tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13008280487835239532024-03-12T17:22:31.010-07:00Open a VeinFlo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.comBlogger165125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-51452458039026981042023-07-07T11:10:00.000-07:002023-07-07T11:10:43.980-07:00Double Troubles Part 4<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-fm9FI5-7YAz0OQB3NXD8x-jD4pq98Y4lGNi5RrFK1wmlxadDIm6APwHVi31vsmZVMU21e8r_6u0J60jRuzdEZuNP8jeVclM--bJZ27HTxQgj2t8UH84_JLfrUYiXgAbVOiYuWs5BDCmrCddEZSgUfg-yMcIZHqX-1ZQxOZjK7Xg9xq7e9Cd-FBouECjH/s3000/Doubles%20Meadowood.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="3000" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-fm9FI5-7YAz0OQB3NXD8x-jD4pq98Y4lGNi5RrFK1wmlxadDIm6APwHVi31vsmZVMU21e8r_6u0J60jRuzdEZuNP8jeVclM--bJZ27HTxQgj2t8UH84_JLfrUYiXgAbVOiYuWs5BDCmrCddEZSgUfg-yMcIZHqX-1ZQxOZjK7Xg9xq7e9Cd-FBouECjH/s320/Doubles%20Meadowood.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">A friend
recently told me he’d been up to Carmel North Hospital and thought he’d seen me
in the distance. “Was that you?” he asked. “Are you OK?” I assured him I was
fine but that wasn’t me he’d seen—it was probably my double.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">We’re all
supposed to have at least one doppelgänger—a “double walker” who so closely
resembles us even a close friend would have difficulty spotting the difference.
Was the woman my friend saw a Flo from another timeline that intersected with
ours for a moment? A long-lost twin the ‘rents neglected to tell me about for
some reason? An alien who found my appearance appealing for a disguise? A clone
from a secret laboratory under Carmel North?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Here is a
fun “A Doppelgänger Field Guide” featuring possibilities I hadn’t thought of:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><a href="https://medium.com/the-nib/know-your-double-7f7b029ae71e" target="_blank">https://medium.com/the-nib/know-your-double-7f7b029ae71e</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">John has
seen my doppelgänger a couple of times. It’s a few days before Christmas, 1979.
I start wrapping presents and discover the Stretch Spider-Man we bought for three-year-old
Eoin is leaking! This is something he really wants, so that means trekking to
Children’s Palace and exchanging it without Eoin figuring out what we are
doing. (This is a BIG present for him, a surprise.) John drops me off at the
entrance to the store on West 38<sup>th</sup> St. and he and Eoin wait in
the car not far from the front. That night I’m wearing a distinctive grey
cape-coat my mom had given me the year before. I didn’t wear it often because,
without sleeves, it was impractical for winter weather.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">The store is
crowded with holiday shoppers coming and going, and John is surprised to see me
come out after only 10-15 minutes. Eoin sees me, too, and yells, “It’s Mommy!”
They know it’s me because I am wearing the unusual cape-coat, besides being the
right height and general size with long brown hair holding a shopping bag that
contains a box the right size for the toy. John says, “Let’s go get Mommy!” and
pulls up to the entrance, keeping an eye on me the whole time. But then the
figure steps behind a pillar—and disappears. He parks the car, gets out, and starts
looking around. Then he walks over to the front window and sees me at the
Service desk—halfway through a line of forty customers! Why did I go back into
the store? How did I get back in there so fast? The figure he’d seen looked
exactly like me. Weird.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Fast forward
to summer of 1993. I’m job-hunting, laid off from running a mainframe for AARP
(the whole shebang shut down, leaving more than 100 people out of a job). I don’t
relish the idea of working downtown but figure what the heck, I’ll apply at
Merchants Bank for a job in MIS. This time, John sits alone in the food court
on the third floor of Claypool Court on the NW corner of Washington and
Illinois and waits for me to come up the escalators. After business was taken
care of, we planned to get a coke and share fond memories of times spent there
with Eoin--one of our favorite things to do as a family was to go downtown and
shop at magazine stores that stocked periodicals we couldn’t get at your
friendly neighborhood drugstore—computer magazines like Antic, Analog, ST
Express and ST World, esoteric ones like Weird Tales and Magical Blend,
etc.—not to mention <i>Fangoria, Famous Monsters,</i> and <i>Cinefantastique</i>!
(And it was really exciting when the stores selling computer magazines stocked
an issue with one of John’s articles in it!) Then we’d tromp over to the food
court at Claypool Court for a coke and share our finds.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Anyhow, that
day I’m looking very spiffy, wearing new dusky rose slacks and fuchsia suit
jacket with a nice flowery blouse, good shoes, long brown-gray hair curled,
leather purse over my shoulder and carrying a briefcase. I’d say my hair was my
most distinguishing feature (besides the elan with which I carried myself). So,
John is waiting for me, doesn’t know how long I’ll be because I might get an
interview if they take one glance at my application and decide they must speak
to such a qualified candidate immediately, and he sees me riding the first
escalator. Same outfit, purse, briefcase, curled hair. <i>Oh, good</i>,<i> </i>he’s
thinking,<i> she’s done</i>. He watches me come up the second escalator
and get off on the third floor. Then I step behind a post—and promptly
disappear! John is looking all around, wondering, <i>What the heck? Did
she go into a shop? </i>If one of the stores there was currently stocking a
magazine with one of his articles, we’d go in together.<i> </i>A few minutes
later he looks down and sees me—same rose and fuchsia outfit, good shoes,
leather purse, briefcase, curled hair—coming in the entrance <i>on the
ground floor</i> heading for the escalator. There wasn’t time for me
to go down two floors—by escalator, elevator, stairs, or bungee cord—and leave
the building and come back in and why would I do that in the first place?
Strange. (Hey, maybe my double got the job at Merchants, because they never
called me in for an interview.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">I always
wonder, if it was my double either time, how did she know exactly what I was
going to wear when I didn’t even know myself until the last minute, going
through clothes in the closet.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Traditionally,
doppelgängers are bad omens but I’m not really bothered by the idea—as long as
they don’t get too close! I wonder how difficult it would be to impersonate me
and take over my life—scary thought!<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">And what
would I do if I met my double face-to-face? What would <i>she</i> do?
Would she share my philosophical take on the situation and start asking me a
zillion questions or attack me as an impostor?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">John has met
several people who have encountered his doppelgänger and has written several
blogs about it. One guy insisted he was that person, that they hung out all the
time, and why was he lying! The guy almost got violent. Here are his blogs
about his experiences:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">https://johndstanton.blogspot.com/2010/07/double-troubles-part-1.html<br />
https://johndstanton.blogspot.com/2014/10/double-troubles-part-2-imposter.html<br />
<a href="https://johndstanton.blogspot.com/2015/11/double-troubles-part-3.html" target="_blank">https://johndstanton.blogspot.com/2015/11/double-troubles-part-3.html</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;">Have you
ever encountered your double or someone who has? Has anyone ever treated you
strangely because they thought you were someone else? That would be a horror
story…</span></span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-84819965948921446482022-05-22T18:18:00.017-07:002022-05-22T18:34:23.495-07:00Wise words<p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEmUJWfCebkifjnlsnuyUbe0AkeQS-D7JcBo65ogQAZD17X1jal0G5EsKjwhbi2mpTJW2WHV2-NNLTrmiBa7c7SI9ItpgATolxdJkE2BQpu_tbZXH4wWHPMfJQTi51SbLoB98BjLK8fHWm16UMGkTpJGZ6MwAHupHorT-I9RL2LVtTj3Y0eVdlmOX95w/s1920/typewriter2%20PD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1920" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEmUJWfCebkifjnlsnuyUbe0AkeQS-D7JcBo65ogQAZD17X1jal0G5EsKjwhbi2mpTJW2WHV2-NNLTrmiBa7c7SI9ItpgATolxdJkE2BQpu_tbZXH4wWHPMfJQTi51SbLoB98BjLK8fHWm16UMGkTpJGZ6MwAHupHorT-I9RL2LVtTj3Y0eVdlmOX95w/s320/typewriter2%20PD.jpg" width="320" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on writing from authors born May 23:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American journalist, critic, and women's rights
advocate Margaret Fuller (<i>Woman in the Nineteenth Century</i>) (1810-1850):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate
outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to
the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its
impressions.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American children’s book author Margaret Wise
Brown (<i>Noisy Book</i> series, <i>The Runaway Bunny, Goodnight Moon, The
Color Kittens</i>) (1910-1952):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In this modern world where activity is stressed almost
to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked. Yet
a child's need for quietness is the same today as it has always been—it may
even be greater—for quietness is an essential part of all awareness. In quiet
times and sleepy times a child can dwell in thoughts of his own, and in songs
and stories of his own.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A good picture book can almost be whistled. ... All
have their own melodies behind the storytelling.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is a loving way with words and an unloving way.
And it is only with the loving way that the simplicity of language becomes
beautiful.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A child's own story is a dream, but a good story is a
dream that is true for more than one child.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to
write naturally.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don't think I'm essentially interested in children's
books. I'm interested in writing, and in pictures. I'm interested in people and
in children because they are people.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I wish I didn't have ever to sign my long name on the
cover of a book, and I wish I could write a story that would seem absolutely
true to the child who hears it and to myself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English children's book author Susan Cooper (<i>The
Dark is Rising</i> series, <i>The Boggart, King of Shadows</i>) (b. 1935):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The truth is that every book we read, like every
person we meet, has the capacity to change our lives. And though we can be sure
our children will meet people, we must, must create, these days, their chance
to meet books.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poets find truth by writing about what they love.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Any great gift of power or talent is a burden ... But
there is nothing to be done. If you were born with the gift, then you must
serve it, and nothing in this world or out of it may stand in the way of that
service, because that is why you were born and that is the Law.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from German-born American writer Ursula Hegi (<i>Floating
in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River</i>) (b. 1946):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don't write for an audience. I write for myself. And
if I imagine an audience at all, it's the characters, but I know that I would
keep writing even if no one ever published me again, even if no one ever read
me again.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">"Now the purpose of her stories had changed. She
spun them to discover their meaning. In the telling, she found, you reached a
point where you could not go back, where-as the stories changed—it transformed
you, too.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American poet, translator, and essayist Jane
Kenyon (<i>From Room to Room, Constance, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening
Come, Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, A Hundred White Daffodils</i>)
(1947-1995):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A poet's job is to find a name for everything; to be a
fearless finder of the names of things.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we
all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell
the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time.
Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good
sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the
phone off the hook. Work regular hours.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a
line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Israeli religious author Yehuda Berg (<i>The 72
Names of God: Technology for the Soul, The Power of Kabbalah</i>) (b. 1972):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Words are singularly the most powerful force available
to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of
encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and
power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to
humiliate and to humble.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Good ideas are a dime a dozen. What counts is
completion. Look at your life and all the half-finished projects sitting on
your shelf. Commit to taking on one of these ideas and finishing what you
started.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American non-fiction writer Nicolas Cole (<i>Confessions
of a Teenage Gamer, The Art and Business of Online Writing</i>) (b. 1990):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Give away 99% of your best writing for free. Monetize
the last 1%.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In the game of Online Writing, volume wins.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The Golden Intersection of great writing is: Answering
The Reader’s Question by Telling Them An Entertaining Story<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You are not the main character in your story. The
reader is.</span></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-41486348062375813602022-05-15T19:19:00.000-07:002022-05-15T19:19:12.420-07:00Wise words<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji-RMepKZhEQVc955i8pKilJ9_MLBeMfXzd3FqwLs8YNz3-O0jFncYF-pM0Ranjl367TTRY9qQtO4pck0vNobREiYxjoi5Hb-0ZiWjer5kmIdIw-0guZi3d-KfCXcFNlNuo_-Cef0qq7IN8oPvJEkObo1BmrVHIt43N5EpXSFiwLRIKzNkrdJeSWCQ0A/s1920/books%20on%20shelf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji-RMepKZhEQVc955i8pKilJ9_MLBeMfXzd3FqwLs8YNz3-O0jFncYF-pM0Ranjl367TTRY9qQtO4pck0vNobREiYxjoi5Hb-0ZiWjer5kmIdIw-0guZi3d-KfCXcFNlNuo_-Cef0qq7IN8oPvJEkObo1BmrVHIt43N5EpXSFiwLRIKzNkrdJeSWCQ0A/s320/books%20on%20shelf.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on reading and writing from authors born May
16:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English novelist and short-story writer H. E.
