Joss Whedon’s Dark Storytelling Place:
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The Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus: a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings.
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Damon Lindelof of Lost: Relevant Storytellers Talk at Disney, 10/19/11, Pt. 1:
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NPR’s Scott Simon: How to Tell a Story
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Stephen King on short stories
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Salman Rushdie: On Storytelling
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Doris Lessing on Traditional Storytelling
Like this:
Here are some recent links related to writing and creativity.
“Wield a More Subversive Sword!”: Writing advice from the scabrously funny, theatrically kvetchy, lovingly profane Maurice Sendak
I expected my encounters with Maurice, however friendly, to be the sort of stiff colloquies one tends to have with very celebrated people, who are often (for good reason) fiercely protective of their private selves. Instead, his lack of a social and emotional carapace—that same wide-open quality that allowed him to write and draw straight from his own vividly recalled childhood, and that made him such a killer interview subject—was immediately apparent in person. From the moment he hugged you hello, he was himself: scabrously funny, theatrically kvetchy, needy and paranoid and observant and discerning—in short, totally crazy, but also crazy good company.
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Stephen Colbert’s uncensored final interview with Maurice Sendak (via Brain Pickings):
COLBERT: Why do you write for children?
SENDAK: I don’t write for children. I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’ I didn’t set out to make children happy or make life better for them, or easier for them.
COLBERT: Do you like them?
SENDAK: I like them as few and far between as I do adults — maybe a bit more, because I really don’t like adults at all.
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Neil Gaiman’s memories of Maurice Sendak:
What I loved, what I always responded to, was the feeling that Sendak owed nothing to anyone in the books that he made. His only obligation was to the book, to make it true. His lines could be cute, but there was an honesty that transcended the cuteness.
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5 Art and Design Projects Inspired by Literary Classics: From James Joyce to Jonah, or what the Brontë Sisters’ objectification of men has to do with Holden Caulfield.
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From Horror to Ecstasy – Dave McKean Turns Silence into Expression:
In the past few years, Dave McKean has set out to pay homage to the great masterpieces of early cinema in an extraordinary creative venture which he is calling Nitrate. The paintings in this series are a celebration of early films in which McKean has either given us his interpretation of a particular scene or encapsulated the themes, story, and characters into a singular striking image.
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The Beautiful Illustrations That Made Poe’s Stories Terrifying In 1919:
These drawings invite dissection by the reader, something popular images rarely ask of us today.
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Annie Dillard on Winter, Memes, and Living with Wonder:
[She] manages to capture in some 200 words just about everything that’s magical and poetic about life, innocence, curiosity, presence, and even the memes that permeate the Internet, a kind of vision for the currency of the web long before the web as we know it existed.
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From the 1978 story conference between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan for Raiders of the Lost Ark:
G — The thing with this is, we want to make a very believable character. We want him to be extremely good at what he does, as is the Clint Eastwood character or the James Bond character. James Bond and the Man With No Name were very good at what they did. They were very fast with a gun. They were very slick. They were very professional. They were Supermen.
S — Like Mifune.
G — Yes, like Mifune. He’s a real professional. He’s really good. And that is the key to the whole thing. That’s something you don’t see that much anymore.
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‘Losing Yourself’ In A Fictional Character Can Affect Your Real Life:
You have to be able to take yourself out of the picture, and really lose yourself in the book in order to have this authentic experience of taking on a character’s identity.
Here are a some links related to writing and creativity.
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Billy Wilder on writing:
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A great series of writing prompts for poetry, fiction and non-fiction:
A cento, Latin for “patchwork,” is a poem composed entirely of fragments and lines taken from other poems and/or written sources.
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Write a piece of flash fiction or a short story that starts with an advice column. Use the advice column to introduce the story’s protagonist, the central drama, or the back story of the characters. Alternatively, read through advice columns such as the Rumpus’s Dear Sugar and Salon’s Since You Asked and create a story based on the problem posed by one advice-seeker.
The literary idol of my adolescence was Mickey Spillane, that much pilloried yet enormously popular creator of perhaps the most famous of all private eyes, Mike Hammer. And I came to be Mickey’s friend – my son Nate is his godson – and was honored by the great storyteller who, in the final weeks of his life, asked me to shepherd a number of his unfinished novels into publication.
- Max Allan Collins on “The Evolution Of Detectives In Fiction“
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The author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, who is also a ceramic artist, tells us about books that have influenced both his careers, from the life of a celebrated potter to a collection of Japanese haiku:
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“If I had to pick a book of poems for my desert island, I would probably end up with Wallace Stevens.”
- Edmund de Waal on Inspiration for Writing and Art
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Buck Henry on writing comedy about dark topics:
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In emotionally charged moments, we tend to do reflexively what the fairytale does for us: we put distance between ourselves and what we are experiencing in order to see it and deal with it better than we otherwise could.
- The Power of “Once upon a Time”: A Story to Tame The Wild Things, by Maria Konnikova
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Golden Age science fiction authors and propagandists grew up reading science fiction from the 1904-33 era; it’s from that era, as I’ve discovered in my own reading, that we have inherited such enduring science fiction tropes as the superman, the eco-catastrophe, robots, and the telepath!
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When it comes to getting work done and being creative, hell is other people, as Sartre said. But let’s not forget that no man is an island; other people are indispensable when they provide us with inspiration and thoughtful criticism.
