they were stars

At first they had difficulties with the camera. Instead of framing someone's face, as they intended, they often photographed his knees or feet. There were no windows in the mountain huts where they slept, and they had rarely seen television, so the idea of "framing"was utterly foreign to them: they had never seen their surrounding through anything. I asked them to carry a piece of paper with a hole in it and look through it at everything they came upon. Within a couple of weeks the problem of using the viewfinder was solved.  Wendy Ewald in the introduction to Magic Eyes; Scenes from an Andean Girlhood

an uncertain chimera

All right, but it's an unpleasant one. Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through. And then, but only then, the thing will go on its own power, it will hold the reins, and you need do nothing but hang on.

Cynthia Ozick in the Guardian

Photo: Johanna Burke in Freunde von Freunden

straight is the gate

What are your other inspirations? 
Aside from literary friendships and books and writing? I can admit to no others. Strait is the gate.

Cynthia Ozick in the Guardian

Margaret Kilgallen, Untitled, c. 2000 via SF Weekly

high delight

I love you to pieces, distraction, etc. Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger

Photo: Jessica Barensfel and Simon Howell on Freunde von Freunden

freaks and geeks

I love everything about Rookie and everything about this.

it's complicated, of course

I've been thinking about writing, how we create from life. It's complicated, of course. Stephen Elliott in today's Daily Rumpus.

Painting: Narangkar Glover, Shangri-La Girls School: A Thousand Stairs, 2010

leitmotif

The leitmotif is constant change. Nina Yashar in W Magazine.

Photo: The Sartorialist

ama

Nina Poppe via Horse Hunting

luck - is not chance

As an artist so much of one does is based on faith - in a belief that exceed or ignores society's interest. Roni Horn in a 2006 Keynote to the Graduating Class of the Iceland Academy of Arts

Roni Horn, Still Water (The River Thames for Example), 1999

uses for boys

And here's the cover, designed by Elsie Lyons at St. Martin's Press with photography by Tess Kongteattikul. I love Tess's work which reminds me of another favorite photographer, Olivia Bee. More about the book (January 2013) here and here.

of something was happening

...and our memories of the story are action-based; it burns in our mind as a shining scene with silverware and spilled wine, but the percentage of action lines might be really low. So the goal might be to cut out as much action as you can but keep the image-burn effect of something was happening. Ben Jahn

Photo: Memory Lake by We are Bandits

for books I like

Two close friends blurbed my first novel. I am forever in their debt, and I found the whole process a bit humiliating. No strangers were willing to blurb me on the strength of the book itself, and my editor asked many people, far and wide. The whole thing made me feel jaundiced and annoyed.

My later books were beautifully blurbed by a several generous fellow writers I barely knew—people I now adore and feel indebted to, although I still barely know them.

I happily, freely offer and write blurbs for everyone I know or sort of know or who know people I know, and even people I don't know if I like their books, which, come to think of it, disproves my assumption that all blurbs are personal. I write blurbs for books I like and people I like. Kate Christensen in an interview with The Awl

Painting: The Lantern Parade by Thomas Cooper Gotch via Books vs. Cigarettes

others who possess this urge

Simon likes to record things that do not officially exist, did not happen, and cannot be seen. Others who possess this urge generally write fiction. Simon sets out to photograph the impossible and the forbidden: posing the unjustly convicted at the scene of crimes they never committed for “The Innocents,” her breakout show at MoMA PS1 in 2003; capturing the braille edition of Playboy magazine, the CIA’s art collection, and a repository of nuclear waste in “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” her 2007 one-woman show at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and documenting every prohibited ­curiosity, counterfeit handbag, and drug confiscated from passenger luggage at JFK Airport in the space of five sleepless days and nights for “Contraband,” exhibited at Manhattan’s Lever House in 2010. Taryn Simon in W Magazine

Photo of the artist by Rineke Dijkstra for W Magazine

sometimes

Everything must not be fussed over. Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don’t get all writerly: “He opened the door.” There, it’s open. Amy Hempel, the Art of Fiction, No. 176 in the Paris Review

Photo: wall of my studio at Headlands

but at least we try

One is prepared for friendship, not for friends. And sometimes not even for friendship, but at least we try: usually we flail in the darkness, a darkness that`s not foreign to us, a darkness that comes from inside us and meshes with a purely external reality, with the darkness of certain gestures, certain shadows that we once thought were familiar and that in fact are as strange as a dinosaur.

