Completely Mental

"You’re projecting" is always a dis. 

a disrespect.

a pointing finger that wags at the psychological undertones present in the words you just said

the words you just said with your own heart and your own lips. the sounds that you just thought were yours to make. the reaction yours to take.

Subliminally it’s not the case. For there are layers of association and self rejection that plumb the depths of insecurity even while the ticking, scheming brain is wide awake. 

In art we’re allowed to dream with open eyes. 

The references and associations, are ok. Wherever they come from, however interior or hipster or old school or passe. 

Having your own feeling is the point. The art evokes and what you make of it is what it is.

record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.

Ted Hughes on writing

1 Write only when you have something to say.
2 Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.
3 Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
4 If nobody will put your play on, put it on yourself.
5 Jokes are like hands and feet for a painter. They may not be what you want to end up doing but you have to master them in the meanwhile.
6 Theatre primarily belongs to the young.
7 No one has ever achieved consistency as a screenwriter.
8 Never go to a TV personality festival masquerading as a literary festival.
9 Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood, or you can choose not to.
10 The two most depressing words in the English language are “literary fiction”.

David Hare, writing tips.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night, dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.

Seamus Heaney

As a writer, I tolerate error, poor performance, failure. So what if I
fail some of the time, if a story or an essay is no good? Sometimes
things do go well, the work is good. And that’s enough.

It’s just this attitude I don’t have about sex. I don’t tolerate
error, failure—therefore I’m anxious from the start, and therefore
I’m more likely to fail. Because I don’t have the confidence that some
of the time (without my forcing anything) it will be good.

If only I could feel about sex as I do about writing! That I’m the
vehicle, the medium, the instrument of some force beyond myself.

I experience the writing as given to me—sometimes, almost, as
dictated. I let it come, try not to interfere with it. I respect it,
because it’s me and yet more than me. It’s personal and transpersonal,
both.

I would like to feel that way about sex, too. As if “nature” or “life”
used me. And I trust that, and let myself be used.

Susan Sontag

“As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks”

The time to worry is three months before a flight. Decide then whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying. To worry is to add another hazard. It retards reactions, makes one unfit… . Hamlet would have been a bad aviator.

Amelia Earhart - Wikiquote (via alecresnick)

Writing is an act of Courage: Notes From the First Year: Some Thoughts on Teaching at MIT

"But more than that, you need the physical courage to look at a blank screen, and write. What you write will generally be pretty awful — especially when you are young. And for the most part, this does not change as you age. The writing in your head may well be the sweetest music. But when you put it on to the page what you will get will likely only be some vague, mushy approximation."

“One of my students insisted that whereas in math, you could practice and get better, in writing you either “had it” or you didn’t. I told her that writing was more like math then she suspected.”

Writing is an act of Courage: Notes From the First Year: Some Thoughts on Teaching at MIT

Craigslist, a poem by Lulu Liu. 

*interruption*
type type type type
click
off

phone interactions

[gallery]

Paris Arcades -esque (Walter Benjamin style)

galeriachroma:

Tomas Saraceno na Hamburger Banhof em Berlin. Incrível.

[gallery]

craf-t:

[Tomas Saraceno]

uniquetemperament:

Tomás Saraceno’s Iridescent Plant Medium with Lamp, 2009

[gallery]

and we’re bouncin’

mylistofthangs:

Tomas Saraceno, External Stimuli.

Inside the white cube

(Inside Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008) Saraceno)

Saraceno

it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

Jhumpa Lahiri, My Life’s Sentences (via azspot)

On Interactive Lit and the fancy Media-Labby Writing happening at MIT Erica says, she always thought that she was the one who was supposed to arrange words into sequences, and then to sequence the sequences into larger sets thereafter.

Animals Are Passing From Our Lives

It’s wonderful how I jog

on four honed-down ivory toes

my massive buttocks slipping

like oiled parts with each light step.

I’m to market. I can smell

the sour, grooved block, I can smell

the blade that opens the hole

and the pudgy white fingers

that shake out the intestines

like a hankie. In my dreams

the snouts drool on the marble,

suffering children, suffering flies,

suffering the consumers

who won’t meet their steady eyes

for fear they could see. The boy

who drives me along believes

that any moment I’ll fall

on my side and drum my toes

like a typewriter or squeal

and shit like a new housewife

discovering television,

or that I’ll turn like a beast

cleverly to hook his teeth

with my teeth. No. Not this pig.

-Philip Levine

A snippet

            The corridor led into a column of rooms: each resembling the quiet corner of a living room. There were bookshelves densely packed with not books but people, what remained of them—their ashes encased in bronze book-like containers with book-like spines inscribed with their names. Perhaps the room was not a living room at all but a private study of somebody with money. I saw in a glass case his reading glasses. Beside them sat his framed portrait.

            Some rooms led into smaller corridors, their archways slightly different from one another. Cool cement, patterned with perennials—cinquefoil—five leaves and sometimes seven. I stood on the middle step of one and looked up at the tunnel’s skeleton. The vaulted supports were so richly decorated so that their ornament concealed their function, their necessity. The spaces in the ribbed tunnels were sometimes filled with the same book-like containers filled with ashes. Memories of years past concealed in the concrete structure. This was a destination for old souls, a place of meditation.