Bates CBE (<i>Love for Lydia, The Darling Buds of May, My Uncle Silas</i>)
(1905-1974):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The basis of almost every argument or conclusion I can
make is the axiom that the short story can be anything the author decides it
shall be;...In that infinite flexibility, indeed lies the reason why the short
story has never been adequately defined.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Studs
Terkel <i>("The Good War": An Oral History of World War II</i>)
(1912-2008):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very
being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one
generation to another.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American poet, essayist, and feminist Adrienne
Rich (<i>A Change of World, The Diamond Cutters, and Other Poems, Diving into
the Wreck, On Lies, Secrets and Silence, Atlas of the Difficult World</i>)
(1929-2012):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The moment of change is the only poem.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot
avoid cheating truth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Lying is done with words, and also with silence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through
stone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When a woman tells the truth she is creating the
possibility for more truth around her.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To write as if your life depended on it; to write
across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged;
sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence—words you have
dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry can open locked chambers of possibility,
restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of
language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the
universe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to
see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I believe that words can help us move or keep us
paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something—a
great deal—to do with how we live our lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American young adult fiction author Bruce Coville
(<i>The Magic Shop</i> series, <i>My Teacher Is an Alien</i> series, <i>I Was a
Sixth Grade Alien</i> series, <i>The Unicorn Chronicles, Shakespeare Retellings</i>)
(b. 1950):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But, really, why does anyone create? You feel a...a
restlessness inside, a need to make something new, something no one has ever
seen before. You want to add to the beauty and the richness of the world with a
gift, an offering that is uniquely yours. It's an act of selfishness and
generosity, all rolled into one.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Every book is like starting over again. I've written
books every way possible—from using tight outlines to writing from the seat of
my pants. Both ways work.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American self-help author Richard Carlson (<i>Don’t
Sweat the Small Stuff... and it’s all Small Stuff</i> series) (1961-2006):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Reading is a gift. It's something you can do almost
anytime and anywhere. It can be a tremendous way to learn, relax, and even
escape. So, enough about the virtues of reading. Time to read on.</span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-74209651594206170182022-05-08T09:23:00.000-07:002022-05-08T09:23:08.044-07:00Wise words<p></p><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmvIVkSoMzEb4_0Ycyvm6A-htBhoe2z7r-uTiXz9djNz-Iwb_wI2RPzHmfY0gLHLud0gudP59ayNK6bXFEO1NJ6MV9T4OFY7qaT_O-kYA8KD2XImifBF2poFeJ0RkD2e__iR2l-KgK2ukCCAue7gIdIJigyzTzznDRlAgxcQB7Mpv5w7xnOyOxESGm6w/s1920/words-have-power.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1478" data-original-width="1920" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmvIVkSoMzEb4_0Ycyvm6A-htBhoe2z7r-uTiXz9djNz-Iwb_wI2RPzHmfY0gLHLud0gudP59ayNK6bXFEO1NJ6MV9T4OFY7qaT_O-kYA8KD2XImifBF2poFeJ0RkD2e__iR2l-KgK2ukCCAue7gIdIJigyzTzznDRlAgxcQB7Mpv5w7xnOyOxESGm6w/s320/words-have-power.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born May 9:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Spanish philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset (“I
am I, and my circumstance”) (<i>España invertebrada, La rebelión de las masas</i>)
(1883-1955):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power of
man. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God
forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The poet begins where the man ends. / The man's lot is
to live his human life, / the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American author and illustrator of children’s books
William Pène du Bois (<i>The Twenty-One Balloons, Bear Party, Lion</i>);
co-founded <i>The Paris Review</i> (1916-1993):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Half of this story is true and the other half might
very well have happened.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English Tony-winning dramatist Alan Bennett <i>(Beyond
the Fringe, The History Boys</i>); also noted for <i>A Private Function, Prick
Up Your Ears, Single Spies, The Madness of George III, Talking Heads, The Lady
in the Van</i> (b. 1934):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Books are not about passing time. They're about other
lives. Other worlds.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to
have read and often thinks they have.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The best moments in reading are when you come across
something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had
thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone
else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as
if a hand has come out, and taken yours.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its
indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not
care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were
equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a
republic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met
within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's
imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one
had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one
the kindness by writing them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my
mind. I try to root things out.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's
kept rigidly under control.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You don't put your life into your books, you find it
there.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Serbian American Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet Laureate
Charles Simic (<i>The World Doesn't End</i>); also noted for <i>Selected Poems
1963-1983, Unending Blues </i>(b. 1938):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite
equal the experience behind them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a
dark alley.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">One writes because one has been touched by the
yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our
own lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">At least since Emerson and Whitman, there's a cult of
experience in American poetry. Our poets, when one comes right down to it, are
always saying: This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt. Truth,
they never get tired of reiterating, is not something that already exists in
the world, but something that needs to be rediscovered almost daily.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The religion of the short poem, in every age and in
every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem
rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of
a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up
in a dark universe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There's no preparation for poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A poem is an instant of lucidity in which / the entire
organism participates.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves
and the Other.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a
blanket.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Words make love on the page like flies in the summer
heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we
need art.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that
floats.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham
(<i>The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994</i>); also noted
for <i>The End of Beauty, Sea Change, P L A C E, From the New World: Selected
Poems 1976-2014, Fast, Runaway</i> (b. 1950):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What poetry can, must, and always will do for us: it
complicates us, it doesn't soothe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The primary function of the creative use of language—in
our age—is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the
living tissue of responsibility alive.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how
apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love,
it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness,
and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I think I am probably in love with silence, that other
world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it. Because
there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two
separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only
our hearing fails.</span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-52722919025470441822022-05-01T20:31:00.002-07:002022-05-01T20:32:38.139-07:00Wise words<p></p><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7g30N3kqCA9KYwIbnNpvYKtEYd-gkmqTkwTQfqMftv-GMnLKbjFKWl37EA_rTHQos33VgRxgG36xtQ_LOsw_haUKENee_XV4LZ1ppFL67e7MAPpzTqp3xX5j7cUqS2xP-isHgNOacxE5LHofPZDaIhY8vxUuKoH8AT3I6PLP5U2Ra9Io-vtOzCnfIYw/s1920/boy%20readingPD.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1271" data-original-width="1920" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7g30N3kqCA9KYwIbnNpvYKtEYd-gkmqTkwTQfqMftv-GMnLKbjFKWl37EA_rTHQos33VgRxgG36xtQ_LOsw_haUKENee_XV4LZ1ppFL67e7MAPpzTqp3xX5j7cUqS2xP-isHgNOacxE5LHofPZDaIhY8vxUuKoH8AT3I6PLP5U2Ra9Io-vtOzCnfIYw/s320/boy%20readingPD.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born May 2:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from German poet Novalis (<i>Hymns to the Night,
Spiritual Songs</i>) (1772-1801):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the
magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the
ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the
finite as infinite.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil
of order.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been
active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American detective fiction writer Martha Grimes
(Richard Jury series, Emma Graham series) (b. 1931):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">You can't be blocked if you just keep on writing
words. Any words. People who get “blocked” make the mistake of thinking they
have to write good words.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">“Polly was a writer of many deadlines. There were the
ignorable deadlines, the not-to-be-taken-too-seriously deadlines: the
deadlines-before-the-deadlines deadlines, and finally, the no-kidding-around
deadlines. She set these various dates, she'd told him, to fool herself."
(<i>Rainbow's End</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I read somewhere that we never completely forget a
thing, that there are the imprints of everything we’ve ever seen or done, all
of these tiny details at the bottoms of our minds, like pebbles and weeds that
never surface from a river bottom.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I love stories. I just enjoy telling stories and
watching what these characters do—although writing continues to be just as hard
as it always was.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">There are people who read Tolstoy or Dostoevski who do
not insist that their endings be happy or pleasant or, at least, not be
depressing. But if you're writing mysteries—oh, no, you can't have an ending
like that. It must be tidy.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I'm constantly battling writer's block; it usually
takes me two hours to write anything.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Writing is an antisocial act.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American romance novelist Anne Stuart (<i>Ice
</i>series<i>, The House of Rohan</i> series, <i>Banish Misfortune, Falling Angel,
Winter's Edge</i>, 100 + more); received Romance Writers of American Lifetime
Achievement Award (b. 1948):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The beginning of a story can come from absolutely
anywhere. A line in a song. A dog food commercial. A painting. A bad movie (bad
movies are quite often good inspiration – you watch them and start thinking
about how they could do it right). <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I day dream. I scribble notes and ideas in a notebook,
so that I have a general form for what I’m going to be writing. And then I jump
into it, feet first. Definitely no details, no outlines, just vague scenes.
Scenes do come into my head like a movie, but the weird thing is, I’m such a
writer I tend to fantasize in words. I’m not kidding.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Characters always take on a life of their own, god
bless them. Since I don’t plan too much ahead I’d be royally screwed if they
didn’t. Sometimes they go in the wrong direction, and then I have to rein them
in, but usually they go places that are fascinating and unexpected and move the
story along in exciting ways.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">... in order to survive that childhood, I took refuge
in fantasy – in reading, and in telling myself stories. And not for a moment
would I trade it in for a peaceful, serene life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">If we don't risk it all, we may as well not write at
all.</span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-10327407749642239822022-04-24T19:36:00.003-07:002022-04-24T19:36:44.978-07:00Wise words<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBAH-oqe1zBPcf1IXReOr6Tcv7jJpFeAIcKbKRmYS2FRYuB99BxeSeiqbu8qI_9iYHutxUwwqcPeKFCDNUJz-XqsVAxnwO5Y1A-m_kx67A7azfO6L2AEzzBM9F6v9r28p5jHPuu8OpzjUWP925JyqPXP69ToNbMLEGCMA7D9hCa0A9scMoyfilm5q7Tg/s1920/book%20stack%20PD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1271" data-original-width="1920" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBAH-oqe1zBPcf1IXReOr6Tcv7jJpFeAIcKbKRmYS2FRYuB99BxeSeiqbu8qI_9iYHutxUwwqcPeKFCDNUJz-XqsVAxnwO5Y1A-m_kx67A7azfO6L2AEzzBM9F6v9r28p5jHPuu8OpzjUWP925JyqPXP69ToNbMLEGCMA7D9hCa0A9scMoyfilm5q7Tg/s320/book%20stack%20PD.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born April 25:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from British poet, fiction writer, playwright, and
editor Walter de la Mare (<i>Songs of Childhood, Poems, Memoirs of a Midget,
Crossings, Come Hither, Collected Stories for Children</i>) (1873-1956):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">That is one of the pleasures of reading—you may make
any picture out of words you can and will; and a poem may have as many
different meanings as there are different minds.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All day long the door of the sub-conscious remains
just ajar; we slip through to the other side, and return again, as easily and
secretly as a cat.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American author Maud Hart Lovelace (Betsy-Tacey
novel series) (1892-1980):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and
hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this?
I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the
writing on them will be.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I cannot remember back to a year in which I did not
consider myself to be a writer, and the younger I was the bigger that capital
"W."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Spanish novelist Corín Tellado ((<i>Boda
clandestina, Incomprensión, Lucha Oculta, La Novia viuda, Desde el Corazon, El
Testamento</i>); wrote more than 4,000 books (1927-2009):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I'm not a romantic or write romance novels. I am
positive and sensitive, and I write novels of feelings, which is not the same.
For me, the novel can be sentimental, it does not bother me that I am
pigeonholed in the pink novel, but it is evident that many ignore that the pink
denomination comes from when the covers of the novel were of that color. Love
never goes out of style and although my novels may resemble each other, they
are all different. Heartbreak is what is most present in them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To insinuate he taught me censorship, because he said
things clearly and that was rejected. There were months that I was rejected up
to 4 novels. Some novels came with so many underlines that there was hardly any
black handwriting left. I was taught to insinuate, to suggest rather than to
show. I learned to tell the same thing but with subtlety, so I never left
anything to say.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I have sacrificed my life to literature. I hurt
myself. But I will stop writing, when my head falls on the machine. I don't
give up.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and
author J. Anthony Lukas (“The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick,” <i>Common
Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families</i>)
(1933-1997):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All writers, I think, are to one extent or another,
damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I firmly believe that any good journalist must
essentially be temperamentally an outsider. I don't think full sense of
belonging and security is conducive to creativity.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If the noun is good and the verb is strong, you almost
never need an adjective.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet Laureate Ted
Kooser (<i>Delights & Shadows</i>); also noted for <i>Sure Signs, One World
at a Time, Weather Central, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, House Held
Up By Trees</i>) (b. 1939):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The poem is the device through which the ordinary
world is seen in a new way—engaging, compelling, even beautiful.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There are mornings when everything brims with promise,
even my empty cup.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There's nothing wrong with delighting in what you do.
In fact, most of the fun you'll have as a poet will come about during the
process of writing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">a happy birthday this evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the
darkness. I could easily have switched on a lamp, but I wanted to ride the day
down into night, to sit alone, and smooth the unreadable page with the pale
gray ghost of my hand<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If I don't take the risk, I'll wind up with a
bloodless poem. I have to be out there on the edge.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English poet and journalist James Martin Fenton (<i>Terminal
Moraine, A Vacant Possession, The Memory of War, Children in Exile: Poems
1968-1984, All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim,
Manilla Envelope, Out of Danger</i>) (b. 1949):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones
into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It
stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be
done.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if
you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm,
rhyme, simple subjects—love, death, war.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas,
such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace:
one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don't see that a single line can constitute a
stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For poets today or in any age, the choice is not
between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The
choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the
developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line—all the
fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">An aria in an opera—Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for
example—gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a
large amount of variation and repetition. That's the beauty of it. It's not
taxing to the listener's intelligence because if you haven't heard it the first
time round, it'll come around again.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American novelist and memoirist Darcey Steinke (<i>Up
Through the Water, Suicide Blonde, Jesus Saves, Milk, Sister Golden Hair, Easter
Everywhere</i>) (b. 1962):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When you write you have to reside in the unknown for
as long as possible.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American novelist Seth King (<i>The Summer
Remains, All We Ever Wanted</i>) (b. 1989):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If eyes are windows into the soul, books are rabbit
holes into the imagination.</span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-28116890410682255732022-04-17T07:32:00.011-07:002022-04-17T07:36:52.323-07:00Wise words<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY6rl5LTSgSM2FUVHKLVhCGf8sGnK3uIiDcbIGB7dy0xWAUL7miNhVHcGM8tg-3YR_vpms6fJII0hU8Owv-0ws9mzHBHgWOgRf6SEb1ivUb4eRIhmDUf4dVHfk3BaGdqqg79uYHeUt8fM7JpAQhFPfJdOtmeZE5aSFoPuSX9AHoMy_LxBnV_XLNv9EnQ/s1920/band-silhouettePD.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="626" data-original-width="1920" height="115" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY6rl5LTSgSM2FUVHKLVhCGf8sGnK3uIiDcbIGB7dy0xWAUL7miNhVHcGM8tg-3YR_vpms6fJII0hU8Owv-0ws9mzHBHgWOgRf6SEb1ivUb4eRIhmDUf4dVHfk3BaGdqqg79uYHeUt8fM7JpAQhFPfJdOtmeZE5aSFoPuSX9AHoMy_LxBnV_XLNv9EnQ/w340-h115/band-silhouettePD.jpg" width="340" /></a></div></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born April 18:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from English philosopher, writer, critic, editor,
actor, and scientist George Henry Lewes (<i>The Biographical History of
Philosophy, The Leader, The Life and Works of Goethe, Actors and Acting,
Problems of Life and Mind</i>) (1817-1878):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Personal experience is the basis of all real
Literature.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Insight is the first condition of Art.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible
by imagination.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate,
or to amuse.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">All great authors are seers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">No man was ever eloquent by trying to be eloquent, but
only by being so.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Endeavour to be faithful, and if there is any beauty
in your thought, your style will be beautiful; if there is any real emotion to
express, the expression will be moving.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or
upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists,
but belongs in varying degrees to all men.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The public can only be really moved by what is
genuine.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Good writers are of necessity rare.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Speak for yourself and from yourself, or be silent.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American journalist, novelist, and playwright
Richard Harding Davis (<i>Harper's Weekly, Gallegher and Other Stories, Soldier
of Fortune, Ransom's Folly</i>) (1864-1916):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a
new way or a new thing in an old way.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from English-born American conductor Leopold Stokowski
(Philadelphia Orchestra) (1882-1977):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Music comes from the heart and returns to the heart...
music is spontaneous, impulsive expression... its range is without limit...
music is forever growing... music can be one element to help us build a new
conception of life in which the madness and cruelty of wars will be replaced by
a simple understanding of the brotherhood of man.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The highest reaches of music come thrillingly close to
the central core and essence of life itself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I believe in a passionately strong feeling for the
poetry of life—for the beautiful, the mysterious, the romantic, the ecstatic—the
loveliness of Nature, the lovability of people, everything that excites us,
everything that starts our imagination working, LAUGHTER, gaiety, strength,
heroism, love, tenderness, every time we see—however dimly—the godlike that is
in everyone and want to kneel in reverence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">As a boy I remember how terribly real the statues of
the saints would seem at 7 o'clock Mass</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">—before</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;"> I'd had breakfast. From that I
learned always to conduct hungry.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">It's hard to put into words the impact of the perfect
lyric, melody or contagious beat that moves you in an unexpected way. Authors,
composers and artists have tried—and here we've rounded up our favorite quotes
that help to begin forming structure around such an unspoken universal force.