Sometimes that`s what a friend is: the distant shape of a dinosaur crossing a swamp, a dinosaur that we can`t grab or call or warn of anything. Friends are strange: they disappear. They`re very strange: sometimes, after many years, they turn up again and although most have nothing to say to us anymore, some do, and they say it. Excerpt from "Friends are strange", in Between Parentheses by Roberto Bolaño. New Directions. 2011.p.135 via Sparks and Kicks

Shirt: Margaret Howell at Creatures of Comfort

or do i want to be you?

First this:

There is this German word,Lohmaunsheit, which describes a certain ambivalent kind of affection one may feel with particular others, be the acquaintanceship friendly or romantic - do I want to be with you, or do I want to be you? At its core it is the instinct that longs for being an entity, a closed circuit, that recognizes oneself in another but the other, whilst almost entirely alike, also possessing just a fractionmore of something unnamable but undeniably real and really lacking in oneself, just the missing bit to being a complete person. Lohmaunsheit is longing with equal force for both togetherness with and the annihilation of someone, because they are the same. That is fine so far, were it not for the appendix - per definitionLohmaunsheit is always unrequited. It is you as the external me and me knowing that to be true because the feeling is just too strong, yet you just not seeing it, and me knowing that this negates our mirroring on a fundamental level, but that impossibility seeming impossible in itself. That is its inherent tragedy.—Karolina Elyse Watson, Everything

And then this:

you guys. i’m sorry to announce that i made this whole thing up. i made up a german-sounding word and ascribed a random melancholic-pretty definition to it, made up a quote from a made up source by a made up author to describe it. i did it after i saw something similar about an icelandic word on my dash, and i thought to myself, “that’s so cool, even though they could have made that word up, how would i know, but what does that matter”, so i decided to try myself to see what happened. a bunch of likes and reblogs happened but nobody called me out on it and now i feel like a jerk because i’m writing this explanation unasked and because i mean i do think myself that it really doesn’t matter if a word or whatever is “real” or not as long as it resonates with you and gives you something, which incidentally is also what i think about authenticity in pop culture, e.g. lana del rey, so in hindsight it makes no sense that i did this in the first place. the end. From Herzschrittmacher

Photo: Chateau Marmont by Gia Coppola for Lula

yes.

angels in america

Act 1, Scene 6

First week of November. In the men’s room in the offices of the Brooklyn Federal Court of Appeals. Louis is crying over the sink. Joe enters.

JOE: Oh, um...Morning.

LOUIS: Good morning, Counselor.

JOE (He watches Louis cry): Sorry, I...I don't know your name.

LOUIS. Don't bother. A word processor. The lowest of the low.

JOE (Holding out hand): Joe Pitt. I'm with Justice Wilson.

LOUIS: Oh, I know that. Counselor Pitt. Chief Clerk.

JOE: Were you...are you OK?

LOUIS: Oh, yeah. Thanks. What a nice man.

JOE: Not so nice.

LOUIS: What?

JOE: Not so nice. Nothing. You sure you’re...

LOUIS: Life sucks shit. Life...just sucks shit.

JOE: What’s wrong.

LOUIS: Run in my nylons.

JOE: Sorry...?

LOUIS: Forget it. Look, thanks for asking.

JOE: Well…

LOUIS: I mean, it really is nice of you.

(He starts crying again)

Sorry. Sick friend…

JOE: Oh, I'm sorry.

LOUIS: Yeah, yeah, well, that’s sweet.

Three of your colleagues have preceded you to this baleful sight and

and you're the first one to ask. The others just opened the door, saw me, and fled. I hope they had to pee real bad.

JOE (Handing him a wad of toilet paper): They just didn't want to intrude.

LOUIS: Hah. Reaganite heartless macho asshole lawyers.

JOE: Oh, that's unfair.

LOUIS: What is? Heartless? Macho? Reaganite? Lawyer?

JOE: I voted for Reagan.

LOUIS: You did?

JOE: Twice.

LOUIS: Twice? Well, oh boy. A Gay Republican.

JOE: Excuse me?

LOUIS: Nothing.

JOE: I'm not...

Forget it.

LOUIS: Republican? Not Republican? Or…

JOE: What?

LOUIS: What?

JOE: Not gay. I'm not gay.

LOUIS: Oh. Sorry.

(Blows his nose loudly) It’s just…

JOE: Yes?

