“I haven’t been able to write since the moment I started thinking I could or should be making money as a writer.” Meritt Tierce with a refreshingly candid piece on writer’s block and how success doesn’t always negative the likelihood of failure.
Dog Eat Dog
There Is No End
“In the years before my book came out, I was writing frantically. I remember a week when I was working late at my job, late enough that the buses had stopped running and I had to take a cab home, and I still wrote into the night, trying to finish an essay I had promised an editor. Now I see that I was trying to race against time. I had believed, however irrationally, that there would be a moment beyond which my voice would be taken away from me and I would no longer be able to write.” On writing and tenacity.
I’m Tellin’ Y’all It’s Sabotage
You’ll never want to turn in a library book late again after seeing the spoof video of The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” featuring crime-fighting librarians.
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Space Invaders in The Smithsonian
Martin Amis isn’t the only highbrow fan of video games. As of last Friday, The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington has begun “The Art of Videogames,” which is “one of the first major shows to explore the artistic power of the medium.”
Book Cover Contests
Venus Febriculosa, currently judging entries for its Name of the Rose book-cover design contest, has opened up another contest, this one to design a “cover” for Eugenio Montale’s poem, “The Eel.”
Science Fictions and Realities.
What 2012 looks like, viewed from the perspective of science fiction. Where we are going, viewed from the perspective of science fiction. Where we have been, viewed from the perspective of science reality: Mars.
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Gastronomy
It’s not hard to find studies of the connection between creativity and alcohol. It’s a connection which great minds have remarked upon for centuries. But what’s less remarked upon is a more everyday relationship — the connection between great writing and food. In The New York Review of Books, Patricia Storace reads Sandra M. Gilbert’s The Culinary Imagination. (Related: Stephanie Bernhard tries out Hemingway’s recipes.)
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The Faces of War
Photographer Lalage Snow photographed Scottish soldiers before, during, and after their deployments to Afghanistan. The photographs show “the toll that fighting … takes on our troops.”
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News That Stays News
“Yes, they believed I was a dangerous person, unpredictable, and I observed that I really scared them. Sometimes I noted that the guards looked at me as judges. Their look translated to me as ‘gorilla, stay in your cage!’ When soldiers were off-duty, they came to gawk at me with a sense of wonder. Sometime they would throw me a piece of meat or something sweet, just like to an animal. The old EZ: an exciting and fascinating sight.” Ezra Pound reflects on his time in an Italian prison.
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