Which are most meaningful to you? If you had to sum up the power of music and
sound in one sentence, what would you say? "A painter paints pictures on
canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Hungarian-American Oscar-winning composer Miklós
Rózsa (<i>Spellbound, A Double Life, Ben-Hur</i>); also noted for <i>Double Indemnity,
The Lost Weekend, The Killers, The Red House, The Asphalt Jungle, Lust for
Life, The Power, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes</i> (1907-1995):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Emotions in a film come from elements that may be
completely asymmetrical, like a kaleidoscope. Music is the element that keeps
the different elements together, because it has continuity and rhythm. Music is
the most abstract element in a film, full of impressionistic effects, but it
usually has the most symmetry. That is why music should underline drama, not create
it. It may be even worse today, the use of what in Hollywood is called
wall-to-wall music, but even then many producers and directors did not
understand the importance of silence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I believe in music as a form of communication; for me
it is more an expression of emotion than an intellectual or cerebral crossword
puzzle... I am a traditionalist, but I believe tradition can be so recreated as
to express the artist’s own epoch while preserving its relationship with the
past.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a name="_Hlk101080040"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American
experimental writer Kathy Acker (<i>Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High
School, Empire of the Senseless</i>) (1944-1997):<o:p></o:p></span></a></p>
<span style="mso-bookmark: _Hlk101080040;"></span>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Women need to become literary "criminals,"
break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws
prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Well, I think writing is basically about time and
rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off
of it. And the riffs are about timing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The only reaction against an unbearable society is
equally unbearable nonsense.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart
the repressing machine at the level of the signified.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you
wouldn't bother to read it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead,
and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">First of all, writing at best—certainly fiction
writing—more and more I think is magic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">A novel is a book with a lot of pages.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish-American poet and critic
Ilya Kaminsky (<i>Dancing in Odessa, Deaf Republic</i>) (b. 1977):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I believe that no great lyric poet ever speaks in the
so-called “proper” language of his or her time. Emily Dickinson didn’t write in
“proper” English grammar but in slant music of fragmentary perception. Half a
world and half a century away, Cesar Vallejo placed three dots in the middle of
the line, as if language itself were not enough, as if the poet’s voice needed
to leap from one image to another, to make—to use Eliot’s phrase—a raid on the
inarticulate. Paul Celan wrote to his wife from Germany, where he briefly
visited from his voluntary exile in France: “The language with which I make my
poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Erase everything you have written, Mandelstam says,
but keep the notes in the margin.</span></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-85880470298858551662022-04-10T15:53:00.004-07:002022-04-10T15:54:31.273-07:00Wise words<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKkmOUhHBZJI3kMv3A5FubWwm8oD6qYjsX7hyHULzKH2mx6iJkDfpxJk5VfhPH37u8xjvBdIpo4sTP9MgzPaBVLGpYYtMBDdYNOLDLkMhBKddpFkfYlat9zBEhGctQ6NccdDR5FDcvWmoLpeWEMlgqZVoAyH-icv8vGo0yrE_XihZpnPrb2nrFTFkMVg/s1920/library%20Dublin%20PD.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKkmOUhHBZJI3kMv3A5FubWwm8oD6qYjsX7hyHULzKH2mx6iJkDfpxJk5VfhPH37u8xjvBdIpo4sTP9MgzPaBVLGpYYtMBDdYNOLDLkMhBKddpFkfYlat9zBEhGctQ6NccdDR5FDcvWmoLpeWEMlgqZVoAyH-icv8vGo0yrE_XihZpnPrb2nrFTFkMVg/s320/library%20Dublin%20PD.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born April 11:</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from English essayist and poet Christopher Smart (<i>The
Student, The Midwife, The Hilliad, A Song to David, Jubilate Agno</i>)
(1722-1771):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">For I bless God in the libraries of the learned and for
all the booksellers in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Awake before the sun is risen, I call for my pen and
papers and desk.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Polish-born American journalist, humorist,
screenwriter, and social scientist Leo Rosten (<i>The Education of H*Y*M*A*N
K*A*P*L*A*N, The Joys of Yiddish, Captain Newman, M.D., The Power of Positive
Nonsense</i>) (1908-1997):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">A writer writes not because he is educated but because
he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the
need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The
writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or
praised or even loved.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Words must surely be counted among the most powerful
drugs man ever invented.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that
he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of
literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand
novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long,
long time between James Thurbers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The only reason for being a professional writer is
that you can't help it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Canadian-born American Pulitzer Prize-winning
U.S. Poet Laureate, essayist, critic, and translator Mark Strand (<i>Blizzard
of One</i>); also known for <i>Sleeping with One Eye Open, The Monument, Hopper</i>
(1934-2014):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than
prose.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally,
in the end, pleasure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional
notions of what is beautiful.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I tend to like poems that engage me—that is to say,
which do not bore me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry is, first and last, language—the rest is
filler.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American screenwriter-director John Milius (<i>Magnum
Force, Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian, Red Dawn, Rome</i>) (b. 1944): <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I may not be the strongest guy or the most well armed,
but you can put me in a room with a pencil and a piece of paper and I can kill
anybody.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Writing requires a great deal of skill, just like
painting does. People don't want to learn those skills.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Most artists think they're frauds anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Also, they don't understand—writing is language. The
use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It
requires a skill of learning how to use language.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Films are always pretentious. There's nothing more
pretentious than a filmmaker.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I was never conscious of my screenplays having any
acts. It's all bullshit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">No, you're either born a writer, a storyteller, or
you're not.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from English journalist, broadcaster, and author Mark
Lawson (<i>Front Row, Mark Lawson Talks to…, The Guardian, Bloody Margaret:
Three Political Fantasises, The Battle for Room Service, Idlewild</i>) (b.
1962):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Critics are giving marks for originality, acting,
photography and scripting, while mass audiences are more drawn to familiarity
of genre, stars they would like to have sex with or plots that are more likely
to make their dates have sex with them. Reviewers are doing their day's work,
cinema-goers are escaping from theirs: this leads to an inevitable difference
of response. It is, though, wrong to conclude that reviewers are completely
useless. Books, movies and shows may be critic-proof, but the egos and psyches
of the people who make them very rarely are.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from English singer-songwriter Lisa Stansfield (Blue
Zone<i>, Affection</i>, "All Around the World," <i>Real Love, So
Natural, Lisa Stansfield, Face Up</i>) (b. 1966):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">You have to say no to a lot of people and when a lot
of people are telling you what you're doing is a bit rubbish you just have to
have the courage to say “no it isn't” and believe in it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I did work incredibly hard but I think there's a
certain element of luck.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">People say to me about my music “it got me through college,
it saved my marriage, it helped me to come out.” It's wonderful to be part of
someone's life in a big way.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The power of music is a wonderful thing. It can make
us happy, make us cry. It can make us forget and make us remember.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Business people want things to be safe but that's
rubbish to me. In music nothing should be safe.<o:p></o:p></span></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-28979422402721262992022-04-04T05:53:00.001-07:002022-04-04T05:53:33.800-07:00Wise words<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDAqVUVDc025r6jolDak1eb2wFrqPphMk6ZQrcKpVfezO4d6c6gD1DleBRZSEr9TLbDe8OpgPFW_LlLomwBMKMjF5QRBEHUGg4mvi-ADo_wDt4gTxAcMMjYDdv3c8l6VBo4FgA7DA3FgIBe5isNZjsjQUvvOKve5c7yeKVerYcLIcLo7_LdHQpwtn9EA/s1920/musical%20notesPD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDAqVUVDc025r6jolDak1eb2wFrqPphMk6ZQrcKpVfezO4d6c6gD1DleBRZSEr9TLbDe8OpgPFW_LlLomwBMKMjF5QRBEHUGg4mvi-ADo_wDt4gTxAcMMjYDdv3c8l6VBo4FgA7DA3FgIBe5isNZjsjQUvvOKve5c7yeKVerYcLIcLo7_LdHQpwtn9EA/s320/musical%20notesPD.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts about Art from creative people born April 4:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from French Fauvist painter Maurice de Vlaminck (<i>Sur
le zinc, L'homme a la pipe, La danseuse du Rat-Mort, La Seine a Chatou</i>)
(1876-1958):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted,
but not explained.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I try to paint with my heart and my loins, not
bothering about style.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I heightened all the tones, I transposed in an
orchestration of pure colors all the feelings I could grasp. I was a tender
barbarian filled with violence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's
prescription; one must be sick to believe them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I wanted to burn down Ecole de Beaux Arts with my
cobalts and vermilions and I wanted to express my feelings with my brushes
without troubling what painting was like before me... Life and me, me and life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Painting was an abscess which drained off an evil in
me. Without a gift for painting I would have gone to the bad... what I could
only have achieved in a social context by throwing a bomb... I have tried to
express in art.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When I get my hands on painting materials I don't give
a damn about other people's painting... every generation must start again
afresh.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and
biographer Robert E. Sherwood (<i>Idiot’s Delight, Abe Lincoln in Illinois,
There Shall Be No Night, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History</i>); also
known for the Oscar-winning <i>The Best Years of Our Lives</i> (1896-1955):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive,
imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile,
something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">He must be independent and brave, and sure of himself
and of the importance of his work, because if he isn't he will never survive
the scorching blasts of derision that will probably greet his first efforts.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English-born American dancer, teacher, and
choreographer Antony Tudor (1908-1987):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I would like to tell all dancers to forget themselves
and the desire for self display. They must become completely absorbed in the
dance. Even in a classical variation there should never be any thought of a
dancer doing a variation—he should become identified with it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Sometimes I feel as if sections of my ballets were
done for me—that I didn't do them myself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker
Marguerite Duras (<i>Hiroshima mon amour, India Song, L’Amant</i>) (1914-1996):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more
...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace
them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A book consists of two layers: on top, the readable
layer ... and underneath, a layer that was inaccessible. You only sense its
existence in a moment of distraction from the literal reading, the way you see
childhood through a child. It would take forever to tell what you see, and it
would be pointless.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole,
in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be
without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to
find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book.
Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something
terrible, terrible to overcome.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath
is put back into life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Men like women who write. Even though they don't say
so. A writer is a foreign country.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Tony-winning actor Elizabeth W. Wilson (<i>Sticks
and Bones</i>); also noted for <i>Patterns, The Threepenny Opera, Morning's at
Seven, Salonika, Nutcracker: Money, Madness & Murder</i> (1921-2015):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When I was about 8, I used to go into one of the rooms
in the mansion, and I would open a magazine like the ‘Ladies Home Journal,’ and
I would see these characters on the pages and then become them, talking back
and forth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I always felt the play came first. If it didn’t touch
me, I’d say forget the part.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I had no desire to be a star. I wanted to be a
character actress and be able to do all kinds of parts and work on a lot of
things. That was my unconscious choice. I wanted to be an undercover actress.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Grammy-winning poet, memoirist, and
civil rights activist Maya Angelou (<i>On the Pulse of Morning, Phenomenal
Woman, A Song Flung Up to Heaven</i>); also known <i>for I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings</i> and <i>Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie</i>
(1918-2014):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story
inside you.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space
between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Any book that helps a child to form a habit of
reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You can only become truly accomplished at something
you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing
and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off of you.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from South African jazz trumpeter and composer Hugh
Masekela ("Grazing in the Grass," <i>Sarafina! The Music of
Liberation, Jabulani</i>); also noted for "Soweta Blues," "Bring
Him Back Home" (1939-2018):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don't think any musician ever thinks about making a
statement. I think everybody goes into music loving it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Whatever you go into, you have to go in there to be
the best. There's no formulas. It's all about passion and honesty and hard
work. It might look glamorous, but it takes a lot of hard work. The blessing
with the arts is that you can do it forever.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Irish blues-rock guitarist Gary Moore (Skid Row,
Thin Lizzie, "Parisienne Walkways," <i>Still Got the Blues, After
Hours</i>) (1952-2011):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you are an expressive player, people can feel that.
