#twice told

[literatureonline]

You can't fix someone's broken heart. Only time can do that. And you can't take on someone else's guilt. All you can do is love them, and let time take care of the rest.

Bruce Coville, Saying No To Nick (Twice Told)

[owleyesreviews]

Twice Told: Original Stories Inspired by Original Artwork by Various Authors

Twice Told: Original Stories Inspired by Original Artwork by Various Authors

Date Finished: March 24 2013

Date Published: April 6th 2006

Publisher: Dutton Juvenile

Genre: Short Stories/Anthology 

Pages: 259

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Summary (From Goodreads): 

For this intriguing collection, Hunt sent nine hauntingly surreal images to 18 authors and asked each one to write a story based on the image. Sometimes the same picture can tell two different stories, as this collection shows.

Review:

This book was so unique and brilliant. I didn't think I would love it as much as I did, but like I said  it was brilliant.

Story-line: There were many different stories in this book. Some I loved, and others I didn't really like, but for me the pictures are what brought everything together. I loved love loved the idea of bringing authors together with these pictures. They were beautiful too.

Characters: This part is hard to do with an anthology. Like I said before, it is hard to bring this all together because there are many different characters. I did have favorites though. They were all just beautiful.

Writing: I LOVED the writing style of many of these stories. There were only two stories that I didn't enjoy the writing style. It opened me up to many new authors that I love, because of their writing style.

Originality: This is the most original book I have read in a very long time. I loved this idea, I only wish there were more.

Ending: The closing story could have been better. 

Extras: Every story was not perfect, but I did really enjoy everything. I felt that the book was perfect anyway because nobody is perfect, so it is bound to have flaws. Beautiful book.

[danisom]

Stephanie Washburn’s “Twice Told”

By Danielle Sommer, April 24, 2012, DailyServing

What makes a tale “twice told”? For Nathaniel Hawthorne, who published a collection called Twice Told Tales, these were stories that had already lived one life by having been previously printed.  And for William Shakespeare, who coined the phrase, a “twice-told tale” was the most tedious tale of the lot, borrowed and uninspired. Shakespeare, however, had not met Stephanie Washburn.

In the case of Washburn’s “Twice Told,” on view at the Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, the tales that repeat belong to the endless stream of images and narratives available through the television set.  Washburn, a painter, breaks the fourth wall by reacting to this stream, turning the television on and smearing her screen with not just paint, but everyday household items like butter, tape, bread, and potatoes. She then sets up a Hasselblad digital camera, and snaps a picture.

The resulting images, which Washburn calls “television drawings,” don’t look much like drawings; nor is the television screen easy to spot. From a distance, many look like abstract expressionist paintings. The spaghetti strewn across the screen in Reception 2, 2011,and Reception 9, 2011, initially calls to mind the gestures of Jackson Pollock, although thoughts of the fleshy materiality and subversive humor of many 1970s feminist artists follow quickly.

For many of the images, including Reception 4, 5, and 13 (all 2011), it’s almost impossible to make out any specific background image beyond a field of color. The television’s tell, of course, is its glow, and that glow permeates Washburn’s images: warm in some and cool in others, at times penetrating swathes of paint and at other times merely strengthening the shadows of dimensional objects.

This interplay of the television image and Washburn’s interventions occurs not just formally (in terms of light and shadow, or scale), but figuratively. In Reception 1, 2011, a rubber-gloved hand creeps onto the scene from the bottom left of the image; blending almost perfectly with a group of three hands in the background, except for the fact that the intervening hand (the gloved hand) has a deep shadow to emphasize its physicality.

The beauty and power of Washburn’s work comes from how effortlessly the images marry both formal and conceptual references to a variety of traditionally “opposed” relationships: digital and physical, visceral and cerebral, touch and sight. It’s no wonder that the series is called “Reception” – Washburn’s photographs don’t just rework old narratives and images into new forms, but challenge us to consider our role as media consumers in the 21st century.

[un-honeyed]

And suddenly we began exchanging several e-mails per workday — at first about apartment-related things, and then other kinds of e-mails, joke-telling e-mails, the kind that only lead to one thing: stifled laughter. And stifled laughter, as everyone knows, leads to one thing: a crush.

Modern Love: A Family Fairy Tale, Twice Told