“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”—
Ira Glass (via nefffy)
QUOTE —> ‘The novel, as it was developed in the eighteenth century, provided its readers with a field of play that was at once speculative and risk-free. While advertising its fictionality, it gave you protagonists who were typical enough to be experienced as possible versions of yourself and yet specific enough to remain, simultaneously, not you. The great literary invention of the eighteenth century was, thus, not simply a genre but an attitude toward that genre. Our state of mind when we pick up a novel today - our knowledge that it’s a work of the imagination; our willing suspension of disbelief in it - is in fact one half of the novel’s essence.
‘A number of recent scholarly studies have undermined the old notion that the epic is a central feature of all cultures, including oral cultures. Fiction, whether fairy tale or fable, seems mainly to have been a thing for children. In pre-modern cultures, stories were read for information or edification or titillation, and the more serious literary forms, poetry and drama, required a certain degree of technical mastery. The novel, however, was within reach of anyone with pen and paper, and the kind of pleasure it afforded was uniquely modern. Experiencing a made-up story purely for pleasure became an activity in which adults, too, could now indulge freely (if sometimes guiltily). The historical shift toward reading for pleasure was so profound that we can hardly even see it anymore. Indeed, as the novel has proliferated subgenerically into movies and TV shows and late-model video games - most of them advertising their fictionality, all of them offering characters at once typical and specific - it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that what distinguishes our culture from all previous cultures is its saturation in entertainment. The novel, as a duality of thing and attitude-toward-thing, has so thoroughly transformed our attitude that the thing itself is at risk of no longer being needed.
‘On Robinson Crusoe Island, I had seen the damage wrought by a trio of mainland plant species, maquis and murtilla and blackberry, which have monotonously overrun entire hills and drainages. Particularly evil-looking was the blackberry, which can overwhelm even tall native trees and which spreads in part by shooting out thick runners that look like thorny fibre-optic cables. Two native plant species have already gone extinct, and unless a massive restoration project is undertaken, many more will follow. Walking on Robinson, looking for delicate endemic ferns at the blackberry’s margins, I began to see the novel as an organism that had mutated, on the island of England, into a virulent invasive that then spread from country to country until it conquered the planet.
‘Henry Fielding, in “Joseph Andrews,” referred to his characters as “species” - as something more than individual, less than universal. But, as the novel has transformed the cultural environment, species of humanity have given way to a universal crowd of individuals whose most salient characteristic is their being identically entertained. This was the monocultural spectre that David Foster Wallace had envisioned and set out to resist in his epic “Infinite Jest.” And the mode of his resistance in that novel - annotation, digression, nonlinearity, hyperlinkage - anticipated the even more virulent and even more radically individualistic invader that is now displacing the novel and its offspring. The blackberry on Robinson Crusoe Island was like the conquering novel, yes, but it seemed to me no less like the Internet, that BlackBerry-borne invasive, which, instead of mapping the self onto a narrative, maps the self onto the world. Instead of the news, my news. Instead of a single football game, the splintering of fifteen different games into personalized fantasy-league statistics. Instead of “The Godfather,” “My Cat’s Funny Trick.” The individual run amok, everyman a Charlie Sheen. With “Robinson Crusoe,” the self had become an island; and now, it seemed, the island was becoming the world.’
-Jonathan Motherfucking Franzen, “Farther Away,” The New Yorker - 4.18.2011
My morose movies
A sampling of movie descriptions from my current DVR backlog:
Chiller about a series of horrible murders in a small German village. Lionel Atwill. (Mystery & Suspense, 63 Mins.)
A reporter (Bruce Cabot) and his girl (Dorothy Jordan) discover a double murder at a roadhouse. (Drama, 73 Mins.)
A girl (Ann Harding) discovers the jungle has turned her fiancé into an alcoholic. (Drama, 73 Mins.)
Stanley Kramer’s production of Nevil Shute’s nuclear-doomsday novel—-disturbing and well-acted. Gregory Peck. (Drama, 133 Mins.)
Moving, sober story of a young escaped convict (Farley Granger) and his numbered days with his bride (Cathy O’Donnell). (Crime Drama, 95 Mins.)
Walter Huston is excellent as the maniacal ruler of a jungle empire. Lupe Vélez. (Drama, 86 Mins.)
Electrifying performances charge Mike Nichols’ account of the mystery surrounding the death of a nuclear-plant worker. (Drama, 131 Mins.)
A studied, impressive chronicle of the capture, imprisonment and trial of Joan of Arc (Florence Carrez), the sainted French peasant girl who led an uprising and was executed in 1431. (Drama, 65 Mins.)
Cheer up, DVR. It’s spring!