LOUIS: Well, Sometimes you can tell from the way a person sounds that...I mean you sound like a …

JOE: No I don’t. Like what?

LOUIS: Like a Republican.

(Little pause. Joe knows he’s being teased; Louis knows he knows. Joe decides to be a little brave)

JOE (Making sure no one is around): Do I? Sound like a…?

LOUIS: What? Like a…? Republican, or…? Do I?

JOE: Do you what?

LOUIS: Sound like a…?

JOE: Like a…?

I’m...confused.

Louis: Yes.

My name is Louis. But all my friends call me Louise.

I work in Word Processing. Thanks for the toilet paper.

(Louis offers Joe his hand, Joe reaches, Louis feints and pecks Joe on the cheek, then exits.)

Drawing: Kiki Smith, Silver Bird, 2006 at Brooklyn Museum

liquidity

My lover's love is an illiquid asset. Gleaned from Christian Nagler's Market Fitness.

Photo: Robert Kinmont, 8 Natural Handstands on view at BAM

believe in side projects

Believe in side projects. Tattly was a side project; swissmiss was a side project; CreativeMornings was a side project; TeuxDeux was a side project. These are all things that turned into revenue streams for me and made it possible to not have clients. I would never hire anyone who doesn’t have side projects. To me, that shows that someone has ideas, self-initiative, and can make things happen. Tina Roth Eisenberg on The Great Discontent

Photo: Tattly

today

At Headlands Center for the Arts.

Photo: Cybele Lyle's studio by In the Make

a standing ovation

A standing ovation can be extorted from the audience. A gasp cannot. True and False; Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, David Mamet

Photo: The Selby, Otto Sander and Monika Hansen

a thing I could see

She wasn't doing a thing I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. JD Salinger, "A Girl Like That"

Photo by Victoria Hannan

in the quiet way

She was beautiful, in the quiet way that lonely, unnoticed people are beautiful to those who notice them. Jedediah Berry via the ugly earring

Photo by Ashley Rose Helvey

happy 95% day

you.

this kind of muted stance

My work is all about living vicariously. I'm very easily embarrassed, and I think there's a lot of me that has a difficult time with people, period. All this angst, about myself, and about things I have no control over, is somehow in the work. I didn't really get English, and I lost my Russian. As far as expressing myself, I feel like I have bones in my tongue. Language is so crucial, but I think my pictures really do come from this kind of muted stance that I took. When you draw something, the drawing speaks for itself. Dasha Shishkin in an interview with Tina Barney, Vogue, June 2011.

Dasha Shishkin, Pity is an Agreeable Sentiment, Uplifting Like Military Music, c. 2007-2008

filly

blog and shop.

and good luck at it

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it. Joan Didion in a commencement address at UC Riverside via Inspiracioh

Photo: Rolf Henke's farm via freunde von freunden

i constantly questioned the ownership of sound

Watching: Todd Selby x Christine Sun Kim on Nowness.com

turning out shirts

Artists can change and move on and that's much more interesting than being like Chagall, who painted the same damn thing all his life. Don't you think? I think that's like turning out shirts. Dorothea Tanning in The Guardian, 2004

Photo: Inès de la Fressange via Miss Moss

someday i'll make it all up to you

I love how Jess tags and tracks the books she reads and I really loved her Top 10 at the end of the year. Hila has book reviews and M. has begun writing reviews as a way of thinking about what she's read. I've never tracked the books I read. My GoodReads shelf is more a mashup of books I've read, bought, bookmarked, heard about, thought about, whatever. And I buy (like Andrew Sean Greer says) many, many more books than I read. My bedside table reflects books I've started, not books I've finished, so I'll start tracking books I've finished here:

January 2012

Wonderstruck, Brian Selznick

Looking for Alaska, John Green

In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway

Where She Went, Gayle Forman

Fighting Fire, Caroline Paul

The Sense of An Ending, Julian Barnes

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sacred, Elana K. Arnold (Random House, Fall 2012)

Photo: Tegan wearing my favorite T-shirt from

Cali DeWitt and Blood is the New Black

i wasn't actually in love

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a kind of tender curiosity. The Great Gatsby

Photo: Rolf Henke, Freunde von Freunden

my imaginary self

is wearing this dress right now.