It is an emotional thing and becomes an extension of yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Lots of kids when they get their first instrument
hammer away at it but they don't realise there are so many levels of dynamics
with a guitar. You can play one note on a guitar and it really gets to people
if it is the right note in the right place played by the right person.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I wasn't really worrying too much about what anybody
thought: if you do that you shut yourself down.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I think that a lot of people are going so wrong by
analysing music too much and learning from a totally different perspective from
the way I learned. I mean, I just learned by listening to people. People I
learned from learned by listening to people.</span></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-84625239773439452352022-03-27T08:28:00.028-07:002022-03-27T11:16:37.861-07:00Wise words<p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEEztgoMzpB4oSGf5d0c46VkQw1qTRYdrlz5HhEIoUUz4Psx4XDxSMZ2R7PPNx2AD5xJeCA8movEbcwg74X45uu1lJTlObs3SLaAaQDrU91NAOjwr-0SmtFue_5YYvt2PqZ8Roqp9TcEFnREufKEN8tpKnO_1d1G1v_fRR86oUSz89zpYL2WuXa6EB0w/s1920/kid%20readingPD.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1196" data-original-width="1920" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEEztgoMzpB4oSGf5d0c46VkQw1qTRYdrlz5HhEIoUUz4Psx4XDxSMZ2R7PPNx2AD5xJeCA8movEbcwg74X45uu1lJTlObs3SLaAaQDrU91NAOjwr-0SmtFue_5YYvt2PqZ8Roqp9TcEFnREufKEN8tpKnO_1d1G1v_fRR86oUSz89zpYL2WuXa6EB0w/s320/kid%20readingPD.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born March 28:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Russian writer and political activist Maxim Gorky
(<i>Na dne, Mat', Destvo, V lyudyakh, Moi univeritety, Rasskazy 1922–1924, Delo
Artamonovykh, Zhizn' Klima Samgina</i>) (1868-1936):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The good qualities in our soul are most successfully
and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect
of the world, art is its soul.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">You must write for children the same way you write for
adults, only better.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">In recalling my childhood I like to picture myself as
a beehive to which various simple obscure people brought the honey of their
knowledge and thoughts on life, generously enriching my character with their
own experience. Often this honey was dirty and bitter, but every scrap of
knowledge was honey all the same.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives
inside, and the publisher inns the rent.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American fiction writer and essayist Nelson
Algren (<i>The Neon Wilderness, The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild
Side, Chicago: City on the Make</i>) (1909-1981):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more
than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness
and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as
it is to armed robbery.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very
much.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel
Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is
almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench
down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all
ages of man.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">One of the best things Henry Miller ever said was that
art goes all out. It's all out. It goes full length. . . . A big book is an
all-out book in which you limit your life to things that pertain directly to
the book.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional.
For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or
indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was
just to keep making it longer until something happens.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Peruvian Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas
Llosa (<i>La ciudad y los perros, La casa verde, Conversación en la catedral, La
guerra del fin del mundo, La fiesta del chivo</i>) (b. 1936):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Like writing, reading is a protest against the
insufficiencies of life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious
attitude in us.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Literature is a form of permanent insurrection. Its
mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, to keep men in a constant state of
dissatisfaction with themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Good literature is absolutely necessary for a society
that wants to be free.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something,
while despair is nothing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very
complete autobiography. Not before.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it
subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">There are many things behind a good novel, but in
particular there is a lot of work—a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and
a critical spirit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's
something that gives me what real life can't give me—all the adventures, all
the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination,
literature completes.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">You cannot teach creativity—how to become a good
writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of
writer he would like to be.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American novelist Russell Banks (<i>Continental
Drift, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The
Darling</i>) (b. 1940):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And
in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an
early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was
reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to
history.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your
life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out
with your pals or in any other line of work.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Through writing, through that process, they realize
that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than
they can be in any other part of their life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Lists of books we re-read and books we can't finish
tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out
stories or hunt them down.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Tony- and Emmy-winning actor Ken Howard
(<i>Child’s Play, Grey Gardens</i>); also known for <i>1776</i> and <i>The
White Shadow</i> (1944-2016):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">When television gets in trouble is when it forgets
that it all begins with the written word.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Franco–Belgian playwright, novelist, and short story
writer Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt (<i>Le Visiteur, Enigma Variations, Le Cycle de
l'invisible, L'Evangile selon Pilate, Ma Vie avec Mozart</i>) (b. 1960):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">When I start a book, it's every day. There is no
Saturday, no Sunday. It's every day, because if I stop one day, I'm afraid of
losing the book and losing the energy.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I wanted to become a director before I wanted to
become a writer. When I was 10, people would ask me what I wanted to be when I
grew up, and I said, “Walt Disney.” I wanted to make films. But I wasn't
offered a camera. I was offered language. So I started telling stories in the
theatre and then in my novels.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I consider a house without books or a piano to be
unfurnished.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American fiction writer Jennifer Weiner (Cannie
Shapiro series, <i>In Her Shoes, Little Earthquakes, The Littlest Bigfoot</i>
series) (b. 1970):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">When I was five I learned to read. Books were a
miracle to me—white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in
each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first
time, the anticipation of where I'll go and whom I'll meet inside.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read
hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your
library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to
find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard
time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working.
Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The difference between people who believe they have
books inside of them and those who actually write books is sheer cussed
persistence—the ability to make yourself work at your craft, every day—the
belief, even in the face of obstacles, that you've got something worth saying.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the
characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you,
that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.</span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American novelist Lauren Weisberger (<i>The Devil
Wears Prada,</i> <i>Chasing Harry Winston, Revenge Wears Prada</i>) (b. 1977):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">So much of my own life inspires what I write. Whether
it's work, family, friends, motherhood, I am a writer who tends to write what
she knows. In 'Revenge Wears Prada,' a great deal of my own life finds its way
into the book.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Naturally, I mine my girlfriends' lives for good
anecdotes and stories—so many of their experiences find their way into my
books.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">So much of writing is done alone in a room in
sweatpants, with only the Internet for company.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">
</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">It's the hardest thing in the world to dedicate to
writing, but if you do that even once a week, after six months or a year you'll
have something substantial.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-25938856754234310462022-03-20T21:18:00.000-07:002022-03-20T21:18:06.922-07:00Wise words<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgFCXGgF97oqVRDWA_rNrApmp9bqSyGIK1fRCYVDPKC4S_fIlaTSyLpKQuaIy1gapyAOFPP-qtv1QaubzbItPygr7hoCovE6S0Q23KnuNpF79Wu7UDOatrtTT4G6c56SuxzZFqcGXGMXM0xOOTUFGOuoPCeWiZHLGQkmrQ4xBcmpV6bch_XFCZMr_6vhA=s1920" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1920" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgFCXGgF97oqVRDWA_rNrApmp9bqSyGIK1fRCYVDPKC4S_fIlaTSyLpKQuaIy1gapyAOFPP-qtv1QaubzbItPygr7hoCovE6S0Q23KnuNpF79Wu7UDOatrtTT4G6c56SuxzZFqcGXGMXM0xOOTUFGOuoPCeWiZHLGQkmrQ4xBcmpV6bch_XFCZMr_6vhA=s320" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born March 21:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from German Romantic author Jean Paul (<i>Die
unsichtbare Loge, Hesperus, Siebenkäs, Titan, Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise</i>)
(1763-1825):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Never write on a subject without first having read
yourself full on it; and never read on a subject till you have thought yourself
hungry on it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A scholar knows no boredom.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from German-born American Abstract Expressionist
painter and teacher Hans Hofmann (<i>Effervescence, The Gate, Auxerre</i>)
(1880-1966):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art leads to a more profound concept of life, because
art itself is a profound expression of feeling. The artist is born, and art is
the expression of his overflowing soul.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Creation is dominated by three absolutely different
factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist,
who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the
medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is something absolute, something positive, which
gives power just as food gives power. While creative science is a mental food,
art is the satisfaction of the soul.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous,
and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest
insight into the experience of life and nature.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the
relation between things that gives meaning to them and that formulates a
thought. A thought functions only as a fragmentary part in the formulation of
an idea.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Color is a plastic means of creating intervals… color
harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now
between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music
between counterpoint and harmony.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is to me the glorification of the human spirit,
and as such it is the cultural documentation of the time in which it is
produced.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Painters must speak through paint, not through words.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes
to us through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it.
This mystic quality of color should likewise find expression in a work of art.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is not the form that dictates the color, but the
color that brings out the form.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its
metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a
magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If
creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A work of art is finished, from the point of view of
the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">People say “Hofmann has different styles.” I have not.
I have different moods; I am not two days the same man.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Through a painting, we can see the whole world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Phyllis
McGinley (<i>Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades</i>); also noted
for children’s books such as <i>All Around the Town</i> (1905-1978):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest
reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Australian author Frank Hardy (<i>Power Without
Glory, The Yarns of Billy Borker, The Unlucky Australians</i>) (1917-1994):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The truth is impossible to comprehend even when one is
willing to tell it. For the truth resides in memory and memory is clouded with
repression and a desire to embellish. The recollections of any individual are
conditioned by the general truths to which he or she has tried to live. To
recall an event is to interpret it, so the truth is altered by the very act of
remembering. Therefore the truth, like God, does not exist—only the search for
it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English <a name="_Hlk98630174">Tony- and
Emmy-winning director Peter Brook (<i>Marat/Sade, A Midsummer Night's Dream, La
tragédie de Carmen, The Mahabharata</i>) </a>(b. 1925):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen
and (2) Something must happen.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is
contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and
eventually to an awakening of understanding.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A word does not start as a word—it is an end product
which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behaviour which dictates
the need for expression.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A
man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and
this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from New Zealand children's and YA author Margaret
Mahy (<i>A Lion in the Meadow, The Haunting, The Changeover, The Tricksters,
Memory, Under-runners, A Summery Saturday Morning, A Villain's Night Out, 24
Hours</i>) (1936-2012):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work
on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and
improved them so that they can be shared.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Reading is very creative—it's not just a passive
thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by
reading it, completes it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing
because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic
reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single
imaginative act.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There are certainly times when my own everyday life
seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a
writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life
and “live” with the characters.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I
would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had
even taken over someone else's life.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It can certainly happen that characters in more
sophisticated stories can "take over" as they develop and change the
author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style
and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my
own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Try not to become disappointed if someone doesn't like
a story you've written. Stick up for your ideas, but listen to what other
people say, too. They might have good advice.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Every writer has to find their own way into writing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Singaporean author Catherine Lim (<i>Little
Ironies: Short Stories of Singapore, Or Else, The Lightning God and Other
Stories, The Serpent's Tooth, The Bondmaid</i>) (b. 1942):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I draw my inspiration and material from life around
me; from people I’ve known.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I write because I enjoy it. I write about things that
interest me—human behaviour, human relationships, the not-so-pleasant abilities
people possess to deceive one another, seek revenge, inflict pain. And their
capacity to bear it all as well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I’m so sensitive to irony that if I see a situation, I
witness something, I hear something, I read a report in the newspaper about
something, and I see it as potential for a short story, my ironic sense
immediately creates a narrative and then I sit down and write.</span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-42220379225882120542022-03-13T19:48:00.003-07:002022-03-13T19:48:58.799-07:00Wise words<p></p><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhjsmPtOC6B3sD8MsbjdGEZCxn_y1WNDyVPEXzAZ2JrXWekZFyA_ArfbuFXMLcNtlUeDrwhTjBFAFoja9Bcb7MvwgPhpl9VMTRsovaFSV_9fmGbqlUDOBcmYqDVNVnyE19499QI1hAL98HoCGKIrAaBtUCoYmk2HehqzEsrRD_OUAnnLWg-ZpO4_FVjJA=s1920" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1572" data-original-width="1920" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhjsmPtOC6B3sD8MsbjdGEZCxn_y1WNDyVPEXzAZ2JrXWekZFyA_ArfbuFXMLcNtlUeDrwhTjBFAFoja9Bcb7MvwgPhpl9VMTRsovaFSV_9fmGbqlUDOBcmYqDVNVnyE19499QI1hAL98HoCGKIrAaBtUCoYmk2HehqzEsrRD_OUAnnLWg-ZpO4_FVjJA=s320" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born on March 14:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">from British writer Algernon Blackwood (</span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">The Empty
House and Other Ghost Stories, Incredible Adventures, The Doll and One Other</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">)
(1869-1951):</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I used to tell strange, wild, improbable tales akin to
ghost stories, and discovered a taste for spinning yarns.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Invention has ever imagination and poetry at its
heart.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from German-born American Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my
imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is
limited. Imagination encircles the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you want your children to be intelligent, read them
fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy
tales.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Abstract Expressionist painter Adolph
Gottlieb (<i>Vigil, Labyrinth 1, Frozen Sounds Number 1, Unstill Life III,
Blues, Burst</i>) (1903-1974):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I use color in terms of emotional quality, as a
vehicle for feeling... feeling is everything I have experienced or thought.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I never use nature as a starting point. I never
abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Painting is self-discovery. You arrive at the image
through the act of painting.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But to me everything is nature, including any feelings
that I have—or dreams. Everything is part of nature. Even painting has become
part of nature. To clarify further: I don’t have an ideological approach or a
doctrinaire approach to my work. I just paint from my personal feelings, and my
reflexes and instincts. I have to trust these.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My favorite symbols were those which I didn't
understand.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I want to express the utmost intensity of the color,
bring out the quality, make it expressive.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When I work, I'm thinking in terms of purely visual
effects and relations, and any verbal equivalent is something that comes
afterwards. But it's inconceivable to me that I could experience things and not
have them enter into my painting.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The role of the artist has always been that of
image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our
aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and
times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are
the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain
so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the
realism of our time.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which
can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Right now I am sick of the idea of all the pretty good
pictures and want a picture that is either damn good or no good.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">(with Mark Rothko):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.
