t touch the fulcrum, you’ll never gain a felt sense of it, and your movement will be impoverished for it.
Maggie Nelson, in response to ‘Is it important to risk sentimentality?’ in an interview with Genevieve Hudson for Bookslut (via arabellesicardi)
Always, still, misquoting this in my head.
(via durgapolashi)
“...in which he abandoned high-keyed colors.”
“The 1955 picture is dusky, but it retains a classic Rothkovian sizzle, with a lilac-gray atop, a sea-blue below, and a dominant black. The black can alternately seem to advance, as a clenched mass, and to recede, as infinite depth. For me, this gives the lilac a lyrical quality of heartbreak. You might register it differently, though. We are on our own with pre-1957 Rothko in a way that we’re not, for the most part, from then on.”
Katherine sent this to me from Peter Schjeldahl’s mini Rothko piece.
Good insult from Henry James
“You’re blasé, but you’re not enlightened. You’re familiar with everything, but conscious, really, of nothing. What I mean is that you’ve no imagination.”
Frank O’Hara, from Meditations in an Emergency
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth– we call it life.
Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays (via otherkinwords)