Creative studio, Obvious State, has created orignal illustrations inspired by lines from famous literary works by T.S. Eliot, Philip K. Dick, Walt Whitman, Vonnegut, Cummings, Nabokov, Salinger and others. I want one several.
There is profound beauty in prose, so why not make it art?
If you love books, and the stuff in books, from the music and places to the drinks your favorite fictional characters enjoy, then you’ll be mad for Small Demons.
Not only does Small Demons host an ever-expanding archive of literary references, but they also cross-link and connect those references to other books, creating what they call the “storyverse.”
http://youtu.be/DSlY74J6iH8
Small Demons is an amazing, and sublimely addictive, resource for the book-obsessed. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
We stumbled upon this excerpt from a talk by Ira Glass, brought to life with beautifully rendered typography, on storytelling, good taste and the absolute necessity of perseverance in creative work.
https://vimeo.com/24715531
(via brainpickings.org)
Per the Guardian:
Charlie Kaufman is set to write a big-screen adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five, to be directed by Guillermo del Toro. The screenwriter behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich is Del Toro’s preferred writer to work on his film of the 1969 Kurt Vonnegut novel.
I like the pairing. Kaufman is an inventive writer, and the adaptation of Vonnegut book should go better than his past book adaptations. Guillermo del Toro has tremendous vision as a filmmaker, and I trust him with Slaughterhouse-Five.
Of course, this is technically a remake, since Slaughterhouse-Five has already been on the big screen. The 1972 film was described by Vonnegut in his preface to Between Time and Timbuktu as, “a flawless translation of my novel Slaughterhouse-Five to the silver screen.”
As a refresher, here is the trailer:
Vonnegut went on to write in the same preface that, “I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book.”
Now it’s Kaufman and del Toro’s turn to bring Vonnegut’s classic anti-war novel, once again, to the big screen. No easy task, even if it’s been done before.
As Hollywood’s imagination seems to be running on fumes these days, film remakes and adaptations of books are becoming the rule rather than the exception.
In the instance of Slaughterhouse-Five, Hollywood is guilty of both.
And so it goes.
The great modern American Zen master and photographer John Daido Loori once said, “Shut up and sit!” Of course, the late Daido was referring to Zazen, the Zen practice of seated meditation. I was reminded of Daido’s words as I read a recent post in The New Republic, “Screw Your Standing Desk! A Sitter’s Manifesto.”
To the Zen Buddhist, the act of sitting is an essential practice. Much like the Taoist concept of Wu-Wei, the action of non-action, the simple act of sitting can be the most active thing one does. Daido makes this point in a Dharma talk on the Koan “Dongshan’s Essential Path,” saying, in essence, that when we allow for things to happen, happen they do, and often times the outcomes are fantastic. In sitting, in moments of reverie, things open up, they emerge and move in “unanticipated directions,” to quote Donald Barthelme. This is where writing begins.
Similarly, in The New Republic piece, the author quotes Jonathan Franzen who once told the Guardian that “you see more sitting still than chasing after.”
But, what about not sitting, or—gasp!—writing while standing up? Philip Roth does it. So did Virginia Woolf and Lewis Carroll. In fact, more and more people, in more and more offices, all around the country, are doing it, too. Welcome to the era of the standing desk. As we work more and spend more time at our desks, someone took a stand, literally, against sitting.
Yet for Ben Crair, the writer of the New Republic piece, “sitting is one of the true rewards of writing.” And I agree. But the kind of sitting a writer does is more than sitting, right? It’s not the same as couch potato sitting or channel surfing sitting, or all-you-can-eat buffet sitting. Our sitting is intentional and bears fruits. It’s where we become architects of the fictive dream, John Gardner’s induced state of oneness between reader and story.
Can we, however, be good catalysts for this dream while standing around? Well, Roth, Woolf, and Carroll clearly could. But, for what it’s worth, Rodin’s “The Thinker” is doing his thinking while seated.
I like doing my sitting and writing in coffeehouses, soaking up the collective energy and taking in the lively hum, which has been linked to increased levels of creativity.
While Crair is clearly in the sitting camp as well, and makes a compelling case for it, there is still Truman Capote to consider. Capote was, after all, a brilliant writer, and he neither sat nor stood, but instead, considered himself “a completely horizontal writer.”
Now it’s your turn. Pick a posture—sitting, standing, walking on a treadmill, laying down, even—then get comfortable, and write. There are stories to be told.