206. READ. LOOK. THINK.
206. READ. LOOK. THINK.
Babe I am the fresh eyes, miserable daily effort, "Notice boys!", “hehe I seriously couldn’t breathe lol”, 'nothing in how I live or act bears any relationship to a writerly identity' 👁️
Hi friends,
Please enjoy —
READ.
‘You have to believe, against the scornful trumpeting of your intellect, in the miraculous ability of form to create itself out of chaos. You have to hold the line through all the wretched days, months, even years that you spend not writing – doing anything but write: ‘wasting time’, indulging in displacement activities, wandering about pointlessly, biting people’s heads off, seething with anxiety and self-reproach. You have to believe that you’re preparing the ground for something to manifest out of the darkness, to present itself, to be born. Having already gone through this process countless times does not help. You forget, every single time, that it’s coming at you. The anxiety, the self-reproach are always total, unremitting, inescapable. You have to submit to it, allow yourself to suffer it, right to the end.’
Also Helen: I so love being old and unmarried.
It’s the miserable daily effort that is everything.
‘… a prevailing literary ethos: that the primary function of social novels is social change, that social change lends fiction real-world utility, that its real-world utility makes fiction a craft, that this craft requires labor, and that this labor includes a responsibility to historical accuracy and progressive politics. […] Not only do writers of fiction bear no such albatross, but the misplaced anxiety that they do imposes undue artistic limits on authors that displace and undermine the actual responsibilities novelists do have: aesthetically to beauty, and ethically to truth.’
‘Neither robust enough to truly function as novels, with rich worlds populated by independent characters with their own attitudes and anxieties, nor self-aware enough to eschew convenient, classical plotting, these novels reiterate the same curiously unsatisfying pattern, as if repeatedly rehearsing the fundamental “need to tell” — to confess something, to speak one’s life aloud […]. Yet ungrounded in fact and clouded by the haze of formulaic plotting, it is as if their narrators are afraid to “seduce and subjugate the listener” — as if the novels were themselves masochists, eager to be told their place, begging for someone, anyone to take the reins.’
‘Always, she found people who considered her perfect.’ (On H.D.)
‘I recall writing a reminder to myself on a scrap of paper that simply read, “Notice boys!”’
‘To watch a horror movie is to know that something bad is going to happen. To have a body is really the same thing.’
‘A synthetic female voice narrates “hehe I seriously couldn’t breathe lol” while she has her literary meltdown in her bedroom.’ (On Colleen Hoover.)
‘What I have to remind myself is that I always think there’s no other book to be written,” [Cusk] answered. “And I think that that is a consequence of not having a strong ego basis as a writer, and my writing being so shelved right at the back of my unconscious that nothing in how I live or act bears any relationship to a writerly identity.’
LOOK.
Roasting a chicken on cabbage | ‘Little did the skeptics know that, in blow-drying my chicken, I was standing on the shoulders of giants.’
Iconic Australian actor Sigrid Thornton’s ‘North Melbourne compound’.
What a pregnancy actually looks like before ten weeks.
Tilda Swinton and Joanna Hogg lose their minds over latté art.
Anna Freud’s necklace.
Spent a lovely fifteen mins with [redacted friend] cut and pasting these captions under pics of Saddam’s palace (#comedy)(#getajob), but it is very vibrant and creative: Zoe Foster-Blake’s Sydney home.
Tony Blair randomly turns up on the X Factor.
THINK.
‘Social media provides a platform for artists and nonartists alike to engage in the act of creation and creativity. And creativity is well known to have such healing benefits as improving mood, reducing stress and anxiety and boosting self-esteem. When we focus our creative energy on a system that attacks the very things creativity fosters, we are left with acts of creation that make us sick.’
‘Many adolescents I see immediately want to exit the world stage, as if all options are already on the table, played-out, disenchanted, and the only choice is to disappear, or take medicine, get famous, detach — other versions of disappearing, suicide being the most extreme.’
‘I’ve never been one to say I predicted anything, but—for one thing, birds. Birds had taken down the plane. And then bush—President Bush. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is another 9/11, and I predicted the whole thing.’ Can psychosis be prevented? (PDF)
‘The U.K. is now an object lesson for other countries dealing with a dark triad of deindustrialization, degrowth, and denigration of foreigners.’
What happens to journalists after Twitter?
Rates of short-sightedness increasing.
And don’t forget to read my book.
Jess
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