We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We
wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy
illusion and reveal truth.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from French sociologist, historian, and political
commentator Raymond Aron (<i>L’Opium des intellectuels, Paix et guerre entre
les nations, Démocratie et totalitarisme, Les Étapes de la pensée sociologique</i>)
(1905-1983):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the
first two paragraphs select another subject.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-, Oscar-, and
Emmy-winning playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote (<i>The Young Man from
Atlanta, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tender Mercies, William Faulkner’s Old Man</i>);
also noted for <i>The Trip to Bountiful,</i> <i>The Orphan’s Home Cycle</i>
(1916-2009):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I know that people think I have a certain style, but I
think style is like the color of the eyes. I don't know that you choose that.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I think there's certain things you don't choose. I
don't think that you can choose a style; I think a style chooses you. I think
that's almost an unconscious choice. And I don't know that you can choose
subject matter, really. I think that's almost an unconscious choice. I have a
theory that from the time you're 12 years old all your themes are kind of
locked in.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A writer has an inescapable voice. I think it's
inherent in the nature, and I think that we don't control it anymore than we
control what we want to write about.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But I don't really write to honor the past. I write to
investigate, to try to figure out what happened and why it happened, knowing
I'll never really know. I think all the writers that I admire have this same
desire, the desire to bring order out of chaos.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When you're a writer, you have to write these stories,
even if you don't get paid.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don't think I'll ever stop writing. I write almost
every day. I'd write plays even if they were never done again. You're at the
mercy of whatever talent you have.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If I ever teach writing again, I’d say the first
lesson is to listen.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American photographer Diane Arbus (<i>Esquire,
Harper’s Bazaar, The Sunday Times Magazine, Untitled, Artforum</i>); noted for
photographs of marginalized people (1923-1971):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging
it, I arrange myself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You see someone on the street, and essentially what
you notice about them is the flaw.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For me, the subject of the picture is always more
important than the picture.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it
tells you the less you know.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're
always better or worse.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English novelist, poet, and playwright John Wain CBE
(<i>Hurry On Down, Strike the Father Dead, Nuncle and Other Stories, Young
Shoulders</i>) (1925-1994):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I have nothing to say. And I am saying it. That's
poetry.</span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-43428220589212872022-03-06T19:15:00.000-08:002022-03-06T19:15:19.427-08:00Wise words<p></p><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgaI6MH2ylAO9PmJrwBIyGH8JIM93N7bguJ5P2ovUqIk2ApbRfe2Dly6oTYBrjFP0fDoGTugnYUAsef46VDMC-MQ67ImWW7UGcd8VhfArNCHK8gMoGa49LVliL1mM0bSBuin3Zn33tYBWaLGemTjw3xcjsrgLw60fSjD2IyI8dXemx2O82gYp_xk0yimQ=s1920" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1439" data-original-width="1920" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgaI6MH2ylAO9PmJrwBIyGH8JIM93N7bguJ5P2ovUqIk2ApbRfe2Dly6oTYBrjFP0fDoGTugnYUAsef46VDMC-MQ67ImWW7UGcd8VhfArNCHK8gMoGa49LVliL1mM0bSBuin3Zn33tYBWaLGemTjw3xcjsrgLw60fSjD2IyI8dXemx2O82gYp_xk0yimQ=s320" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born 07 March:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">from English astronomer Sir John Herschel (</span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">Results
of Astronomical Observations, Outlines of Astronomy</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">) (1792-1871):</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the
most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Were I to pray for a taste which should stand me in
good stead under every variety of circumstances and be a source of happiness
and a cheerfulness to me during life and a shield against its ills, however
things might go amiss and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for
reading.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is a gentle, but perfectly irresistible coercion
in a habit of reading well directed, over the whole tenor of a man's character
and conduct, which is not the less effectual because it works insensibly, and
because it is really the last thing he dreams of.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Dutch abstract art painter Piet Mondrian (<i>The
Gray Tree, Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, Broadway Boogie Woogie</i>)
(1872-1944):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time,
for everybody.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The position of the artist is humble. He is
essentially a channel.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation
to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as
possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find
ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality,
otherwise it would have no value for man.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The only problem in art is to achieve a balance
between the subjective and the objective.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In art the search for a content which is collectively
understandable is false; the content will always be individual.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don't want pictures, I want to find things out.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from French composer, pianist, and conductor Maurice Ravel
(<i>Menuet, Pavane, Le Tombeau de Couperin, Boléro</i>) (1875-1937):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I begin by considering an effect.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of
me by pieces.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Music, I feel, must be emotional first and
intellectual second.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing
first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We should always remember that sensitiveness and
emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Whatever sauce you put around the melody is a matter
of taste. What is important is the melodic line.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial
by nature?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American novelist and short story writer Ben Ames
Williams (<i>Come Spring, Leave Her to Heaven, House Divided, The Unconquered,
Saturday Evening Post</i>) (1889-1953):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">An author never has a vacation. He's a walking sponge,
sopping up impressions till he's saturated, then going to his desk and
squeezing them out on paper.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from British Emmy-winning and celebrity photographer
Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon (<i>Don’t Count the Candles</i>)
(1930-2017):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I'm very much against photographs being framed and
treated with reverence and signed and sold as works of art. They aren't. They
should be seen in a magazine or a book and then be used to wrap up the fish and
chucked away.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I believe that photographs should be simple
technically, and easy to look at. They shouldn't be directed at other
photographers; their point is to make ordinary people react—to laugh, or to see
something they hadn't taken in before, or to be touched. But not to wince, I
think.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I'm not a great one for chatting people up, because
it's phony. I don't want people to feel at ease. You want a bit of edge. There
are quite long, agonized silences. I love it. Something strange might happen. I
mean, taking photographs is a very nasty thing to do. It's very cruel.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from British novelist Andrea Levy (<i>Small Island,
The Long Song</i>) (1956-2019):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Describe snow to someone who's lived in the desert.
Depict the colour blue for a blind man. Almost impossible to fashion the word.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There are some words that once spoken will split the
world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the
altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like
that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English best-selling novelist Robert Dennis
Harris (<i>Fatherland, Archangel</i>) (b. 1957):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite
possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes
earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every
other bloody book that’s ever been written.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Of all human activities, writing is the one for which
it is easiest to find excuses not to begin—the desk’s too big, the desk’s too
small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold,
too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and
simply to start.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All good books are different but all bad books are
exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot
of bad books—books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat,
when you consider what is published. And what they all have in common, these
bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not
saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the
time you're reading it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American writer and environmental activist Rick
Bass (<i>Where the Sea Used to Be, The Lives of Rocks, Why I Came West, For a
Little While</i>) (b. 1958):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There's an enormous difference between being a story
writer and being a regular person. As a person, it's your duty to stay on a
straight and even keel, not to break down blubbering in the streets, not to
pull rude drivers from their cars, not to swing from the branches of trees. But
as a writer it's your duty to lie and to view everything in life, however
outrageous, as an interesting possibility. You may need to be ruthless or
amoral in your writing to be original. Telling a story straight from real life
is only being a reporter, not a creator. You have to make your story bigger,
better, more magical, more meaningful than life is, no matter how special or
wonderful in real life the moment may have been.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There are no new stories in nature, only new
observers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Write every day. Don't ever stop. If you are
unpublished, enjoy the act of writing—and if you are published, keep enjoying
the act of writing. Don't become self-satisfied, don't stop moving ahead,
growing, making it new. The stakes are high. Why else would we write?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from British best-selling novelist E. L. James (<i>Fifty
Shades</i> novels) (b. 1963):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Write for yourself. That's it. And write every day.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American novelist Bret Easton Ellis (<i>Less Than
Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, The Informers, Glamorama, Lunar
Park, Imperial Bedrooms</i>) (b. 1964):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Every book for me is an exorcism in some way or
another, working through my feelings at the time.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult
thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises
me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">No one is drawn to writing about being happy or
feelings of joy.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It's the rare book that's able to transport you in a
way that a movie does.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I
don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to
be judgmental in the fiction.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All of my books come from pain.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I needed something—the distraction of another life—to
alleviate fear.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Not being able to find meaning can be just as powerful
as finding meaning.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it
easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I write books to relieve myself of pain. That's the
prime motivator to write. Period.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I like the idea of a writer being haunted by his own
creation, especially if the writer resents the way the character defines him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of
your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen
the things that intrigue you.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly
writing and rewriting things over each other.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I really believe that readers are smart and
sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his
novels.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I've never written an autobiographical novel in my
life. I've never touched upon my life. I've never written a single scene that I
can say took place.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You don't market-research a novel; you really are
writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what
you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the
books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I don't know why I write what I write.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American writer and folklorist Ari Berk (<i>The Undertaken</i>
trilogy, <i>Secret History</i> series, <i>William Shakespeare: His Life and
Times, Goblins!, Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Letters, The Runes of Elfland</i>)
(b. 1967):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held
together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by
others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for
someone to bother having a look inside us.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American best-selling fantasy writer Brent Weeks
(<i>The Night Angel</i> trilogy, Lightbringer series) (b. 1977):<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone.
If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German,
you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books,
you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi
readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their
own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be
writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look,
Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until
he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was
real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he
was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”.
The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they
connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few
thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million
women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because
the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience.
Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are
trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they
count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the
book.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American screenwriter Kyle Killen (<i>Lone Star, The
Beaver, Mind Games, Halo</i>) (b. 1981):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I tend to be really interested in characters who,
instead of just asking the question, end up exploring what it would mean to try
to have it more than one way.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Writing is like a heroin addiction—if you can quit,
you totally should.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American best-selling poet and activist Amanda
Gorman (<i>The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, The Hill We Climb, Call Us What
We Carry</i>); the first National Youth Poet Laureate (b. 1998):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Words matter, for<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Language is an ark.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Yes,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Language is an art,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">An articulate artifact.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Language is a life craft.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Yes,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Language is a life raft.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended
from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call
me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I was obsessed with everything and anything; I wanted
to learn everything, to read everything, to do everything. I was constantly on
sensory overload. I’d hoard dozens of books in my second-grade cubby, and
literally try to read two at a time, side by side.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it’s
always been the language of bridges.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You don’t have to be a poet, you don’t have to be a
politician or be in the White House to make an impact with your words. We all
have this capacity to find solutions for the future.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to
become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it’s
this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of
people.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of
movements for change.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history
we stand on and the future we stand for.</span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-73967388988559777592022-02-27T18:48:00.002-08:002022-02-27T18:48:37.337-08:00Wise Words<p></p><div style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHfK7smO1Mn4VQLrTah9cEI4sDGNs6Waoa0yv9yJd49ieWVVpZoN82SD028t1fjefopK4j47SpmFRc7mYrnKEyyO_t8ymW84KWpO_lRafAz2BgfKcvUzDwEZUgRszd3dgIYvodVIWv4eMgIPYIcb32KkH3CMSCKSLU4iZ1puKIePGqJiqIfLSMfIXBew=s1920" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1276" data-original-width="1920" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgHfK7smO1Mn4VQLrTah9cEI4sDGNs6Waoa0yv9yJd49ieWVVpZoN82SD028t1fjefopK4j47SpmFRc7mYrnKEyyO_t8ymW84KWpO_lRafAz2BgfKcvUzDwEZUgRszd3dgIYvodVIWv4eMgIPYIcb32KkH3CMSCKSLU4iZ1puKIePGqJiqIfLSMfIXBew=s320" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born February 28:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English satirical artist and illustrator and Sir
John Tenniel (<i>Punch, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking
Glass</i>) (1820-1914):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Well, I get my subject on Wednesday night; I think it
out carefully on Thursday, and make my rough sketch; on Friday morning I begin,
and stick to it all day, with my nose well down on the block.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Welsh poet, editor, and critic Arthur William
Symons (<i>Days and Nights, London Nights, Amoris Victima, Images of Good and
Evil, The Savoy, The Symbolist Movement in Literature</i>) (1865-1945):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All art is a form of artifice. For in art there can be
no prejudices.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art begins when a man wishes to immortalize the most
vivid moment he has ever lived.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The making of one's life into art is, after all, the
first duty and privilege of every man.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Leave words to them whom words, not doings, move.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we
live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams,
in religion, passion, art.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American newspaperman and playwright Ben Hecht (<i>Chicago
Daily News, Twentieth Century, The Front Page</i>) (1894-1964):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses
or you kowtow to the elite; you can't have both.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief
effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind,
for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually
forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it.
Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream
and agony.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Oscar-winning director Vincente Minnelli
(<i>Gigi</i>); also known for <i>Meet Me in St. Louis</i>, <i>An American in Paris,
The Bad and the Beautiful, Brigadoon, Lust for Life</i> (1903-1986):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I allow an area for improvisation because the chemical
things actors bring to stories make it not work.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I use colors to bring fine points of story and
character.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up
of a hundred or more hidden things. They’re things that the audience is not
conscious of, but that accumulate.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It's the story that counts.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English poet, dramatist, novelist, and essayist
Sir Stephen Spender (<i>The Temple, Poems, Trial of a Judge, The God that
Failed, Ruins and Visions</i>) (1909-1995):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Great poetry is always written by somebody straining
to go beyond what he can do.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What we call the freedom of the individual is not just
the luxury of one intellectual to write what he likes to write but his being a
voice which can speak for those who are silent.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">But reading is not idleness. It is the passive,
receptive side of civilization without which the active and creative world would
be meaningless. It is the immortal spirit of the dead realised within the
bodies of the living. It is sacramental.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The greatest poets are those with memories so great
that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest
observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Memory exercised in a particular way is a natural gift
of poetic genius. The poet above all else, is a person who never forgets
certain sense impressions which he has experienced and which he can relive
again as though with all their original freshness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is
like a midwife—a tyrannical midwife.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">All that you can imagine you already know.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">An English poet writes, I think, just for people who
are interested in poetry. An American poet writes, and feels that everyone
ought to appreciate this. Then he has a deep sense of grievance...<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American children's author Megan McDonald (<i>Judy
Moody</i> and <i>Stink</i> series) (b. 1959)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you want to write, find your splinter. Find the
thing that pierces you and won't let you go.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you listen to your own voice, unknown friends will
come and seek you.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English children's author Philip Reeve (<i>Mortal
Engines</i> series) (b. 1966):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I'm sure it came as no surprise to my friends and
family when I became an illustrator and then a writer because, from about the
age of five, I was one of those children who always had his nose in a book.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using
their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is
happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator
includes to add their own elements to the story.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I still feel, as I did when I was six or seven, that
books are simply the best way to experience a story.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from country music singer-songwriter Jason Aldean (<i>My
Kinda Party, Night Train, Old Boots, New Dirt</i>) (b. 1977):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you say, “I'm going to cut this song because I know
the teenagers are going to love it,” well, then you're going to alienate
everybody else. When I cut my record, I'm just going to cut the things that I
like, and whoever likes it, likes it. That's too much work to try to figure out
the demographic. That's too much like a business.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">No matter what you do, you're going to have people who
have something to say about something you do. You can't please anybody.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">My goal is that when the last song is over, and you're
walking back to the parking lot, you're already on your phone searching to find
the next show.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I didn't get into music to become famous and I didn't
get into music to become rich either—I got into because I liked it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English children's author Chris Wooding (<i>Broken
Sky</i> series, <i>The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray</i>, <i>Poison, The Braided
Path</i> trilogy) (b. 1977):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Everything you write makes you better. But if you
really need a tip, here's one: a good story begins in opposition to its ending.
