Vincent Gallo on Writing
Did I call him a pig? If I called him a pig, then he’s a pig.
I`m not an artist, I`m a hustler. As a hustler I`ve done many things. You should really believe it when I tell you that, `cause I`m not being sarcastic. I`m a total hustler.
Interviewer: How important is fashion and fashion week for you? Gallo: Nothing that we’re doing on the planet is important.
I’m sorry I’m not gay or Jewish, so I don’t have a special interest group of journalists that support me.
I constantly try to reinvent my sensibilities and my ideas. I enjoy some of the satisfaction that I get when I feel good about what I’ve done. But the process is quite lonely and quite painful.
I never apologized for anything in my life. The only thing I’m sorry about is putting a curse on Roger Ebert’s colon. If a fat pig like Roger Ebert doesn’t like my movie, then I’m sorry for him.
I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings. And I did it out of spite.
I`m the happiest the saddest guy in the world can be.
I told you, I`m an extremist. Even in art, if my work wasn`t 50 times more interesting than me and my petty life, it would be useless.
I do it for the money now. What gets you there maybe are simple things: survival, ego, and revenge.
Tarantino is a collage artist.
Hey Paula (critic) go ahead and write whatever it is you want, because you’re next in line for a curse.
One has to be slightly unpopular to have a profound vision.
I don`t trust or love anyone. Because people are so creepy. Creepy creepy creeps. Creeping around. Creeping here and creeping there. Creeping everywhere. Crippity crappity creepies.
Jeffrey Dahmer on Writing
“I really screwed up this time.”
“I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium. That’s what I should have done.”
“I think in some way I wanted it to end, even if it meant my own destruction.”
Of his first victim: “I, uh, didn’t know how else to keep him there other than to get the barbell and hit him, over the head, which I did, and then strangled him with the same barbell.”
Robert Ressler: “So you were aroused at just the physique?”
Dahmer: “The internal organs.”
“That’s why I started drilling. ‘Cause drugging was not working.”
“I made my fantasy life more powerful than my real one.”
“The maintaining of the skulls was a way to feel that I had saved at least something of their essence, that I wasn’t a total waste in killing them.”
“I would cook it, and look at the pictures and masturbate.”
“My consuming lust was to experience their bodies. I viewed them as objects, as strangers. It is hard for me to believe a human being could have done what I’ve done.”
“I was completely swept along with my own compulsion. I don’t know how else to put it. It didn’t satisfy me completely, so maybe I was thinking, ‘Maybe another one will. Maybe this one will.’ And the numbers started growing and growing and just got out of control, as you can see.”
“I carried it too far, that’s for sure.”
Theory of Prose & better writing (ctd): The New Sincerity, Tao Lin, & “differential perceptions”
In the first post in this series, I outlined Viktor Shklovsky’s fundamental concepts of device (priem) and defamiliarization (ostranenie) as presented in the first chapter of Theory of Prose, “Art as Device.” This time around, I’d like to look at the start of Chapter 2 and try applying it to contemporary writing (specifically to the New Sincerity). As before, I’m proposing that one can actually use the principles of Russian Formalism to become a better writer and a better critic.
Another way to generate text #3: “dictionary expansions”
Viktor Shklovsky wants to make you a better writer, part 1: device & defamiliarization
When I was finishing up my Master’s degree at ISU, I worried that I still didn’t know much about writing—like, how to actually do it. My mentor Curtis White told me, “Just read Viktor Shklovsky; it’s all in there.” So I moved to Thailand and spent the next two years poring over Theory of Prose. When I returned to the US in the summer of 2005, I sat down and started really writing.
I’ve already put up one post about what, specifically I learned from Theory of Prose, but it occurs to me now that I can be even more specific. So this will be the first in a series of posts in which I try to boil ToP down into a kind of “notes on craft,” as well as reiterate some of the more theoretical arguments that I’ve been making both here and at Big Other over the past 2+ years. Of course if this interests you, then I most fervently recommend that you actually read the Shklovsky—and not just ToP but his other critical texts as well as his fiction, which is marvelous. (Indeed, Curt has since told me that he didn’t mean for me to focus so much on ToP! But I still find it extraordinarily useful.)
Let’s talk first about where Viktor Shklovsky himself started: the concepts of device and defamiliarization.
Another way to generate text #2: “backmasking” (now with bonus Batman/Beatles content)
As I mentioned in my last post (“The Spell Check Technique”), I’ve played around with more than a few means for generating text. Another one that I used when writing Giant Slugs is a trick that I somewhat jokingly called “backmasking.” Here’s how it works:
- Write a sentence or the start of a sentence.
Another way to generate text #1: “The Spell Check Technique”
[Update 26 June 2012: At my personal blog, I’ve put up another demonstration of this technique.]
When I was younger and wanted to write but was less sure of my own inspiration, I liked inventing processes that would generate text for me. The most useful technique I devised was something I called “the Spell Check Technique.” These days I don’t really use it anymore, so I thought I’d set it down here in case others would like to pick it up.
For this technique you need a text editor with spell check capacity (I’ll demonstrate it using Microsoft Word 2003), plus some text. It doesn’t really matter what the text is.
Let’s start with a good chunk of lorem ipsum (generated through this website). (Note that you can use any starting text you like; I’m using lorem ipsum just for this example.)
Alexander Calder on Writing
The universe is real but you can’t see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it.
Each element can move, shift or sway back & forth in a changing relation to each of the other elements in the universe. Thus, they reveal not only isolated moments, but a physical law or variation among the elements of life. Not extractions, but abstractions. Abstractions which resemble no living things except by their manner of reacting.
I paint with shapes.
The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by disks and then I vary them. My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement. Even my triangles are spheres, but they are spheres of a different shape.
That others grasp what I have in mind seems unessential, at least as long as they have something else in theirs.
With a mechanical drive you can control the thing like the choreography in a ballet and superimpose various movements.. a great number, even, by means of cams and other mechanical devices.
My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.
I’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty but I understand it’s quite wonderful to go into it, to walk through.
To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect.
It whirls, it whirls.
Pseudonyms, Authenticity, and Internet Identity
When I was a kid I made up a superhero named Dr. Power. He wore a blue costume, carried a purple Frisbee not unlike Captain America’s shield, and whatever powers he possessed were derivative of whatever comic books I’d been reading at the time.
Drawing Dr. Power wasn’t enough. I wanted to be him. My mom encouraged my eight-year-old fantasy by making me a handsome cape out of blue velvet, and I made my own mask out of paper-mache. The mask sucked, it was thick and heavy and weird-smelling, and I could barely see anything out of the eye holes, but I thought it looked pretty cool.
For some reason it was important that my friends believed Dr. Power was real, and not just my super alter ego. So I had my brother take a picture of me standing next to Dr. Power while Dr. Power did pull-ups in our bedroom doorway. See, that’s the best you could get with Dr. Power, because he didn’t have time for photo shoots. He had to stay fit. Eveready. You never know when your next deranged enemy will come busting through the wall.
I am enthusiastic about boredom
My friend Maya told me about this guy who tried to hit on her by making fun of her weight and then kicking her under the table.
I said, ‘That’s an interesting strategy, I always wondered if a strategy like that would work.’
Then I thought about my own strategy, which generally involves waiting for something to happen and not forcing things on the other person.
I felt like my strategy was fucking stupid and just as terrible as that other guy’s. READ MORE >