lynda barry card w/ purple paint spatters © by xinem

… [Lynda Barry] told a story about the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who helps patients experiencing phantom-limb pain. Barry discussed one patient who felt that his missing left hand was clenched in a fist and could never shake the discomfort — could never “unclench” it.

So Ramachandran used a mirror box — a compartment into which the patient could insert his right hand and see it reflected at the end of his left…

See Your Own Trouble Reflected

[caption id=”flickrImage_1” align=”aligncenter” width=”375” caption=”lynda barry card w/ purple paint spatters © by xinem”][/caption]

… [Lynda Barry] told a story about the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who helps patients experiencing phantom-limb pain. Barry discussed one patient who felt that his missing left hand was clenched in a fist and could never shake the discomfort — could never “unclench” it.

So Ramachandran used a mirror box — a compartment into which the patient could insert his right hand and see it reflected at the end of his left arm. “And Ramachandran said, ‘Open your hands.’ And the patient saw this” — Barry opened two clenched fists in unison. “That’s what I think images do.

“I think that in the course of human life,” she continued softly, “we have events that cause” — she clenched her fist and held it up, inspecting it from all angles. “Losing your parents might cause it. Or a war. Or things going bad in a family.”

The only way to open that fist, she said, is to see your own trouble reflected in an image, as the patient saw his hand reflected in a mirror. It might be a story you write, or a book you read, or a song that means the world to you. “And then?” She opened her hand and waved.

I read this article about Lynda Barry - who became a writing and creativity teacher when the market for her comic strips dried up.

I was pretty troubled in college - and whenever people (people like the other girls in my eating disorders recovery group, for instance) would suggest to me that writing was therapeutic for me - I thought this idea was bullshit at best.

However, I do think writing has a cathartic quality - not in a confessional, I’m-making-my-audience-my-therapists! way. Rather, in the way Barry describes above.

If something has caused you to close, cave in, get smaller - writing about it, creating around it, reflecting it in the world again and again - gets you bigger again.

via Cartoonist Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself - NYTimes.com.

Original Article

….from Bernard Malamud:

“If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”

— 

The Drawing Board (Terri Windling’s blog): On Creative Burn-out: Part IV

Reading all the parts, all the quotes, and everything Terri posts: Always recommended.

(via gwendabond)

I don’t know what nationality this werewolf perched in London is, but I have to think he’s American.

If I were to make blog t-shirts, the first would say PROVOKE ANXIETY.

This feels like a founding principle to me – of the way I write, the way I live, the way I encounter the world.

If I’m doing something that doesn’t make me anxious – that doesn’t make me delay, worry, perseverate, talk about it endlessly – it doesn’t feel worth doing.

I don’t want to waste my time feeling…

Provoke Anxiety

[caption id=”attachment_1706” align=”aligncenter” width=”461” caption=”I don’t know what nationality this werewolf perched in London is, but I have to think he’s American.”][/caption]

If I were to make blog t-shirts, the first would say PROVOKE ANXIETY.

This feels like a founding principle to me - of the way I write, the way I live, the way I encounter the world.

If I’m doing something that doesn’t make me anxious - that doesn’t make me delay, worry, perseverate, talk about it endlessly - it doesn’t feel worth doing.

I don’t want to waste my time feeling safe and comfortable.

I provoke anxiety - in myself, in others - because that’s where art lives.

Art is anxious. Not safe.

[caption id=”attachment_1708” align=”aligncenter” width=”614” caption=”In an effort to take you behind the scenes here on the blog, I bring you a picture of this blog post being written — in the lobby of The Hoxton, London.”][/caption]

*

I’m listening to Julie Klausner’s amazing podcast “How Was Your Week.” She really loves the things she loves (1970’s stars, animals reading her book, musical theatre, reality T.V.) — and helps you love them too.

Original Article

Positions of Privilege

lareviewofbooks:

MATTHEW SPECKTOR

on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.
Joan Didion © Ed Wexler
The Los Angeles Review of Books  gives its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in 1976 that “[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.” That attention to style, structure, perspective, and meaning animates these essays by Meghan Daum, Susan Straight, Amy Wilentz, Richard Rayner, Amy Ephron, and today, Matthew Specktor, who grew up around the corner when Didion lived in Brentwood.

¤
Joan Didion
Blue Nights
Alfred A. Knopf, November 2011. 208 pp.