That means you work out how it finishes first, and then begin the story as far
away from that point—in terms of character development—as you can.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We relate comics to the main super-heroes, but it's a
great medium through which all sorts of stories are told.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Imagination is as close as we will ever be to godhead…
for in imagination, we can create wonders.</span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-23417995001235864972022-02-20T22:24:00.017-08:002022-02-20T22:37:14.889-08:00Wise Words<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEguX1z8gUuvHtl-uGu2xmGRthuYDxIK51s4b-ecUrf0w-sjo5fOpmGjjcyr2UKnwM_7UzfGpjZQw7RwRRSdDhl_40luZxHaqm7-5xE-PoVXqWEL3eOXasRx09_neMB0-8RbqGmwr0fA8IHi6Z4cOeNfUZzj7Zze_nD-OhQ-CSSldNqYEiEWIKzAnVxPIg=s1920" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1271" data-original-width="1920" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEguX1z8gUuvHtl-uGu2xmGRthuYDxIK51s4b-ecUrf0w-sjo5fOpmGjjcyr2UKnwM_7UzfGpjZQw7RwRRSdDhl_40luZxHaqm7-5xE-PoVXqWEL3eOXasRx09_neMB0-8RbqGmwr0fA8IHi6Z4cOeNfUZzj7Zze_nD-OhQ-CSSldNqYEiEWIKzAnVxPIg=s320" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born February 21:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from French author Anaïs Nin (<i>The Diary of Anais
Nin</i>, <i>Cities of the Interior, Under a Glass Bell, Delta of Venus: Erotica</i>)
(1903-1977):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is
only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual
plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I write emotional algebra.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">No matter what disintegrating influence I was
experiencing, the writing was an act of wholeness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English-born American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
W. H. Auden<i> </i>(<i>The Age of Anxiety</i>); also noted for "Funeral
Blues," "Musee de Beaux-Artes," "September 1, 1939," <i>The
Shield of Achilles</i> (1907-1973):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not
about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the
dead.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is born of humiliation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the
Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he
must never, never be unfaithful to them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought
always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of
mixed feelings.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A poet is, before anything else, a person who is
passionately in love with language.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are
undeservedly remembered.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A real book is not one that we read, but one that
reads us.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for
man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art
which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Nina
Simone (Lifetime Achievement); noted for "I Loves You, Porgy" (Grammy
Hall of Fame Award), "I Put a Spell on You," Ain’t Got No/I’ve Got
Life" "My Baby Just Cares for Me," "Feeling Good"
(1933-2003):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">How do you explain what it feels like to get on the
stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people
who are unable to express it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet.
I do not come from you. I am not like you.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Music is an art and art has its own rules. And one of
them is that you must pay more attention to it than anything else in the world,
if you are going to be true to yourself. And if you don't do it - and you are
an artist - it punishes you.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American author David Foster Wallace (<i>Infinite
Jest, The Pale King, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again</i>) (1962-2008):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader
want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these
are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but
dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The point of books is to combat loneliness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s
just words.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Every love story is a ghost story.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find
a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when
they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just
resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers ... becomes a
source of unbelievable joy. It’s like eating candy for the soul. And I
sometimes have a hard time understanding how people who don’t have that in
their lives make it through the day.</span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-28597757890923493322022-02-13T18:37:00.013-08:002022-02-13T20:22:54.891-08:00Wise Words<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjOGnr2IbVDIfYg2j4EoQcuPYI36xt25NgSuc6wdIWb0fHveKHq6ZvEaljZ_TPcfsXc5nRBzq3-8hm4c9CTJXYn6qSWIeT9YjReHjTR5V5TCySA_Tvebf7USNifMDusm_08Ts4LeIar0QHmbP8X3BQobB0UoHhChnfwljLTeTZuvayoPPRh4m176H_NZA=s1920" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjOGnr2IbVDIfYg2j4EoQcuPYI36xt25NgSuc6wdIWb0fHveKHq6ZvEaljZ_TPcfsXc5nRBzq3-8hm4c9CTJXYn6qSWIeT9YjReHjTR5V5TCySA_Tvebf7USNifMDusm_08Ts4LeIar0QHmbP8X3BQobB0UoHhChnfwljLTeTZuvayoPPRh4m176H_NZA=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born February 14:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Italian Renaissance humanist author, architect, artist,
and poet Leon Battista Alberti (Palazzo Rucellai, Santa Maria Novello, Piazza
Pio II at Pienza, <i>De pictura, De re aedificatoria</i>) (1404-1472):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The Arts are learnt by reason and method; they are
mastered by practice.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I would have artists be convinced that the supreme
skill and art in painting consists in knowing how to use black and white...
because it is light and shade that make objects appear in relief.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">No art, however minor, demands less than total
dedication if you want to excel in it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is no art which has not had its beginnings in
things full of errors. Nothing is at the same time both new and perfect.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American abolitionist Frederick Douglass (<i>Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, My
Bondage and My Freedom, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass</i>) (1818-1890):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Irish-born American journalist Frank Harris (<i>Saturday
Review, Pearson's Magazine, My Life and Loves</i>) (1856-1931):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in
finding great readers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from British novelist, playwright, and Zionist leader
Israel Zangwill</span><span style="font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">(<i>Children
of the Ghetto, The Big Bow Mystery, The Melting Pot, Merely Mary Ann</i>)
(1864-1926):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There never was an age in which so many people were
able to write badly.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American author, editor, and drama critic George
Jean Nathan (<i>The Smart Set, The American Mercury, The American Spectator,
Theatre Book of the Year</i>) (1882-1958):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own
value.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a
doughnut.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature
in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who
transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the
moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring,
love, and dogs.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Criticism is the art wherewith a critic tries to guess
himself into a share of the artist’s fame.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad
with its own loveliness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Welsh-English painter and author Nina Hamnett (<i>Der
Sturm, The Landlady, The People's Album of London Statues, The Laughing Torso</i>)
(1890-1956):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">On February the fourteenth, 1890, I was born.
Everybody was furious, especially my Father, who still is. As soon as I became
conscious of anything I was furious too...<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from German author, philosopher, academic, and film
director Alexander Kluge (<i>Abschied von Gestern, Der Angriff der Gegenwart
auf die übrige Zeit, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung</i>, "Geschichte und
Eigensinn") (b. 1932):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Phantasy provides a kind of temporary glue, which
keeps people from falling apart through the production of illusions which
enable them somehow to live with themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Human beings are not interested in reality. They can’t
be; it’s the human essence. They have wishes. These wishes are strictly opposed
to any ugly form of reality. They prefer to lie than to become divorced from
their wishes...[they] forget everything and can give up everything except this
principle of misunderstanding reality, the subjective... If this is real, then
the media industry is realistic in telling fiction, and the construction of
reality founded on this basis can only lie. This is one of the reasons why
history isn’t realistic: it’s not documentary, it’s not genuine, and it’s not
necessary.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Writing literary texts, you look—if you're going about
it correctly—down to yourself, to your head from above. Then you no longer have
a relationship with yourself. At the most, you have trust in yourself that a
text will emerge from this and that you still have the sovereignty and the
strength to throw it away if it amounts to nothing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Hidden in a long text, there are perhaps three lines
that count.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Canadian playwright Norm Foster (<i>The Melville
Boys, The Affections of May, Maggie's Getting Married</i>) (b. 1949):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Acting is great fun, but writing is my first love. A
lot of people out there like the “idea” of being a writer. The romance of it.
The notion that we all sit around in cafes and talk about our writing with
other writers. Personally, I would rather do it than talk about it. The actual
process of writing is what excites me. Creating a world from the ground up and
populating it with characters I've pulled out of my head. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">One of the curses of being a playwright is that you're
never ever completely satisfied with your finished product.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American television writer and producer Moira
Kirland (<i>Dark Angel, Medium, Castle, The InBetween</i>) (b. 1978):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Never love your day job. I did love my day job and
stayed there for ten years. I think if I had been less happy there, I might
have come to the realization that there were other things I wanted to do
sooner. Not loving your day job if you want to be a writer keeps you motivated.
You’re just paying the rent. That’s really what you’re doing.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So I try to remind myself and others in this, you
gotta have that belief in yourself. You’ve got to believe you’ll get another
job. You gotta believe you can do the job that you’ve just taken.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You should always be writing. You should have nothing
but samples stacked up, because everybody is going to want something different.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I once said something to my mother that she quotes
back to me all the time. I was taking a risk and I’m not really a risk taker.
She said, “Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” I told her, “I have to bet
on myself. I never lose when I bet on myself. Because win or lose, I’m better
for it.”</span></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-83886634107934944122022-02-06T18:27:00.000-08:002022-02-06T18:27:15.865-08:00Wise Words<p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh2nnSPhsNgXjNd0HtZQr0G75yO_WVC6G9tPviYnvnqCExzg4ddz19ojSCvB-fg2GScZznlLsrCAeYLHOWoBXCWYiSLTfbm_StBMCOBRnJPu98WWzq0u3poTskzqe8EJ-8KubiYMMEHSx6SY6VqSAc9EgUreO1hIoepFj1qvR6UOrhae7HPhwCU71cYng=s1920" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1344" data-original-width="1920" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh2nnSPhsNgXjNd0HtZQr0G75yO_WVC6G9tPviYnvnqCExzg4ddz19ojSCvB-fg2GScZznlLsrCAeYLHOWoBXCWYiSLTfbm_StBMCOBRnJPu98WWzq0u3poTskzqe8EJ-8KubiYMMEHSx6SY6VqSAc9EgUreO1hIoepFj1qvR6UOrhae7HPhwCU71cYng=s320" width="320" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on creativity from authors born February 7:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from British novelist and social critic Charles
Dickens (<i>The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David
Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations</i>) 1812-1870):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little
before it will explain itself.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There are books of which the backs and covers are by
far the best parts.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The whole difference between construction and creation
is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is
constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up,
stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to
write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no
better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can
make it otherwise than as it was.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Yet, I had nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I
were to confess (which might be of less moment still), that no one can ever
believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in the writing.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder (<i>Little
House on the Prairie</i> series) (1867-1957):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">As you read my stories of long ago I hope you will
remember that things truly worthwhile and that will give you happiness are the
same now as they were then. It is not the things you have that make you happy.
It is love and kindness and helping each other and just plain being good.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We who live in quiet places have the opportunity to
become acquainted with ourselves, to think our own thoughts and live our own
lives in a way that is not possible for those keeping up with the crowd.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The only stupid thing about words is the spelling of
them.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Scottish-American mathematician and novelist Eric
Temple Bell (<i>Algebraic Arithmetic, Men of Mathematics, The Development of
Mathematics, The Time Stream, Seeds of Life, The Forbidden Garden</i>)
(1883-1960):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The very basis of creative work is irreverence! The
very basis of creative work is bold experimentation. There has never been a
creator of lasting importance who has not also been an innovator.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning
novelist and social critic Sinclair Lewis (<i>Arrowsmith</i>); also noted for <i>Main
Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth</i>) (1885-1951):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe,
polite, obedient, and sterile.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">People read fiction for emotion—not information.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is
largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is impossible to discourage the real writers—they
don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Writers kid themselves—about themselves and other
people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work—there's no
secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes—it is just work.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we
can bore people long after we are dead.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American writer Gay Talese (<i>The New York
Times, Esquire, Honor Thy Father, Thy Neighbor's Wife</i>) (b. 1932):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to
turn in what I think is finished work.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Better that you should take the chance of trying
something that is close to your heart, you think is what you want to write, and
if they do not publish it, put it in your drawer. But maybe another day will
come and you will find a place to put that.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I am writing about people who are alive in the city of
New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character
in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I've always had standards about writing well. There is
art in this business. There is potentially great art.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking
about.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English editor and poet Brian Patten (<i>The
Mersey Sound, Armada, Love Poems, Gargling with Jelly</i>) (b. 1946):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When in public poetry should take off its clothes and
wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of
thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">On sighting mathematicians poetry should unhook the
algebra from their minds and replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should
unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American science fiction, fantasy, and literary
novelist Karen Joy Fowler (<i>Sarah Canary, Black Glass, What I Didn't See, and
Other Stories, The Jane Austen Book Club, We Are All Completely Beside
Ourselves</i>) (b. 1950):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The smart way to build a literary career is you create
an identifiable product, then reliably produce that product so people know what
they are going to get. That's the smart way to build a career, but not the fun
way. Maybe you can think about being less successful and happier. That's an
option, too.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I hear so many writers say—and these are writers that
I trust completely—'I just started hearing a voice', or, 'The characters came
to life'. I am filled with loathing for my own characters when I hear that
because they do nothing of the sort. Left to their own devices, they do nothing
but drink coffee and complain about their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and
I'm often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about
marketing at all.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American “New Thought” author Mike Dooley (<i>Thoughts
Become Things, Infinite Possibilities</i>) (d. 1961):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When you understand that what most people really,
really want is simply to feel good about themselves, and when you realize that
with just a few well-chosen words you can help virtually anyone on the planet
instantly achieve this, you begin to realize just how simple life is, how
powerful you are, and that love is the key.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">The one thing all
famous authors, world class athletes, business tycoons, singers, actors, and
celebrated achievers in any field have in common is that they all began their
journeys when they were none of these things.</span></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-51478047626895345052022-01-30T16:10:00.002-08:002022-01-30T16:10:24.071-08:00Wise Words<p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgY7lXuiuJ_MsAgyfJg9BrKRakz_01iXcNQd5DlYlsksG3bnd8H7u0wOrIJEnn90n1KGp6Cf3bz9aFSVCXavfLmlTMw_Hr8lD328THHuA-FbV7yCfeDhPtbV5NFqb2vz9mIo4fhSgn9l_fiKCvUZAsvWsqYKTqSas3qnYPROB-QN33lM6x_XOqs8snCgA=s1920" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1268" data-original-width="1920" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgY7lXuiuJ_MsAgyfJg9BrKRakz_01iXcNQd5DlYlsksG3bnd8H7u0wOrIJEnn90n1KGp6Cf3bz9aFSVCXavfLmlTMw_Hr8lD328THHuA-FbV7yCfeDhPtbV5NFqb2vz9mIo4fhSgn9l_fiKCvUZAsvWsqYKTqSas3qnYPROB-QN33lM6x_XOqs8snCgA=s320" width="320" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Creativity from artists born January 31:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Austrian composer Franz Schubert (<i>Symphony No.
