One night in L.A., we were talking about the dreamy pleasures of old movies, and I told him I was impressed by the way that, in his own work, everyone is always filmed as if they were beautiful.
“You know, I don’t shoot them that way because I like beauty,” he told me. “I do it because I love them.”
robertogreco 10:02pm on December 25, 2016How wild is it that every version of you probably exists still, somewhere, in someone’s memory? The messy you, crying on the floor exists still in your mind. The happy, sun-soaked you, exists in your best friend’s memory. No part of you has died, all parts of us exist always, simultaneously and hidden.
And I Never Hated You. | How wild is it that every version of you probably… 1:33pm on December 12, 2016Imagine what you would like to see happen, and then don’t do
anything to make it impossible.
Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die.
How to Be Perfect by Ron Padgett | Poetry Foundation 9:33am on December 10, 2016I don’t think I ever was quite naive enough to believe, even at twenty-one, that racially homogeneous societies were necessarily happier or more peaceful than ours simply by virtue of their homogeneity. My best friend during my youth—now my husband—is himself from Northern Ireland, an area where people who look absolutely identical to each other, eat the same food, pray to the same God, read the same holy book, wear the same clothes, and celebrate the same holidays have yet spent four hundred years at war over a relatively minor doctrinal difference they later allowed to morph into an all-encompassing argument over land, government, and national identity. Racial homogeneity is no guarantor of peace, any more than racial heterogeneity is fated to fail.
On Optimism and Despair | by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books 1:40pm on December 8, 2016Only by looking “outward,” by caring for things that, in terms of pure survival, he needn’t bother with at all, by constantly asking himself all sorts of questions, and by throwing himself over and over again into the tumult of the world, with the intention of making his voice count – only thus does one really become a person, a creator of the “order of the spirit,” a being capable of a miracle: the re-creation of the world.
Spolia | Letter from Vaclav Havel to his Wife Olga, from… 12:03am on December 7, 2016That old, dog-eared book containing “Story of Your Life” lived on my desk during that stint, and I referenced it the way a priest returns to the holy bible. This is one of the great advantages of adaptation: You aren’t alone.
How I Wrote Arrival (and What I Learned Doing It) – The Talkhouse 7:27pm on November 29, 2016Your question does make me think of an idea that I heard from the critic John Clute: the notion that certain scenarios are easily storyable, meaning suited to being told as a story, while others are not. I remember once having a conversation with him during which he noted that climate change, as a topic, was not very storyable. I was inclined to agree, but felt that a lot of ideas don’t seem storyable until someone actually does it. I suppose one of the things that interests me as a writer is finding ways to make philosophical questions storyable.
The Legendary Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF 7:17pm on November 29, 2016How does one hate a country, or love one? I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
Austin Kleon — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness “To… 7:52pm on November 25, 2016Whatever the medium, the creative person’s task is to interpret an essentially unchanging reality, a dog-eared reality pondered by Homer and Mel Brooks and everyone in between. The artist succeeds if he or she can present something familiar from an unfamiliar angle.
THE TWELVE DEVICES OF PEANUTS 1:09pm on November 18, 2016What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang — Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists 7:41pm on November 15, 2016What I’ll think is that you are clearly, maddeningly not me. It will remind me, again, that you won’t be a clone of me; you can be wonderful, a daily delight, but you won’t be someone I could have created by myself.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang — Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists 1:20pm on November 15, 2016Spend less time crafting the perfect questions/ more time listening to and for the answers.
gwen ifill on Twitter: “@WesleyLowery Spend less time crafting the perfect questions/ more time listening to and for the answers.” 11:55pm on November 14, 2016It’s possible to think of the camps as what happens when you cross three disciplinary institutions that all societies possess—the prison, the army, and the factory. Over the several phases of their existence, the Nazi camps took on the aspects of all of these, so that prisoners were treated simultaneously as inmates to be corrected, enemies to be combatted, and workers to be exploited.
How the Nazi Concentration Camps Worked – The New Yorker 1:10pm on November 14, 2016Instead of saying ‘I don’t have time’ try saying ‘it’s not a priority,’ and see how that feels. Often, that’s a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don’t want to. But other things are harder. Try it: ‘I’m not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it’s not a priority.’ ‘I don’t go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.’ If these phrases don’t sit well, that’s the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we don’t like how we’re spending an hour, we can choose differently.
168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think: Laura Vanderkam: 9781591844105: Amazon.com: Books 5:07pm on November 13, 2016If you don’t know how much you need, the default easily becomes “more.”
Ego Is the Enemy: Ryan Holiday: 9781591847816: Amazon.com: Books 5:03pm on November 13, 2016Here is how you write a story: you take life, cut out pretty much all of it except for like four things, make up some other stuff, and then move all the stuff around, and just in general distort the world in all kinds of ways until it makes sense to our dumb primate brains.
Storytelling Won The Election 11:17pm on November 11, 2016Defining the secret of reading aloud well, he says it is “refusing to look ahead, to be in the moment”. And he says that a story puts its listener “in an eternal present”.
John Berger: ‘If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen’ | Books | The Guardian 11:55pm on November 3, 2016Forty-four years ago he was a charismatic presence, looking into the camera with piercing eyes and a frequent frown, as if constantly on the edge of disagreeing with himself.
John Berger: ‘If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen’ | Books | The Guardian 11:42pm on November 3, 2016School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is.
Austin Kleon — Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society Schools are… 10:56pm on November 3, 2016