Joan Didion is, as we know, a cool customer. Long before The Year of Magical Thinking, in which a social worker calls her just that, we understood Didion to be cool in every sense of the word. Whatever was happening behind those bug-eyed sunglasses, within that frail frame, the author’s relentless arrangement of information — the research, the reshuffling — kept hot feeling in line. This was true in Play It As It Lays, where the institutionalized Maria Wyeth’s separation from her young daughter exists mostly between parentheses, and it was true in The Year of Magical Thinking, where the immediacy of loss is often cut with diagnostic material: W.H. Auden, observations about grief, and observations about those observations (“the question of self-pity”) interceding before anyone gets wet. There is a moment in Blue Nights, in one sense The Year of Magical Thinking’s logical extension but in another sense unlike any book in Didion’s corpus, that seems to me specifically revealing: leaving a physical therapy session where she’s been working out alongside members of the New York Yankees (!), Didion remarks upon her declining capacities. “My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether,” she writes. “Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp.”

“The correct stance?” It seems an odd thing to be fretting about in the midst of a meditation on aging and grief, but, in a way, Didion’s entire body of work has been about this positioning: “the attitude, the tone.” These things have always been primary in Didion — the words themselves have never been permitted to violate or distress the stance too much — which is frankly why a good portion of it doesn’t interest me much. It’s also why Blue Nights is so forceful. On the one hand, her cognitive confidence — or at least her cognitive capacity — is as powerful as it ever was. The book’s surpassing lucidity (its title, seemingly generic, is in fact perfectly chosen, referring as it does to a specific set of latitudinal conditions in which “the actual light … becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres”) owes much to the tension between that cognitive strength and the cracking, at last, of the writer’s attitudes. Neither nakedly confessional nor coldly composed, Blue Nights is startling in its effect, and remarkable even within the context of Didion’s impressive shelf. (Just because the work doesn’t interest me doesn’t mean I haven’t read a lot of it, or that I don’t think it’s any good.) Blue Nights is heartbreaking, in a word, and if it isn’t among her most exacting performances — in fact it contains a few moments of unusual clumsiness — it may yet be among her finest.

Read More

yourmonkeycalled:

Saul Steinberg is the Best #4
from Steinberg at the New Yorker

Follow the Rabbit Holes

Follow the rabbit holes. As many as you like.

They are like the fractal flowers: everything is connected underground. Following something that appears to be a distraction is not a waste of time, if — and it’s a big all-caps IF — you can do it consciously.

Here is what happens down the rabbit holes.

You find that one small seemingly unrelated thing plants seeds for the next piece.

The piece you’ve been looking for. Or the piece you didn’t even know you needed.

You connect the dots.

You find the treasures.

You discover that all roads lead to the thing you’re trying to get to anyway.

You realize that you are not avoiding your project. You are investigating an aspect of it. Or learning something that will help you with it.

(Source: fluentself.com)

Night London Panorama with Full Moon © by Dimitry B

I’m going to London for a month.

I’ve got to turn in a script first, then I’m going. Because I can. Because this is the kind of thing I always fantasized about as a child – this is what I thought my life would be like. And so far, for the most part, it hasn’t been.

But something big shifted inside me this year. Maybe it was that I got so sick – (I’m feeling a lot better now, thanks to some good doctors and a ton of work on…

Delusional Nicholas Sparks Interview

Sparks says: “I’m going to interrupt you there. There’s a difference between drama and melodrama; evoking genuine emotion, or manipulating emotion. It’s a very fine eye-of-the-needle to thread. And it’s very rare that it works. That’s why I tend to dominate this particular genre. There is this fine line. And I do not verge into melodrama. It’s all drama. I try to generate authentic emotional power.”

But, well, he always does kill someone by the end of his tales, usually to maximum handkerchief effect. “Of course!” Sparks says. “I write in a genre that was not defined by me. The examples were not set out by me. They were set out 2,000 years ago by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. They were called the Greek tragedies. A thriller is supposed to thrill. A horror novel is supposed to scare you. A mystery is supposed to keep you turning the pages, guessing ‘whodunit?’ “A romance novel is supposed to make you escape into a fantasy of romance.

What is the purpose of what I do? These are love stories. They went from (Greek tragedies), to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, then Jane Austen did it, put a new human twist on it. Hemingway did it with A Farewell to Arms.” That’s one of his favorites, and he points it out as he walks the aisles of the bookstore.

“Hemingway. See, they’re recommending The Garden of Eden, and I read that. It was published after he was dead. It’s a weird story about this honeymoon couple, and a third woman gets involved. Uh, it’s not my cup of tea.” Sparks pulls the one beside it off the shelf. “A Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway. Good stuff. That’s what I write,” he says, putting it back. “That’s what I write.”

(Source: USA Today)