[narrativemag-blog]

Philosophers painted in the style of like-minded artists via Renee Bolinger.

[nprfreshair]

The man and the machine.

via doobybrain

[narrativemag-blog]

Hemingway's actual Royal Quiet Deluxe portable typewriter at his former Cuban residence, the Finca Vigia:

Photograph from Hemingway's Finca Vigia by Robert Beatty: http://narri.tv/14QhGUv

[narrativemag-blog]

Betty of Lilyfield has lived in the same house on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, for over seventy years. She has outlived her friends and family—everyone except her dog, Jasmin. "She is the epitome of 'the Aussie battler,'" says photographer Eszter Marosszeky. The entire photoset, "Betty of Lilyfield" by Eszter Marosszeky and David Matheson, may be seen here: http://narri.tv/13XrsBa

[buttonpoetry]

Neil Hilborn - “OCD” (Rustbelt 2013)

"She’d lay in bed and watch me turn the lights off and on, off and on… she’d close her eyes and imagine days and nights were passing in front of her."

Finally, finally, a high quality video of this poem.

[narrativemag-blog]

A touching poem, walking the intersection between love and obsessive compulsive disorder.

[narrativemag-blog]

As regards writers of genius whose greatness is ever the use and benefit to us, we should understand at once that, though they are far from being flawless, yet they all reach a more than human level.

Longinus, On the Sublime

[narrativemag-blog]

In her short story "Gargoyle," Joyce Carol Oates wonders what to make of loneliness:

Loneliness isn’t fashionable. It isn’t considered a subject one can talk about. There are people who brag about living alone, who speak in public about the joys of aloneness, but they fall silent if someone asks them about loneliness.

Read it here.

(Photography credit Pavel Tereshkovets.)

[penamerican]

Twenty-One Reasons Why English Is Hard to Learn

[narrativemag-blog]

Actor Tom Hanks on why he loves manual typewriters.

via New York Times:

The tactile pleasure of typing old school is incomparable to what you get from a de rigueur laptop. Computer keyboards make a mousy tappy tap tappy tap like ones you hear in a Starbucks — work may be getting done but it sounds cozy and small, like knitting needles creating a pair of socks. Everything you type on a typewriter sounds grand, the words forming in mini-explosions of SHOOK SHOOK SHOOK. A thank-you note resonates with the same heft as a literary masterpiece...

[narrativemag-blog]

Virginia Woolf's and Truman Capote's passport photographs via the Guardian.

[narrativemag-blog]

Aleksandra Crapanzano celebrates her mother's chocolate mousse and a world of chocolate far more inspiring than Charlie's Chocolate Factory:

Chocolate can transport you, maybe not always to faraway places, but certainly out of reality.

(Photography credit Berta Vicente Salas.)

[narrativemag-blog]

Ernest Hemingway's phonograph player, Royal Quiet DeLuxe typewriter, and desk at his Cuban residence, the Finca Vigía. The entire photo gallery is here.

[narrativemag-blog]

Long before Daniel Defoe became a novelist, he was a merchant and a political pamphleteer who defended, among other causes, the right to religious freedom for Protestants of all denominations, during a time in which Queen Anne, head of the Anglican Church of England, refused to allow religious dissension. On July 29, 1703, Defoe’s writing landed him in the pillory for several days, followed by a short term in prison (his release was quickly secured by a benefactor). In his later years Defoe would say of Robinson Crusoe: “All these reflections are just history of a state of forced confinement . . . it is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.” In the twentieth century Albert Camus, recognizing the potency of this literary credo, used it as an epigraph to The Plague, his allegorical novel about the Nazi occupation of France.

(Image credit: State Archives of Florida via Florida Memory)

[narrativemag-blog]

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects. (And in both cases there are similarities.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations

[narrativemag-blog]

Narrative Editors review James Alan McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, Elbow Room:

Part of the dramatic conversation in all McPherson’s stories is his intention to challenge the myth of whiteness and replace it with an understanding that we are all mixed race in one way or another. His stories thus unify and interpretively advance themes from the literary tradition of Faulkner and from African-American literature.

[narrativemag-blog]

Read an excerpt from Mentor by Tom Grimes. The memoir traces his long friendship with Frank Conroy, the legendary director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Like a novelist who never outlines a book, I’d never plotted my future. Instead, I trusted my intuition. Sometimes the results were good; other times, disastrous. Only one constant existed: I wrote. Writing was my center of gravity. If I quit, I’d implode. All my notebooks would become worthless. All my unfinished drafts: orphaned. The million words I’d written, however, insisted that I not give up. And since I couldn’t allow my doubt to overwhelm my work, at times I needed to glimpse the life I’d envisioned for myself. So I went to hear Frank Conroy speak.

[narrativemag-blog]

Do you like being drunk? Well hell no where’d you get such of a stupid idea? I like getting drunk being drunk isn’t much special . . .

—David Lee, from "Closing Suite: Last Call"

(Photography credit Terttu Uibopuu via The Tierney Fellowship.)

[tobeshelved]

Catcher in the Rye was published on this day in 1951. And I’ll always love this print by M. S. Corley.