Mara Hoffman at Bona Drag

bread and butter

She loves bread and butter and wine and innards and cannot abide fussy eaters. Madhur Jaffrey on Judith Jones in Saveur

The Pleasures of Cooking for One, one of M's favorite cookbooks

a matter of infinite hope

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. The Great Gatsby

Photo: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel's flat in Freunde von Freunden

contents may have shifted

A new book from Pam Houston is due out next month.

Photo from: Contents May Have Shifted: A Novel

you have to take the dive

Maurice Sendak via Big Other

whatever the scenario

I'm bringing it up because I want to talk about rejection. I'm not saying Happy Baby is a great book, but it tries to be. If you want to create something great you have to be willing to make something that people dislike, that's the only way to find an audience who is in love with you. If someone loves it then someone else will want to tear it down because it puts certain conventions on display and there it is, what we think we know, sitting uncomfortably on a pedestal, as if under a searchlight, scratching at her neck. Stephen Elliott in The Daily Rumpus, January 8, 2012

Painting: Fathom No. 1, 2010, by Olive Jeffers

where since once we are

When I am feeling depressed and anxious and sullen
all you have to do is take your clothes off

From "Poem: A La Recherche de Gertrude Stein" by Frank O'Hara via Books vs. Cigarettes

Photo: Built in Suffolk, England by Haworth Tompkins via Cabin Porn

I enjoy the wanting

This year I gave a lot of gifts made by Wendy MacNaughton and last year I gave a lot of gifts made by mgealach. I also gave M. a copy of Of Recklessness and Water. And M. gave me things that only she could. Sometimes I bookmark a lot of stuff, like this Rye Bread and this t-shirt, but probably I enjoy the wanting more than the getting.

Photo via welcome back, oldtimer

all you have to do

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Ernest Hemingway

Gold bangle by David Neale via jokemijn

jack didn't know what was going to happen next

Jessica Serran, "I am waiting for something amazing to happen" (detail). Mixed media installation at West Oakland, CA train station via Art21 blog

the end

Edward Ruscha, The End, 1991; Eva Roucka; Woody Guthrie's New Year's Resolutions, 1942

the crocodile's snout in the lily pond

I frequently write about love and therefore about jealousy. It’s part of the deal; it’s what comes with love, for most people, in most societies. Of course, it’s also dramatic, and therefore novelistically attractive, because it’s frequently irrational, unfair, boundless, obsessing and horrible for all parties. It’s the moment when something deeply primitive breaks the surface of our supposedly grown-up lives—the crocodile’s snout in the lily pond. Irresistible. Julian Barnes in The Art of Fiction, No. 165, Paris Review

Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg, Of Recklessness and Water

a novelist's normal condition

But then, such is my nature—and I assume I share this with lots of other writers—I thought, What if I only have one book in me? So the second novel is always harder, though in my case it was at least quicker. I still find myself thinking, Well, I may have written seven or eight or nine novels, but can I do it again the next time? But I’m convinced that a high anxiety level is the novelist’s normal condition. Julian Barnes in The Art of Fiction: No. 165, Paris Review

Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg, Of Recklessness and Water

forty sixth at grace

has a new home.

i love you to pieces, distraction, etc.

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Catcher in the Rye

Photo: Mark McNairy cap toe boot via welcome back, oldtimer

pacing, pacing, pacing

You'd be surprised: all I ever think about in the years of revising a novel is "pacing, pacing, pacing." Andrew Sean Greer

Photo via welcome back, oldtimer

the tuesday interview: gene luen yang

I first read Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese when I TA'd a children's lit class as a graduate student and was, without reservation, completely blown away. He lives here in the Bay Area and right after that I had a chance to hear him read at SFPL and then again, this summer, I head him read as part of The Diversity in YA Tour. He strikes me as genuinely curious and is thoughtful and creative in ways that inspire my own work.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Gene Luen Yang: I've got three different projects going on right now.1. I'm doing a graphic novel continuation of Nickelodeon's popular animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender for Dark Horse Comics. I'm writing and a Japanese art team named Gurihiru is drawing. I'm a huge fan of the original cartoon, so I'm very excited about this. Of all the main characters, Zuko is my favorite. I relate to his struggle to do -- or even know -- what's right.

2. I'm writing a superhero comic for First Second Books. Sonny Liew is handling the art. The story is set in Chinatown in the 1930's. I can't say much more about the project at this point, but I'm super-excited about this one, too.

