Post uit Parijs @postuitparijs - Tumblr Blog

Put your book covers on the wall where I can see them

Show me a man's bookshelf and I tell you who it is. There was a time (when a friend invited you for dinner) waiting at the kitchen tabel for him to finish his cooking, you stood up and took a look at his bookshelf. Russian literature. American thrillers. French philosophy. A bookshelf displayed the interests of its owner. Being so, it gave a small guide to his personality. And a whole list of conversation topics to choose from. Nowadays we're reading more and more on Kindle's, Kobo's, Nook's and other ereaders. The explanatory function of the bookshelf is disappearing.

We could print the covers of our ebooks on shining photo paper and put them on the wall above the kitchen table. That will be a beautiful way to replace the bookshelf.

#books #ebooks #kobo #kindle #nook #lit #literature

After a flight over Iceland and Greenland, we arrived in the Shenandoah valley. Morning coffee and green fields.

#virginia #shenandoah #iceland

Ode to café Léa

This is the café where I wrote, the hours I didn't have work on daytime -other than writing. Happy people. Good music. Coffee, cookie, glass of water. Sun in the afternoon. Photo's by bevibelieux and by maria bree.

#paris #writer #coffee #inspiration #art #lit #literature #café léa #music

'Evasion is the shadow side of overwrought explanation'

Evasion is the shadow side of overwrought explanation: dwelling on minutiae can mask a problem of unspeakable magnitude. In “Letter to a Funeral Parlor,” when Davis objects to the company’s use of the portmanteau word “cremains” in reference to her father -before his death, the company had called him her “loved one”- distress over vocabulary stands in for mortal rage. What is left out gives the shape to what remains. Fictionalizing real events, Davis says, has to do with the selection of material, in the way of a teen-ager recounting to her mother how an evening was spent: “We went over to Joan’s house and hung out and listened to music, and then we went to McDonald’s.” Not the part about the vodka in the orange juice, not the part about the making out. Not a lie, just a different story.

-Dana Goodyear, on Lydia Davis, The New Yorker March 17th 2014.

#lit #lydia davis #new yorker #writing #writer #art

Lydia Davis in the New Yorker. On living in the South of France, and reinventing a genre by fiercely trying to keep up with a circle of novelists and poets.

#lit #paul auster #france #writer #writing #lydia davis

Spring has begun. There's a lot of Garrett Leight California Optical in these pictures. A lot of beach, sea and sun as well.

Sources:

@nathaliehelgerud on We Heart It, ianflanigan, christianrod, futuristech-info, frozen-over, angelamarklew, ianflanigan, @saucyglossie, alacanno .

#garrett leight #california #venice beach #sun #spring

'Les toits haussmanniens incarnent l'iconographie parisienne.' View from one side of the rue marignan to the other side of the rue marignan. Photo by @_ewyk, #paris #rooftop #architecture (à Linklaters)

#paris #rooftop #architecture

writerandcoffee-blog-blog

These two pictures of yesterdaywasonly are called ‘Coffee break’, and ‘Busy days, slow nights’. The life of a writer is as the life of a reader. On daytime you need coffee breaks. At night you need a break from your coffee.

Writers and readers, you both need to read to get on to the next day.

#literature #kindle #ebook #art #lit #coffee #inspiration #writer

It says: 'Writer David Hanson during a quiet moment in a cabin in North Georgia, before starting the paddle from the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River to the Gulf of Mexico for the Who Owns Water documentary film. Photo by Andrew Kornylak for www.whoownswater.org'

Somebody commented on this photo: Nice moody setting for inspiration.

I guess inspiration should be stripped of its romantic meaning. A novel can be romantic, or inspiring in some spiritual way. However, inspiration in the sense of a working flow, is a place where your mind is free of trouble (bureaucracy, worries, to-do-lists) where you are able to concentrate and work hard.

So yes, this dark somewhat cleanish place could be that room of inspiration.

That place, you should organize it yourself.

Writers, stop putting the blame for your lack of work outside of your own, and don't think about procrastination as romanticism.

#david hanson #writer #cabin #georgia #chattahoochee #inspiration #coffee #art #literature #flickr #kornylak #highlight

Guernica: Did you feel any hesitation in writing from a woman’s perspective, a worry that readers or critics would be skeptical of the project?

Rabih Alameddine: I’m surprised how often I’m asked about being a man with a woman narrator. I’m not the first, nor will I be the last. It’s been done forever, but we seem to forget that. The whole notion of “write what you know” is not just boring, but wrong. Lately it seems like every novel has to be a memoir. I’m a boring person, but I’m a writer with a relatively vivid imagination. And when people ask me about how I find the voice of a woman, I tell them that my life is run by women. I’m very close to my family—my mother and my sisters. In some ways too close. When I’m around them, we can’t be separated, and then I want to kill them and they feel the same about me, in a good way. We interfere with each other’s lives regularly and I like that. There’s my agent, Nicole Aragi, too. I jokingly call her my dominatrix. If I don’t do what she says, she just calls my mom.

'It´s a whole people whatching it´s presidents'

Picture by @_Ewyk, Paris, december 2013.

#people #paris #presidents #hollande #france #sarkozy

Paris is the city you enter by train. I'll be leaving it by train also -for a trip to the Pyrénées in the French south-west.

Maybe I'll never get back.

My apartment is clean. This morning I packed the espresso machine that I bought two years ago, for the nespresso I ordered along with my pain-au-chocolat at the downstairs bakery, cost me too much money.

In the next two weeks I'll be completing a research project. I'll also finish some stories I've started to write when I first got to Paris, five and a half years ago.

Using my iA Writer Pro on a MacBook in an empty apartment, it'll look like the scene on this picture. Thank you yesterdaywasonly for this wonderful photograph.

#ia writer #macbook #empty #apartment #paris #train #writing #art #bakery #coffee #highlight

Shiver like a kinetoscope

Found this at the blog of the newyorker :

“Whole writing exercises are devoted to photographs: choose a picture and create a narrative from its visual content; provide a photograph and ask a writer to use a person or an object in it as a character or prop for a story. Both fiction and nonfiction writers walk with this crutch, hobbling their way through writer’s block or memory loss. Photographs that may deaden the prose of a fiction writer might enliven the work of an essayist; the same photographs that enable the precision of the journalist might inspire the whimsy of a poet.”

— Casey N. Cep on how the proliferation of photographs has changed writing: http://nyr.kr/1cnJxcM

It is true. Challenging is the part that comes after the interaction between words and images: putting the ideas, phrases and photographs in line and rythm. So it gets motion. Every writers story should shiver like a kinetoscope.

Thanks to marysiaghirardi for the picture of the train. Visit her blog, you won't regret it.