catmcw

Green Green as a quiet chaos lying in verdant beginnings, The freest state you can be in. Not the...

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:21:00 -0400

Green

Green as a quiet chaos lying in verdant beginnings,
The freest state you can be in.

Not the violence but the unorganized circumstance.
Biological and birthing,
Articulate whisperer of promise.

The last few pages of The Great Gatsby:
All green.

A convincingly passive color
To quiet a turmoil or contrast other levels,
An energy contradictory in quixotic abundance.

The Chiaroscuro and Venetian schools
Avoided green and had no green in their palette.

The overall effect is Green.

It is asking it,
Complementary,
Next to it.

If it is not green it is glazing dark umber
Into green effect.

A consequence
Of glazing reds & ochre
Into shades of vicinity insatiate.

Catherine McWeeney

Ben Katchor Interview

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 07:52:03 -0500

Ben Katchor Interview

"Perhaps that’s part of the mystery and magic of writing … that you can’t encompass it in any kind of..."

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:16:17 -0400

““Perhaps that’s part of the mystery and magic of writing … that you can’t encompass it in any kind of definition or aphorism … or do anything but shake your head and strike your breast. It’s beyond me, but thank God, I’m mixed up with it.””

- Jessamyn West (via theparisreview)

beingblog: “A sense of humor is a sense of proportion.” ~Kahlil...

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 19:15:31 -0400

beingblog:

“A sense of humor is a sense of proportion.”

~Kahlil Gibran from Sand and Foam

photo by JD Hancock

robertrauschenberg: “There is no reason not to consider the...

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 22:47:41 -0400

robertrauschenberg:

“There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting.” -Robert Rauschenberg

Photo of Rauschenberg in Captiva, 1979, by Terry Van Brunt. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Visit our Facebook page for more photos and to share your own stories in loving memory of Bob on his birthday.

Back to a Simple Time, When Things Were About to Become Difficult

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 23:51:51 -0400

Back to a Simple Time, When Things Were About to Become Difficult:

“Hard Times: An American Musical” at the Cell Theater, part of the 1st Irish Theater Festival, looks at the life and works of the songwriter Stephen Foster.

theparisreview: “I get really angry when someone says they...

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 16:19:48 -0400

theparisreview:

“I get really angry when someone says they don’t read fiction because it’s all made up and ‘not real.’ Bullshit! Nothing is more real than fiction. Nothing helps us make sense of the real world more than fiction. Nothing instills in us empathy for others like fiction. As David Foster Wallace said, ‘Fiction is what it is to be a fucking human being.’ That’s my favorite quote of all time, because nothing more true has ever been said.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Lapham's Quarterly: “Thus, magic in every papyrus; magic in all the religious formulas;...

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 16:18:53 -0400

Lapham's Quarterly: “Thus, magic in every papyrus; magic in all the religious formulas;...:

laphamsquarterly:

“Thus, magic in every papyrus; magic in all the religious formulas; magic bottled up in hermetically closed vials, many thousands of years old; magic in elegantly bound, modern works; magic in the most popular novels; magic in social gatherings; magic worse than that, sorcery—in the very air one…

stereogum: Tumblr Of The Day: Classic Album Covers Recreated...

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:46:06 -0400

stereogum:

Tumblr Of The Day: Classic Album Covers Recreated With Socks

The Paris Review: Home: reflections for Anthony Shadid

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 00:44:00 -0400

The Paris Review: Home: reflections for Anthony Shadid:

granta:

Last week, Anthony Shadid’s memoir House of Stone, which tells of the author’s attempts to rebuild his dilapidated family home in Marjayoun, Lebanon and in turn of a search for identity in a restless Middle East—was published in the United Kingdom. To celebrate, Granta…

Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:35:27 -0400

Robert Hughes, Art Critic Whose Writing Was Elegant and Contentious, Dies at 74:

With a Hemingwayesque build and the distinctively rounded vowels of his native Australia, Mr. Hughes became as familiar a presence on television as he was in print.

theparisreview: “It seems to me that our business is to try to...

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:17:04 -0400

theparisreview:

“It seems to me that our business is to try to think and imagine and speak about things that, by their nature, might seem to defy us.”

