Summer in the city! Climbing things! Battling hangovers! White shorts!
Cleaning out my phone of old pictures. This is from Nuit Blanche (sp?) in Greenpoint in fall 2010.
Art imitating life. (#gpoy) (at Storm King)
submit! submit! submit!
Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
—
Jonathan Lethem (kind of …) in “The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism”
I’m teaching this tomorrow.
(Source: harpers.org)
I used to have a print of this in my bedroom at my parents’ house. It’s lost now — somewhere between Long Island and Baltimore, or Baltimore and the West Coast, or the West Coast and Western New York — I don’t think it ever made it to Brooklyn.
Remedios Varo
“The Creation of Birds”
I think this is the most truthful painting I’ve ever seen.
One writes out of one thing only — one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
—James Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes”
But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
—Adrienne Rich
this is great.
@youngmonsters — what biography are you reading? do you recommend it?
I am currently reading a biography of Franz Kafka. Up until this point I had never fully comprehended the scope and strangeness of his long on and off again ‘relationship’ with Felice Bauer.
So I sketched the two of them from an old photograph…but instead of their (arguably) faked ‘happy’ faces I drew what they were both probably feeling at the time!
last kafka post of the night.
The Onion:
Prague’s Kafka International Named Most Alienating
“The nearby Dostoevsky Hotel also received low marks from the passengers, a large number of whom checked in due to their flight delays, and ended up murdering another guest at the hotel.”