9 in C Major [The Great], Symphony in B Minor [Unfinished]), Fantasy in F
Minor, Die Winterreise</i>) (1797-1828):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the
greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">No one understands another's grief, no one understands
another's joy... My music is the product of my talent and my misery. And that
which I have written in my greatest distress is what the world seems to like
best.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There are two contrary impulses which govern this
man's brain—the one sane, and the other eccentric. They alternate at regular
intervals.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I never force myself to be devout except when I feel
so inspired, and never compose hymns of prayers unless I feel within me real
and true devotion.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American sagebrush writer Zane Grey (<i>Riders of
the Purple Sage, The Lone Star Ranger, Nevada, Western Union, Valley of Wild
Horses</i>) (1872-1939):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of
the novel. But it does not stay with me.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I can write best in the silence and solitude of the
night, when everyone has retired.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I confess that reading proofs is a pleasure. It
stimulates and inspires me.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The Indian story has never been written. Maybe I am
the man to do it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">What is writing but an expression of my own life?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I wrote for nearly six hours. When I stopped, the dark
mood, as if by magic, had folded its cloak and gone away.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">No one connected intimately with a writer has any
appreciation of his temperament, except to think him overdoing everything.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Work is my salvation. It changes my moods.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">These critics who crucify me do not guess the littlest
part of my sincerity. They must be burned in a blaze. I cannot learn from them.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I love my work but do not know how I write it.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The
spell is on me.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American author John O’Hara (<i>Appointment in
Samarra, Ten North Frederick, Butterfield 8, From the Terrace</i>) (1905-1970):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a
writer.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Hot lead can be almost as effective coming from a
linotype as from a firearm.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">They say great themes make great novels. but what
these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men
and women.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Much as I like owning a Rolls-Royce, I could do
without it. What I could not do without is a typewriter, a supply of yellow
second sheets and the time to put them to good use.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">An artist is his own fault.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Tony-winning actor-singer-dancer Carol
Channing (<i>Hello Dolly!,</i> special Tony, Lifetime Achievement) (1921-2019):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Regret leads to negativity, and negativity kills
creativity.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Norman
Mailer (<i>The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song</i>); also known for
<i>The Naked and the Dead</i> (1923-2007):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Writing books is the closest men ever come to
childbearing.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask
for a book I write.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for
it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel;
not your latest wife anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The difference between writing a book and being on
television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made
in a test tube.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ...
His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to
shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point
where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding
changes to weariness and distaste.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if
necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Every one of my books had killed me a little more.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Scottish comic book writer and playwright Grant
Morrison MBE (<i>Batman, All-Star Superman, New X-Men, Depravity</i>) (b.
1960):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding
constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly
demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar
business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is
obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Writers and artists build by hand little worlds that
they hope might effect change in real minds, in the real world where stories
are read. A story can make us cry and laugh, break our hearts, or make us angry
enough to change the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There are dozens of unfinished or aborted projects in
my files, but I can only assume they don't get done because they're not robust
enough to struggle through the birth process.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Burnout is grist to the mill. I write every day, for
most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on
in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of
grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Sometimes you wonder, in an interconnected universe,
who's dreaming who?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Sometimes it’s only
madness that makes us what we are.</span></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-16308822434898301642022-01-23T17:42:00.007-08:002022-01-23T17:43:32.592-08:00Wise Words<p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEid9R4OywrB2nYcZTW6OUVayqXBf-raVqnVoUDAmUduDonv2vX3mKI3Wq4aLlU-ruxtg__yGAHUvJTFXZ4nAwPTn83huzskrxV00EbND9BS1e2Fz4l0AllPbfRVQ0npRmrFiuh9bGSlySZ_PIyJv74euiih1GfY4mdbPZyOabKt16_b4HiTyBzzNqTzCw=s1920" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1276" data-original-width="1920" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEid9R4OywrB2nYcZTW6OUVayqXBf-raVqnVoUDAmUduDonv2vX3mKI3Wq4aLlU-ruxtg__yGAHUvJTFXZ4nAwPTn83huzskrxV00EbND9BS1e2Fz4l0AllPbfRVQ0npRmrFiuh9bGSlySZ_PIyJv74euiih1GfY4mdbPZyOabKt16_b4HiTyBzzNqTzCw=s320" width="320" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from notable people born January 24:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Prussian King Frederick the Great (1712-1786):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Books make up no small part of human happiness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from English dramatist William Congreve (<i>The Old
Bachelour, The Double-Dealer, Love for Love, The Mourning Bride, The Way of the
World</i>) (1670-1729):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Wit must be foiled by wit: cut a diamond with a diamond.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Words are the weak support of cold indifference; love
has no language to be heard.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">To find a young fellow that is neither a wit in his
own eye, nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a very hard task.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices
and follies of human kind.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be
chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a
poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from French polymath Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais (<i>Le
Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro</i>) (1732-1799):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">To make a living, craftiness is better than
learnedness.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Plays, gentlemen, are to their authors what children
are to women: they cost more pain than they give pleasure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">A writer's inspiration is not just to create. He must
eat three times a day.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from German writer, composer, and painter E. T. A.
Hoffmann (<i>Undine, Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, Nachtstücke, Nussknacker
und Mausekönig)</i> (1776-1822):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of
the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there
finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because
there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have
spoiled their own digestions?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Is it not in the most absolute simplicity that real
genius plies its pinions the most wonderfully?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">None but a poet can understand a poet; none but a
romantic spirit transported with poetry and consecrated in the Holy of Holies
can comprehend what the ordained utters out of his inspiration.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Perhaps, too, you will then believe that nothing is
more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life, and that all that a
writer can do is to present it as "in a glass, darkly."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Should anyone be audacious enough to think of casting
doubt on the sterling worth of this remarkable book, let him reflect that he is
dealing with a tomcat possessed of intellect, understanding, and sharp claws.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edith
Wharton (<i>The Age of Innocence</i>); also known for <i>The House of Mirth </i>and<i>
Ethan Frome</i> (1862-1937):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">True originality consists not in a new manner but in a
new vision.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly
sins.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">To be able to look life in the face: that's worth
living in a garret for, isn't it?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Abstract Expressionist painter Robert
Motherwell (<i>Elegies to the Spanish Republic</i> series, <i>Open</i> series)
(1915-1991):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is an experience, not an object.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is much less important than life, but what a poor
life without it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">It may be that the deep necessity of art is the
examination of self-deception.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">What could be more interesting, or in the end, more
ecstatic, than in those rare moments when you see another person look at
something you've made, and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart
jumped to their heart with nothing in between.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The problems of inventing a new language are staggering.
But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth
looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a
decorator.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Wherever art appears, life disappears.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of
modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he
paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">If one were to ask a painter what he felt about
anything, his just response—though he seldom makes it—would be to paint it, and
in painting, to find out.</span></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-69572801407119199772022-01-17T02:21:00.003-08:002022-01-23T17:44:36.258-08:00Wise Words<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhalCZ1lyx7iLD0xf9IwpIARcLxma8Np4GHuk15HUTG2uWeXw8FEKZmrkgwBN-EXO5CfBqV-Ru0TEmMf_GLe1_tGLBnR56a_SWzFOJg5JrquY6Gpxo4_LTo7f6ScNHWo1_JULtixTIX81cmQiNG9B-JreyRKuMoiuX7pcW6n9b2owuI-Z4KFKhrUPukug=s1280" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="1280" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhalCZ1lyx7iLD0xf9IwpIARcLxma8Np4GHuk15HUTG2uWeXw8FEKZmrkgwBN-EXO5CfBqV-Ru0TEmMf_GLe1_tGLBnR56a_SWzFOJg5JrquY6Gpxo4_LTo7f6ScNHWo1_JULtixTIX81cmQiNG9B-JreyRKuMoiuX7pcW6n9b2owuI-Z4KFKhrUPukug=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">Thoughts on reading and writing from authors born January 17:</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from English novelist Anne Brontë (<i>Agnes Grey, The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall</i>) (1820-1849):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">There are great books in this world and great worlds
in books.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so
whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be, written for
both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should
permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman,
or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and
becoming for a man.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">**<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Poet Laureate and National Book Award
winner William Stafford (<i>Traveling Through the Dark</i>); also noted for<i> West
of Your City, Allegiances, A Glass Face in the Rain, An Oregon Message</i>
(1914-1993):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">A writer is not so much someone who has something to
say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things
he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to
accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long
haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned
jujitsu.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The things you do not have to say make you rich.
Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do
not need to hear dulls your hearing. And things you know before you hear them —
those are you, those are why you are in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">You don't need many words if you already know what
you're talking about.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Language can do what it can’t say.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Writing itself is one of the great, free human activities.
There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery. In writing, for
the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world
remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined
vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth
between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can
offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in
and day out no matter what happens.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">A student comes to me with a piece of writing, holds
it out, says, 'Is this good?' A whole sequence of emergencies goes off in my
mind. That's not a question to ask anyone but yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Everyone is born a poet—a person discovering the way
words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what
everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">**<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Indian award-winning poet, lyricist,
screenwriter, and political activist Javed Akhtar (<i>Zanjeer, Deewar, Sholay,
Saaz, Refugee, Lagaan</i>) (born 1945):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">For an average noun or an average verb, an average
mind can quickly create reference. Where did they hear it? See it? What does it
remind them of? What is its connection? When was it last used in conversation?
What has been my experience with it? A host of memories appear when you hear a
word you remember.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and
decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal.
But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">**<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American novelist and short story writer Ronnie
Ray Jenkins (<i>The Flowers of Reminiscence, The Flynn City Eggman </i>series<i>,
The Twelve Dollar Alligator and Others: A Collection of Short Stories, Boot
Camp for Writers</i>) (born 1957):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">When reading dies,
the imagination soon follows.</span>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-588456774159988522022-01-09T20:43:00.000-08:002022-01-09T20:43:37.972-08:00Wise Words<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjWV-BET6iPLg42VjGVbeeJd3SUloQKGhdeIVgbUi6boq4XOOF_35v7QEAmyCyttjwDrRbvKTliS2z-XkcDaA0hSLF1R21KIvbLCV3MkaHYp3dpsctkLgqcXRUOKdG_RPI0aZcTrRjws4EHIiPcEvCbAQwuAyfWjAILfouJSChxtbwJTmbXDkDBjGk_oQ=s1920" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1920" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjWV-BET6iPLg42VjGVbeeJd3SUloQKGhdeIVgbUi6boq4XOOF_35v7QEAmyCyttjwDrRbvKTliS2z-XkcDaA0hSLF1R21KIvbLCV3MkaHYp3dpsctkLgqcXRUOKdG_RPI0aZcTrRjws4EHIiPcEvCbAQwuAyfWjAILfouJSChxtbwJTmbXDkDBjGk_oQ=s320" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on writing from creative people born January
10:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">from English Modernist sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth
CBE, DBE (</span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">Mother and Child, Pelagos, Corinthos, Figure for a Landscape,
Curved Forms, Squares with two circles</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">) (1903-1975):</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my
body.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I found one had to do some work every day, even at
midnight, because either you're professional or you're not.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Body experience... is the centre of creation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Halfway through any work, one is often tempted to go
off on a tangent. Once you have yielded, you will be tempted to yield again and
again... Finally, you would only produce something hybrid.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American poet Robinson Jeffers <i>(Tamar and
Otber Poems, Cawdor, Thurso's Landing, Be Angry at the Sun</i>) (1887-1962):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my
solitude and slain it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate
Philip Levine (<i>The Simple Truth</i>); also known for <i>The Names of the
Lost, Ashes: Poems New and Old, 7 Years from Somewhere, What Work Is</i>) (1928-2015):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The irony is, going to work every day became the
subject of probably my best poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Some things you know all your life. They are so simple
and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme... they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I believed even then that if I could transform my
experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin
to possess on its own.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Oh, yes, let’s bless the imagination. It gives us the
myths we live by. Let’s bless the visionary power of the human—the only animal
that’s got it—, bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless
the images that stalk the corners of our sight and will not let go.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Don't scorn your life just because it's not dramatic,
or it's impoverished, or it looks dull, or it's workaday. Don't scorn it. It is
where poetry is taking place if you've got the sensitivity to see it, if your
eyes are open.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion,
but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the
extraordinary, the only home.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American poet Dorianne Laux (<i>What We Carry,
Facts About the Moon, The Book of Men, Only As the Day is Long</i>) (born
1952):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Good writing works from a simple premise: your
experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let
it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our
song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been
wounded.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I write to invite the voices in, to watch the angel
wrestle, to feel the devil gather on its haunches and rise. I write to hear
myself breathing. I write to be doing something while I wait to be called to my
appointment with death. I write to be done writing. I write because writing is
fun.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Every poem I write falls short in some important way.
But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.</span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-38060314926142772142022-01-02T23:45:00.001-08:002022-01-02T23:46:10.529-08:00Wise Words<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiz4B0Dxnjj2Nidrdk8mUlF2sV-ifiIKhhiTTiJdAXuUxx2kqiVJjSrUTj4o6qgFPxT1JdeLBqOIplnRBVnRkO2m3JCACVKvBsXsUYFY9Rzusfff86NQU9LaZ9PufYj_BH6odbApjOrOzBhSTEO7YRM7pzOunJkWi6RyPXAIPRPwJHsE-QZc-02XZV5Uw=s1920" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1079" data-original-width="1920" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiz4B0Dxnjj2Nidrdk8mUlF2sV-ifiIKhhiTTiJdAXuUxx2kqiVJjSrUTj4o6qgFPxT1JdeLBqOIplnRBVnRkO2m3JCACVKvBsXsUYFY9Rzusfff86NQU9LaZ9PufYj_BH6odbApjOrOzBhSTEO7YRM7pzOunJkWi6RyPXAIPRPwJHsE-QZc-02XZV5Uw=s320" width="320" /></a></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on writing from authors born January 3:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">from Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (</span><i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">In
Catilinam, Ad Atticum, Ad familiares, Ad Brutum, Ad Quintum fratrem, De
consulata suo, De oratore, De republica, Tusculanae Disputationes, De natura
deorum, De Officiis</i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 13pt;">) (106 B.C.E.-43 B.C.E.):</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A room without books is like a body without a soul.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within
leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out.