—Journalist (and former Paris Review editor) Philip Gourevitch on editing, writing, and his work on genocide.

The Rectory by Robert J. Hughes A great summer novel set in an Orient-like North Fork setting that...

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 19:43:00 -0400

The Rectory by Robert J. Hughes

A great summer novel set in an Orient-like North Fork setting that will sends chills up your spine!

I just bought: The Rectory by Robert J. Hughes

The Rectory is a literary ghost story that explores what happens when a young mother, whose young son has died, seeks solace in an old house by the sea. Instead she finds an old diary, an eerie book - and unexpected visitors who prey upon the grief and desperation of others.

http://amzn.to/PH3F11

theparisreview: What Maira Kalman thinks about herself.

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:32:58 -0400

theparisreview:

What Maira Kalman thinks about herself.

Vita brevis, ars longa, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile. Life is...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 13:50:00 -0400

Vita brevis,
ars longa,
occasio praeceps,
experimentum periculosum,
iudicium difficile.

Life is short,
art lives long,
chance is chancey,
experiments are tricky,
judgment even more so.

beingblog: “What really knocks me out is a book that, when...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 12:19:29 -0400

beingblog:

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

~J.D. Salinger, from A Catcher in the Rye

Photo by Simon Ingram (distributed with Instagram)

strangewood: The Films of Wong Kar-wai As Tears Go By | Days of...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 12:16:56 -0400

strangewood:

The Films of Wong Kar-wai

As Tears Go By | Days of Being Wild | Chungking Express | Ashes of Time | Fallen Angels | Happy Together | In the Mood for Love | 2046 | My Blueberry Nights | The Grandmasters

bbook: “The fiction I’m most interested in has lines of...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 12:13:53 -0400

bbook:

“The fiction I’m most interested in has lines of reference to the real world. None of my stories really happened, of course. But there’s always something, some element, something said to me or that I witnessed, that may be the starting place. Here’s an example: ‘That’s the last Christmas you’ll ever ruin for us!’ I was drunk when I heard that, but I remembered it. And later, much later, when I was sober, using only that one line and other things I imagined, imagined so accurately that they could have happened, I made a story—‘A Serious Talk.’ But the fiction I’m most interested in, whether it’s Tolstoy’s fiction, Chekhov, Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, Hemingway, Isaac Babel, Ann Beattie, or Anne Tyler, strikes me as autobiographical to some extent. At the very least it’s referential. Stories long or short don’t just come out of thin air. I’m reminded of a conversation involving John Cheever. We were sitting around a table in Iowa City with some people and he happened to remark that after a family fracas at his home one night, he got up the next morning and went into the bathroom to find something his daughter had written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror: ‘D-e-r-e daddy, don’t leave us.’ Someone at the table spoke up and said, ‘I recognize that from one of your stories.’ Cheever said, ‘Probably so. Everything I write is autobiographical.’ Now of course that’s not literally true. But everything we write is, in some way, autobiographical. I’m not in the least bothered by ‘autobiographical’ fiction. To the contrary. On the Road. Céline. Roth. Lawrence Durrell in The Alexandria Quartet. So much of Hemingway in the Nick Adams stories. Updike, too, you bet. Jim McConkey. Clark Blaise is a contemporary writer whose fiction is out-and-out autobiography. Of course, you have to know what you’re doing when you turn your life’s stories into fiction. You have to be immensely daring, very skilled and imaginative and willing to tell everything on yourself. You’re told time and again when you’re young to write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets? But unless you’re a special kind of writer, and a very talented one, it’s dangerous to try and write volume after volume on The Story of My Life. A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.”

—Raymond Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76

bbook: I saw America in pictures and movies, and it was sort of...

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 22:56:42 -0400

bbook:

I saw America in pictures and movies, and it was sort of a utopian place compared to where I lived. All I ever wanted was getting there. American music was the opposite of everything I heard in my own country, and there was rhythm and fun—the notion of fun was completely strange to me. Everything I really liked was from this mythical place called America.

A Painting Only You Can See

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 22:06:49 -0400

A Painting Only You Can See:

A viewer revisits a single painting over a decade: Caravaggio’s “Denial of St. Peter,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.