On art and beauty
No matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and analyzed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat; another poor fellow is turned into a beetle — so what?
There is no rational answer to so what. We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lecture on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”
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It takes an enormous act of violence to begin something.
Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Young Workman’s Letter”
(via tanya77)(parisreview)(langer)
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I think most writers have a failure of character, a failure to accept what’s being assigned to you to write. And that often what we’re most talented at we resist, because we think it’s silly, or small, or not good enough.An interview with Mary Karr
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What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.Holy Grail of the Unconscious
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Jonas Mekas: “Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shoot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shoot nothing…. Walden contains material from the years 1964-1968 strung together in chronological order.”
… With Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Carl Th. Dreyer, Timothy Leary, Baba Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Velvet Underground, Hans Richter, Peter Kubelka, Michael Snow, John Lennon, Yoko Ono…
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One of the nice gifts of the movie is that it reminds us that it took the better part of a decade for Julia Child to ponderously work out her cookbook. That she worked in a weird isolation from the means of distribution—who would publish her cookbook? She had no idea! Who these days spends a decade making something new and crazy that might never see the light of day?The Awl
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