3. I'm writing and drawing a graphic novel about The Boxer Rebellion for First Second Books. I've been working on this one for years and years, ever since American Born Chinese came out. The Boxer Rebellion was a war that occurred on Chinese soil over a hundred years ago. At the time, the Chinese government was incredibly weak so the European powers were able to set up concessions all over China -- pieces of land that the Chinese government had no control over. A group of poor, illiterate teenagers from the Chinese countryside decided to take things into their own hands. They performed rituals that called down ancient Chinese gods to possess them. Then, emboldened by the gods' superpowers, they marched through China killing foreigners and Chinese Christians. There are many parallels between The Boxer Rebellion and what's happening in the Middle East today. Of all the projects I'm currently working on, this one is closest to my heart.

RQD: What art or artists interest you?

GLY: I have to confess, I'm pretty comics-y. I read a lot of comics and I am primarily inspired by other cartoonists. My musical tastes are lame. I mostly like pop music from when I was a teenager (late 80's, early 90's -- Rick Astley is totally underrated, as are the Fine Young
Cannibals). Even my movie tastes are comics-y. Like pretty much every other cartoonist, I love Studio Ghibli movies.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

GLH: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. As for prose books, I love Silence by Shusaku Endo.

RQD: What are you reading now?

GLY: I'm reading a collection of Father Brown short stories by G.K.Chesterton. I recently read The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. (I really wanted to read the Steve Jobs biography, but my library didn't have it so I settled for the biography of another Silicon Valley
tycoon.)

As I mentioned already, I also read a lot of comics and graphic novels. Comics that I've read in the past month or two: Picket Line by Breena Wiederhoeft, My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf, Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Merrick, Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol, a
volume of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that I borrowed from a friend, Chris Giarrusso's G-Man with my kids, and the new Wonder Woman comic from DC Comics.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

GLY: I read a lot of comic books. :) I also loved Orson Scott Card, Lloyd Alexander, Judy Blume, Clifford Hicks. Remember Clifford Hicks' Alvin Fernald books? I *loved* them when I was a kid. I wanted to be Alvin. I seem to be the only one, though. Nobody else my age knows what I'm talking about.

I remember reaching the end of the J section at my library and feeling lost in the adult section. That's when I latched onto comics. There wasn't much of a YA section when I was growing up.

Illustration: Still from Studio Ghibli via Cartoonbrew

you have to get accustomed to that

The only thing you can do is to guess, and to believe. Haruki Murakami in Bomb Magazine

Painting: Mark Rothko, Green Over Blue, 1956 via Books vs. Cigarettes

I am not me the horse is not mine

William Kentridge asks “how does one find a way of not necessarily illustrating the society that one lives in, but allowing what happens there to be part of the work?” William Kentridge via PBS Art21

Performance still: William Kentridge, I Am Not Me the Horse Is Not Mine, 2008 via Flavorwire

the tuesday interview: peter orner

I used to carry my copy of Peter Orner's Esther Stories around with me in case I ever got stuck somewhere without something to read. I could open it up to any page and just fall in. Then I heard he was going to read at Dog Eared Books, so I packed in with a bunch of other people and followed along with my book in my lap. Now he has this amazing new book, but he still feels like our own neighborhood storyteller.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?
Peter Orner: I have a new novel out, so I wish I could say I was working at the moment. I think I'm in the process of saying goodbye to characters I've spent so much time with. They are slowly fading away to me and having lives of their own as they get read (or not read) by other people...What interested me for so many years (the book took about seven) was how my people seemed constitutionally incapable of learning from the past.

RQD: What art or artists interest you?
PO: The South African artist William Kentridge I find him amazing; his huge imagination, the way he uses history and politics in his work.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?
PO: A novel by great Nebraskan novelist Wright Morris called Plains Song, I re-read it every year. This and Moby Dick. And also the sea stories of Alvaro Mutis.

RQD: What are you reading now?
PO: Right now I am reading The Book of Ebenzer Le Page, one of the strangest novels I've ever come across, and loving it. Its about a guy on an island off the UK who remembers nearly every single detail about his life. I can't get enough of it.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?
PO: The Phantom Tollbooth. I often think about it at least every day, how easy it seemed in that book to pass from one reality to another. When we're a kid and we read a book like this, we almost take it for granted. These days it's like I'm wandering around looking for that weird and wonderful tollbooth. Where did it go?

Drawing: William Kentridge via Duckrabbit Speaks