Fourth Mess Section
1. If you are interested in the relationship between photographic images and reality, Abraham Zapruder has a conundrum for you. –Errol Morris’s twitter feed
2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others. –The Dunning-Kruger Effect
3. Portraits of those who sit across from Marina Abramovic during The Artist Is Present.
4. The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. –a profile of Jure Robic, ultra-endurance athlete
5. They’ve watched so many times, full of their clear juice, hanging from small striped boxes, gushing like ants, picking at the hands of unsubtle blind people, nibbling right up to the police hem. –Atonement Century Machinery (Frivolous Ridership) by Fortunato Salazar
6. The photographs of Rodney Alcala, the Dating Game killer.
Landschaft Mit Haus
I am in love with this series of paintings from Maria Zaikina. I now have all of the images rotating automatically through my desktop background.
(via but does it float)
most writing prompts suck
So I will try a not-suck one (warning: it might suck). Begin your story/exercise this way:
Socks you wear daily (not yours), revolver, dog you love, dragged out back in the snow falling darkness, dragged behind the dumpster with gun placed to head…Go.
Now, go ahead, say that is lame. Hell, I agree. Way too many images. Crazy off-the-page-subtext. Even seems a bit forced, possibly melodramatic. Even leaning prescriptive.
That’s a prompt?
Maybe the genre of prompt is actually like swimming a true mile (anyone?), as in tougher-than-I-fucking-thought?
Well, fuck. And you. And You try. One sentence, please.
Can I get a non-cliche prompt?
I do not want 1. Which god are you? 2. You drank a milkshake and feel weird. 3. Knock, knock. What was that?
Anything else is cool.
Add your writing prompt (this might appear later in a textbook. And I’m the type of person to pay you .00002 % royalty as opposed to those bastards stealing your idea at 0001%, ha, ha [no, seriously, ha, ha]).
Uh. The point is write ONE sentence as a writing prompt. Let’s see it.
BLACK HOLE KIDS
Fan of Charles Burns’s excellent comic Black Hole? Check this out. Via here. They’re from the current issue of the British magazine 125. This site apparently has all the images, but the bandwith is exceeded at the moment.
most likely to form a clan of dumpster-foraging suburban outcasts
WHORES AND LIARS
just starting a literary magazine, here in this back alley
A few weeks ago I was at a panel discussion where the TV writer/showrunner David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood, the upcoming Luck), known for his powerful intellect and oratorical abilities, talked for a bit about his philosophy of how an artist (in his case, a TV showrunner) should go about striving to get his art into the world (i.e. get his show on the air). He said you have to lie like hell.
On semiotics
The best way to describe a cat is to use the letters c, a, and t. Every word contains a world, and some wonder why we still write. Two arms and a head is shorthand for “man drowning”; lol is an acronym for “laugh out loud,” usually used glibly as hyperbole. When semiotics meets semantics, there is a surreal incident of uncanny humor — an illustration with its own inverse reaction embodied in it. Insert a hyphen in 911 and you have 9-11, the latter date on which the former number was no doubt dialed. As we move along, as the mutt of history and words grows up, let us know when to laugh, when to laugh out loud, and when to remain silent.
[image via fail blog]
Famous Authors ‘Nude’
I’m trying to do anything but write today but I’m still at my desk. I started googling famous authors + the word ‘nude’ to see what would come up. Here’s what came up:
‘Don Delillo nude’
‘Rick Bass nude’