The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">For books are more than books, they are the life, the
very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the
essence and quintessence of their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">If you have a garden and a library, you have
everything you need.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Gould
Fletcher (<i>Selected Poems</i>); also noted for <i>Irradiations: Sand and
Spray, Goblins and Pagodas</i> (1886-1950):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Every artist carries upon his shoulders a profound
moral responsibility. This responsibility is not, as supposed, the duty of
teaching us to conform to the modern official distortion of Christian ethics,
by which we are ruled. It is not the duty of upholding a system of negations,
of prohibitions, of compromises, striking at the very roots of life. It is a
far nobler, far more difficult task. The duty of the artist is to affirm the
dignity of life, the value of humanity, despite the morbid prejudices of
Puritanism, the timid conventionality of the mob, despite even his own
knowledge of the insoluble riddle of suffering, decay and death.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry merely descriptive of nature, however vivid, no
longer seems enough for me, there has to be added to it, the human judgement,
the human evaluation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is time to create something new. It is time to
strip poetry of meaningless tatters of form, and to clothe her in new, suitable
garments.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from English academic and writer J. R. R. Tolkien CBE
(<i>The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Tolkien Reader</i>) (1892-1973):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">They say it is the first step that costs the effort. I
do not find it so. I am sure I could write unlimited "first
chapters." I have indeed written many.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary
languages. I have been at it since I could write.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I dislike Allegory—the conscious and intentional
allegory—yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical
language.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A friend of mine tells that I talk in shorthand and
then smudge it.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American-British poet and scholar Anne Stevenson (<i>Living
in America: Poems, Reversals, Travelling Behind Glass, Minute by Glass Minute,
Selected Poems, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath</i>) (1933-2020):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings—about
human feelings and frailties.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form
because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I
enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated
but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems
are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong
kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism
has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand
literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with
making poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Cuban children's author Alma Flor Ada (<i>Under
the Royal Palms, The Gold Coin, Gathering the Sun</i>) (b. 1938):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The topics that keep repeating, whether the characters
be animals, people or even geometric shapes are the joy of family, the
surprises of discovering friendship among those who apparently are different
from us, our capacity to change our environment and thus our life for the better,
and the power in not-giving up.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from British children’s author Terry Deary (<i>Horrible
Histories</i> series<i>, Master Crook's Crime Academy</i> series) (b. 1946):<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I'm not a historian, and I wouldn't want to be. I want
to change the world. Attack the elite. Overturn the hierarchy. Look at my
stories and you'll notice that the villains are always, always, those in power.
The heroes are the little people. I hate the establishment. Always have, always
will.</span></p><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-85294846843139600342021-12-26T23:07:00.006-08:002021-12-26T23:08:02.720-08:00Wise Words<p style="text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVXOROMyRYolYRSFlz1-4jH-4V_SaJwCZcIH6jlWdR1KGOJxM-rH44J9aWXDiDY87HKUa8XNELJZKcSV0PtPzZiBg0T_QnLdiaPMaNifzJQUOlMA2xThXwwH1vBwC3oqRy_wlBo1Ee4Qb05vrPq-HqGKr_DJvB7oucOv3FEU9BUwptMk25eGuAcfWCPw=s1920" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="721" data-original-width="1920" height="138" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgVXOROMyRYolYRSFlz1-4jH-4V_SaJwCZcIH6jlWdR1KGOJxM-rH44J9aWXDiDY87HKUa8XNELJZKcSV0PtPzZiBg0T_QnLdiaPMaNifzJQUOlMA2xThXwwH1vBwC3oqRy_wlBo1Ee4Qb05vrPq-HqGKr_DJvB7oucOv3FEU9BUwptMk25eGuAcfWCPw=w368-h138" width="368" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on writing from authors born December 27:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from British poet Mina Loy (<i>Lunar Baedeker, Insel,
Stories and</i> Essays) (1882-1966):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual
thoughts, the sound of an idea.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from German novelist and screenwriter Thea von Harbou
(<i>Das indische Grabmal</i>, <i>Dr. Mabuse</i> films, <i>Die Nibelungen</i>
films, <i>Metropolis, M</i>) (1888-1954):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">This book is not of today or of the future.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">It tells of no place.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">It serves no cause, party or class.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">It has a moral which grows on the pillar of
understanding:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The mediator between brain and muscle must be the
Heart.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and
essayist Louis Bromfield (<i>Early Autumn</i>) (1896-1956):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">There is a rhythm in life, a certain beauty which
operates by a variation of lights and shadows, happiness alternating with
sorrow, content with discontent, distilling in this process of contrast a sense
of satisfaction, of richness that can be captured and pinned down only by those
who possess the gift of awareness.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American poet Charles Olson (<i>Projective Verse,
The Distances, The Maximus Poems</i>) (1910-1970):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">of rhythm is image / of image is knowing / of knowing
there is / a construct<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized
in the modality of being.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got
it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all
the way over to, the reader.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to
tell the truth because to some extent it's false.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I defer to all these other American poets who, for
some reason, I both envy and admire.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from British-born American novelist and essayist
Wilfrid Sheed (<i>A Middle Class Education, Frank and Maisie, Office Politics,
The House that George Built</i>) (1930-2011):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It
was the only consolation I could find.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">One reason the human race has such a low opinion of
itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">It's the old case against symbols: if you get them,
they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Every writer is a writer of the generation before.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get
the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain
it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The only reason I didn't kill myself after I read the
reviews of my first book was because we have two rivers in New York and I
couldn't decide which one to jump into.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness
of it all—what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those
who talk about having to stare at a blank page—do they want someone to write on
it?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Books about suicide make lousy gifts.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Australian novelist Alex Miller (<i>The Ancestor
Game, Journey to the Stone Country, Lovesong, Autumn Laing</i>) (born 1936):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Story is the greatest human mystery.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate Bill
Manhire (<i>How to Take Off Your Clothes at the Picnic, Zoetropes, Milky Way
Bar, Lifted, Wow</i>) (born 1946):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I suppose what I really like is to set up a system
which looks wonderfully secure when you first encounter it on the page, but
within the framework there are crazy things which tip the reader off-balance.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Nigerian-American novelist, poet, and essayist
Chris Abani (<i>Graceland, Becoming Abigail, The Virgin of Flames, The Secret
History of Las Vegas</i>) (born 1966):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">... it's the agents of our imagination who really
shape who we are.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Story is powerful. Story is fluid and it belongs to
nobody.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Every successful artist comes from a family—parents or
siblings or both—who, although equally gifted, chose not to pursue the
treacherous and difficult path of the artist.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The question is, how do I balance narratives that are
wonderful with narratives of wounds and self-loathing? And this is the difficulty
that I face. I am trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of
ethical questioning. I am asking us to balance the idea of our complete
vulnerability with the complete notion of transformation or what is possible.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The privilege of being a writer is that you have this
opportunity to slow down and to consider things.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The art is never about what you write about. The art
is about how you write about what you write about.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on
an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American history and culture author Sarah Vowell (<i>Assassination
Vacation, The Wordy Shipmates, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States</i>)
(born 1969):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">History is full of really good stories. That's the
main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is
interesting.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I
always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to
the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only
in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream
of consciousness but I still like to think of as disdain for the finality of
the period).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the
interesting bits in.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">No one I know
actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.</span></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-53280123846495876242021-12-19T16:29:00.000-08:002021-12-19T16:29:04.529-08:00Wise Words<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgPUN9GFete9f2yxyRhT87tTFaX5GloL0W2fDvuhTBQp6kO_u2kK2Em4Mz3uEgYDN4AQqcPPSV9gIokcJc71tdJgOUkCLY-G_9kxFtG_x920kA2qg9BSJZtBFdsZ_sSkdwi71EvCJXMfgDTv4WvWdBAHDU_j5RE1Ppout8lxY95SgNdIQD-xcgCQbithw=s1919" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1150" data-original-width="1919" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgPUN9GFete9f2yxyRhT87tTFaX5GloL0W2fDvuhTBQp6kO_u2kK2Em4Mz3uEgYDN4AQqcPPSV9gIokcJc71tdJgOUkCLY-G_9kxFtG_x920kA2qg9BSJZtBFdsZ_sSkdwi71EvCJXMfgDTv4WvWdBAHDU_j5RE1Ppout8lxY95SgNdIQD-xcgCQbithw=s320" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from people born December 20:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American philosopher Susanne K. Langer (<i>Philosophy
in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art, Feeling and
Form, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling</i>) (1895-1985):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is the objectification of feeling, and the
subjectification of nature.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us
notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we
conceive the idea it presents.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and
at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is significant that people who refuse to tell their
children fairytales do not fear that the children will believe in princes and
princesses, but that they will believe in witches and bogeys.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The high intellectual value of images, however, lies
in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual
experience.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">... the image of feeling created by artists, in every
kind of art—plastic, musical, poetic, balletic—serves to hold the reality
itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of
our intellectual constructions.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American author Hortense Calisher (<i>In the
Absence of Angels, Queenie, The Bobby-Soxer, Sunday Jews</i>) (1911-2009):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The words! I collected them in all shapes and sizes
and hung them like bangles in my mind.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I get up and I have coffee and I speak to no man and I
go to my desk.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It has always seemed to me that if you could talk
about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is
the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the
novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The novel is rescued life.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Every art is a church without communicants, presided
over by a parish of the respectable. An artist is born kneeling; he fights to
stand. A critic, by nature of the judgment seat, is born sitting.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I always say that one's poetry is a solace to oneself
and a nuisance to one's friends.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">This is my answer to the gap between ideas and action—I
will write it out.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Romanian-born Peabody Award- and Ovid
Prize-winning American author Andrei Codrescu (<i>Road Scholar, The Blood
Countess, No Time Like Now</i>) (born 1946):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The real technology—behind all our other technologies—is
language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">These are the poems of a traveler and a lover who
feels both the terror of time passing and the consolation of eternity. From
such tension spring lovely poetic objects, ready for intelligent use.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The time has come for writers to become inaccessible
again. The reason is not some kind of 'mystique' that makes people curious
(though it helps), but the fact that no real writers ever lay down anything
real in public—they work in solitude, they think hard, and their thoughts are
rarely nice or 'friendly.'<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Only the poor can create art.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American writer Sandra Cisneros (<i>The House on
Mango Street, Women Hollering Creek and Other Stories</i>) (b. 1954):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I tell people to write the stories that you're afraid
to talk about, the stories you wish you'd forget, because those have the most
power. Those are the ones that have the most strength when you give them as a
testimony.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Writing is like sewing together what I call these
'buttons,' these bits and pieces.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">We need to write because so many of our stories are
not being heard. Where could they be heard in this era of fear and media
monopolies? Writing allows us to transform what has happened to us and to fight
back against what's hurting us. While not everyone is an author, everyone is a
writer and I think that the process of writing is deeply spiritual and
liberatory.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">There are two things you need to ask for, to open up
that channel, so you get the light. One is humility, because our ego is always
going to block that guidance, and so you ask for humility. And the second thing
you're going to ask for is courage, because what you're going to be asked to do
is bigger than what you think you can do<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see
things through other people’s eyes. All good books do this.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">I'm a witch woman—high on tobacco and holy water. I'm
a woman delighted with her disasters. They give me something to do. A
profession of sorts...I have the magic of words. The power to charm and kill at
will.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from Swiss-born philosopher and author Alain de Botton
(<i>Essays in Love, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Architecture of
Happiness</i>) (born 1969):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are
reading it at the right moment for us.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us
the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise
never have thought to acknowledge.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The difference between hope and despair is a different
way of telling stories from the same facts.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is
actually the ultimate time-saver—because it gives us access to a range of
emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to
experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator—a machine
that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly
witness.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">One kind of good book
should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?</span></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1300828048783523953.post-40935678124743315732021-12-12T18:15:00.022-08:002021-12-12T18:26:48.101-08:00Wise Words<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhMnhClAlx9_OtcaSIOXoJy9LqtabLHjJJO1dB3XT8sstYR0zEjI7dV-TWVVrgC1l5fj0VTmNfQPsljnduWny5sTJTYn9B8dol242KPTiOBMYb-S6SvVY_g_Hj7getV0-oPKBaPh5bJ0LJdfF6gL_gNBeTXvjvtCymQvVJneyzsbpFcUbzcKcaxue2Dow=s1920" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1920" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhMnhClAlx9_OtcaSIOXoJy9LqtabLHjJJO1dB3XT8sstYR0zEjI7dV-TWVVrgC1l5fj0VTmNfQPsljnduWny5sTJTYn9B8dol242KPTiOBMYb-S6SvVY_g_Hj7getV0-oPKBaPh5bJ0LJdfF6gL_gNBeTXvjvtCymQvVJneyzsbpFcUbzcKcaxue2Dow=s320" width="320" /></a><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><br /><p></p></blockquote></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Thoughts on Art from creative people born December 13:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Canadian painter and writer Emily Carr (<i>The
Indian Church, Big Raven, Klee Wyck</i>) (1871-1945)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do
not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep
digging up a plant to see how it grows.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">...real art is religion, a search for the beauty of
God deep in all things.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">It's all the unwordable things one wants to write
about, just as it's all the unformable things one wants to paint—essence.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I am always watching for fear of getting feeble and
passé in my work. I don't want to trickle out. I want to pour till the pail is
empty, the last bit going out in a gush, not in drops.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">There is no right and wrong way to paint except
honestly or dishonestly. Honestly is trying for the bigger thing. Dishonestly
is bluffing and getting through a smattering of surface representation with no
meaning.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Be careful that you do not write or paint anything
that is not your own, that you don't know in your own soul.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American experimental poet and novelist Kenneth
Patchen (<i>Before the Brave, Journal of Albion Moonlight, Collected Poems</i>)
(1911-1972):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Art is not to throw light but to be light.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I don't consider myself to be a painter. I think of
myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend—give
an extra dimension to—the medium of words. It happens very often my writing
with a pen is interrupted with my writing with a brush—but I think of both as
writing.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Dogs with broken legs are shot; men with broken souls
write through the night.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from American writer Ross Macdonald (Lew Archer
novels) (1915-1983):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft,
learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to
be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged
rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal
with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie
Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the
rope I would ever need.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The surprise with which a detective novel concludes
should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire
structure.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">The walls of books around him, dense with the past,
formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">--<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">from Canadian Tony-, Oscar-, and Emmy-winning actor
Christopher Plummer (<i>Cyrano, Barrymore</i>, <i>Beginners, Arthur Halley’s
The Moneychangers, The New Adventures of Madeline</i>) (1919-2021):<o:p></o:p></span></p><p>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">Try and stay sober.
Until the curtain call. And for God's sake, have fun. Don't suffer for your
art. Just have fun.</span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">--</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">from American Tony-, Grammy-, and Emmy-winning
actor-singer Dick Van Dyke (<i>Bye Bye Birdie, Mary Poppins, The Dick Van Dyke Show,
Van Dyke and Company</i>) (born 1925):<o:p></o:p></span></span></p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">You need someone to love, and something to do that you
enjoy, and something to hope for, and that's enough for me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 13.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Somebody asked what I wanted on my gravestone. I'm
just going to put: 'Glad I Could Help.'</span></p></span><p></p>Flo Stantonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06696964010748783119noreply@blogger.com0