Nearing both 70 years of age and total blindness, Borges nonetheless gives a virtuosically wide-ranging series of talks, freely reaching across forms, countries, eras, and languages without the aid of notes.
- Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967-8 Norton Lectures On Poetry (And Everything Else Literary)
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Like or dislike the Henry Rollins persona, how often have you seen a high-profile activist take such a firm stand against resentment?
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Genius is not about scoring 1600 on the SATs, mastering fourteen languages at the age of seven, finishing Mensa exercises in record time, having an extraordinarily high I.Q., or even about being smart.
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- A Filmic Ode to W.G. Sebald Comes to a Theater Near You
On any given day we’re lied to from 10 to 200 times, and the clues to detect those lie can be subtle and counter-intuitive. Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting, shows the manners and “hotspots” used by those trained to recognize deception — and she argues honesty is a value worth preserving.
There’s a full transcript of her presentation on the TED site.
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In 2009 I wrote a review of a related book by Ken Alder: The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession. It was around the time of that TV show, Lie to Me, starring Tim Roth (I really wanted to like that show, but it just never worked for me).
The strange story of the lie detector begins with the hard-boiled world of tough-talking cops and gangsters in the ‘20s, and involves murderers, tabloid journalists, kinky sex and mad scientists.
Link diary: From occult invention to the inherent humour of ‘interment’ vs. ‘internment’
This is my 200th post and I want to start something new. I’ve been using Facebook and Twitter as places to hold links I find every day. I want to try posting them here instead on some sort of regular basis. These are some of the links from the past week or so (May 1-8).
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“I remember we always had to look for the word ‘interment’ instead of ‘internment,’ like in an internment camp. Everybody thought that was pretty funny.”
“The city was a phenomenon with 33,000 families and businesses living in more than 300 interconnected high-rise buildings, all constructed without contributions from a single architect.”
- Inside the Kowloon Walled City where 50,000 residents eked out a grimy living in the most densely populated place on earth
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hungry for pixie sticks, rubik’s cubes and kaleidoscope dust
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“Talking too much about yourself is like wearing your clothes inside out.”
- A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook — Storks, study, and solitude in a fading life, by Anna Kamienska
I love the grenade-acado
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currently reading this novel…I wasn’t sure at first because of the hype, but it’s actually a lot of fun…very much in the same vein as Cabin in the Woods…soon to be a movie by Don Coscarelli, who described it as “Douglas Adams meets Stephen King”
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“Sublime, close at hand but mysterious with the living silence of the rose.”
- Adolfo Bioy Casares from The Invention Of Morel
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read this on Sunday–interesting survey/history: Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Tradition
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“Ink spreads because it wants to go in the direction of less resistance, and that’s probably also the case of when branches grow or neurons grow…”
“A writer lays down words, but they are inert. They need a catalyst to come to life. The catalyst is the reader’s imagination.”
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“one of the earliest films made in the US to feature martial arts as dance choreography”
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this series of articles looks interesting:
“The cosmopolitan treaty port of Shanghai had already proven to be a ready market for the new ‘shadow plays’ from the West, which were among the many attractions featured in massive entertainment complexes that offered music and dancing, Chinese opera and acrobatics, puppet shows, gambling, and all manner of exotic forms of recreation.”
The links between the articles don’t all work, but all six articles seem to be available:
“a surreal mix of science gone awry and fairy tale-like icy enchantment”
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fun short film
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watched this on Friday…”Crouching Tiger meets Sherlock Holmes”
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cool idea:
“Once a day, a subscriber is chosen at random to share a self-written essay with the other subscribers…” (via)
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“The process is something like that which takes place in the kaleidoscope…”
“He knows we’re just talking here, right?”
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watched this movie on Thursday last week
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John Zorn with Albert Collins, playing music inspired by Mickey Spillane
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I used to have this on cassette when I was around 20 or 21…I think it melted or got eaten by a cheap tape player
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something to watch one of these evenings
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“Between 1968 and 1977 bands like Neu!, Can, Faust and Kraftwerk would look beyond western rock and roll to create some of the most original and uncompromising music ever heard.”
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“In fact, Toronto’s sewer tunnels are so large and well-built, they look more like soggy subway tunnels than rivers of human waste. The resulting intrigue has created a subculture of urban exploration around subterranean Toronto. Daring adventurers and mischievous youths, all with a high smell tolerance, have long ventured into the city’s underground passageways to map their trajectory and examine their current state.”
- Sewers of Toronto: A well-preserved network of cavernous tunnels have spent silent centuries removing Toronto’s waste
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“young Rosa ‘Zazel’ Richter had become the first human cannonball…”
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“lets you browse the late DJ’s record archive one virtual shelf and album cover at a time”
- Browse John Peel’s legendary record collection, travel back in time
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Buzz Aldrin and Jack White interview each other, but only one of them gets his photo in the magazine (not the one who went to the moon):
ALDRIN: Who is this lady called Meg?
WHITE: I ask myself that question all the time as well.
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“A little, but I don’t want to stress it.”
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“the secret of all great invention: the need to dabble in the fringe and the esoteric, to push the boundaries of expectation, and, above all, to cross-pollinate wildly different disciplines and lenses on the world in order to synthesize a singular perspective that is at once entirely original and entirely constructed of its integrated parts, yet far greater than their sum”
- Luigi Russolo, Futurist: The Art of Noise and How the Occult Fueled Innovation in Music and Art
