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The evil side of me really wants a vid about shows we break up with—XF, SV, Heroes, BSG, Dollhouse, etc.—to Voltaire’s Future Ex-Girlfriend.
Jessica Helfand, Scrapbooks: An American History: A curious book, full of great pictures of scrapbook pages. Helfand isn’t a historian, so she often says relatively unsupported things about what Americans were like and what their practices of recording memories in scrapbooks meant over time. She doesn’t like the modern scrapbooking industry, repeatedly referring to it—and particular materials, like books with preestablished headings—as “infantilizing.” She likes it better when people just cut and paste over existing books, because then they’re defining their own categories, recording for themselves and not as a type of performance for an imagined audience. I see her point, but I’m not sure that the two things—following anti-creative guidelines to produce a rote record and seeing the scrapbook as a public-facing endeavor—are as tightly connected as she presumes, and I’m sympathetic to the latter, or at least I think it’s hard to avoid in modern American society.
Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing: Rereading this for a project; it’s a really nice look at all the paradoxes of writing, including the ethical responsibilities or lack thereof of the writer. When Atwood discusses the relationship between art and commerce, she ends up talking about the difficulties of being a woman writer specifically in a world that told her that she needed to sacrifice everything else to do so. It’s as if these three things, art, commerce, and womanhood, can each be negotiated in pairs: thesis, antithesis, synthesis—but put all three together and it’s hopeless.
I also really liked her point about writers worrying about not being the unacknowledged legislators of the world any more: “This psychic wound appears to be suffered largely by men. Women writers weren’t included in the Romantic roll-call, and never had a lot of Genius medals stuck onto them; in fact, the word ‘genius’ and the word ‘woman’ just don’t really fit together in our language, because the kind of eccentricity expected of male ‘geniuses’ would simply result in the label ‘crazy,’ should it be practiced by a woman. ‘Talented,’ ‘great,’ even—these words have been applied. But even when they really did affect their own societies, female artist have not often confessed to the ambition to do so. Consequently those of the present day don’t feel a slippage in their power or a demotion in their place on the world’s stage, and they may suspect that they’re doing better today than previously, so they don’t feel too puny by comparison with a horde of illustrious female ancestors.” I think this is probably connected to the way I’ve never felt “the anxiety of influence”; for me it’s always been about the ecstasy of influence.
Stephen King, On Writing: Same deal; it was good to reread this after UR, so I remembered why I like the guy. Like the rest of us, his early creative impulses were fannish. “During The Parent Trap, I kept hoping Hayley Mills would run into Vic Morrow from The Blackboard Jungle. That would have livened things up a little, by God.”
Jessica Helfand, Scrapbooks: An American History: A curious book, full of great pictures of scrapbook pages. Helfand isn’t a historian, so she often says relatively unsupported things about what Americans were like and what their practices of recording memories in scrapbooks meant over time. She doesn’t like the modern scrapbooking industry, repeatedly referring to it—and particular materials, like books with preestablished headings—as “infantilizing.” She likes it better when people just cut and paste over existing books, because then they’re defining their own categories, recording for themselves and not as a type of performance for an imagined audience. I see her point, but I’m not sure that the two things—following anti-creative guidelines to produce a rote record and seeing the scrapbook as a public-facing endeavor—are as tightly connected as she presumes, and I’m sympathetic to the latter, or at least I think it’s hard to avoid in modern American society.
Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing: Rereading this for a project; it’s a really nice look at all the paradoxes of writing, including the ethical responsibilities or lack thereof of the writer. When Atwood discusses the relationship between art and commerce, she ends up talking about the difficulties of being a woman writer specifically in a world that told her that she needed to sacrifice everything else to do so. It’s as if these three things, art, commerce, and womanhood, can each be negotiated in pairs: thesis, antithesis, synthesis—but put all three together and it’s hopeless.
I also really liked her point about writers worrying about not being the unacknowledged legislators of the world any more: “This psychic wound appears to be suffered largely by men. Women writers weren’t included in the Romantic roll-call, and never had a lot of Genius medals stuck onto them; in fact, the word ‘genius’ and the word ‘woman’ just don’t really fit together in our language, because the kind of eccentricity expected of male ‘geniuses’ would simply result in the label ‘crazy,’ should it be practiced by a woman. ‘Talented,’ ‘great,’ even—these words have been applied. But even when they really did affect their own societies, female artist have not often confessed to the ambition to do so. Consequently those of the present day don’t feel a slippage in their power or a demotion in their place on the world’s stage, and they may suspect that they’re doing better today than previously, so they don’t feel too puny by comparison with a horde of illustrious female ancestors.” I think this is probably connected to the way I’ve never felt “the anxiety of influence”; for me it’s always been about the ecstasy of influence.
Stephen King, On Writing: Same deal; it was good to reread this after UR, so I remembered why I like the guy. Like the rest of us, his early creative impulses were fannish. “During The Parent Trap, I kept hoping Hayley Mills would run into Vic Morrow from The Blackboard Jungle. That would have livened things up a little, by God.”
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