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My first workshop with her was a revelation. I’d put up my application story — most of us did at some point — with the idea that it was the best I had. She saw straight through it, the way it was a mix of the autobiographical (I really had been in a coven in high school, with my high school boyfriend) and the fantastical (I did not ever help the police find lost children with clairvoyant dreams). I had tried, crudely, to make something out of a Dungeons & Dragons group I’d been in back in high school, but I hadn’t done the work of inventing a narrator who was whole and independent of me. Deborah drew lines around what was invented, and what was not, with a delicate pencil, and patiently explained to me how what we invent, we control, and how what we don’t, we don’t — and that it shows. That what we borrow from life tends to be the most problematic, and that the problem stems from the way we’ve already invented so much of what we think we know about ourselves, without admitting it.

In some quarters, “misogynist” is now a word used almost as laxly as was “Communist” by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s — and for very like the same purpose.

“Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”

“Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.”
― Joseph Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces

I need to write, but I also feel the need to be going someplace. Trains are the most feasible ways to go somewhere and write at the same time. You don't have to risk your life by writing on a steering wheel, and you have time to ruminate, which you do not have on a supersonic jet. The room that I live in right now is about the size of a train compartment and oh how I wish it had wheels and a continuously scrolling countryside. I am inspired by what I see my window. The problem is I see the same things every time I look out. Of course, I love America, and travel famously "broadens one's horizons", but part of my dilemma as a writer is that I haven't traveled or seen enough of America. Train travel differs from other kinds in that one has one's own personal space, you're not cramped into a seat with a tray table as you are on a bus, but you're also occupying this liminal space with strangers. You get to know people you'd probably never have to spend a lot of time with otherwise.

The first time I got booted from NYC I went home on the Lakeshore to Cleveland. I remember the insomniac feel of the whole thing, the way the coach rolled slow into each station, the empty platforms in the middle of the night, Albany, Buffalo, Erie, as it made it's way up the state and along the coast. I remember the bar car, where a thin middle-aged bartender in a bow-tie was mixing drinks like it was "Cocktail" while listening to Madonna on a little iPod dock. A bald, hulking man in the row in front of me ate a pungent middle-eastern dish and removed his shoes and his socks. I couldn't tell where the pungent smell was coming from. I ended up in the station in Cleveland at 4 am having a much longer conversation than I would've liked with a skinhead from East Cleveland. After sunrise I towed my worldly belongings across town to the catch the shuttle to my girlfriend's college. It was a formative experience the kind a writer needs, and which only travel on Amtrak can provide.

SAM MENDES RULES FOR DIRECTORS

2. Try to learn how to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Direct Shakespeare like it’s a new play, and treat every new play as if it’s Shakespeare.

5. Go to the ancient amphitheater at Epidaurus, in Greece. It makes you realize what you are a part of, and it will change the way you look at the world. If you’re an artist, you will feel central, and you will never feel peripheral again.

7. If you are doing a play or a film, you have to have a secret way in if you are directing it. Sometimes it’s big things. American Beauty, for me, was about my adolescence. Road to Perdition was about my childhood. Skyfall was about middle-age and mortality. Sometimes it’s small things. Maybe it’s just a simple idea. What if we do the whole thing in the nightclub, for example. But it’s not enough just to admire a script, you have to have a way in that is yours, and yours alone. 

11. Run a theater. A play is temporary, a building is permanent. So try to create something that stays behind and will be used and loved by others.

''I go everywhere twice. Once to get the wrong impression, once to strengthen it.''

'Conversation is life,'' Axton says, ''language is the deepest being.

How has institutionalized “creative writing” changed American literature?
Widened its base from the Ivy League bastions or bastards (to quote W.C. Williams, “There’re a lot of bastards out there!”) who still control it anyway. There’s no escape from their hegemony. But what is “American Literature”? Define it as: Works written in English by citizens of the United States. But what happens to AmerLit when, as demographic projections forecast, most USAs speak and write in Spanish? What happens when the Armada sails up the Thames and burns down the Globe and all its Folios? Lope de Shakespeare Vega.
What occupation, besides poetry, interests you most (i.e. music, business, cartography)?
Like a lot of poets, I fantasize about playwriting, the rehearsal-table, the stage-dust, and above all those endless rows of seats, which the audience (a lynch mob wearing haloes) enters with such exit-excitement.
If you could have grown up a poet of any other time and country, when and where?
I’d rather have been -- would rather be -- a contemporary British poet, because British poets have more freedom in the practice of their art than USA poets. Take one example, Carol Ann Duffy: she’s free to write any kind of poem she wants to, and she does, brilliantly. (She’s the best Brit since Larkin, another poet who proves my point.) But we USAs are bound, constrained to cultivate our own little specialties, to po-hoe our separate plots, each scratched-at piss-patch. What sign appears on every US-Po book? “NO TRESPASSING.” Or to use another metaphor, you buy a six-pack of Coke you don’t want the 4th can to contain Pepsi, you buy a Charles Wright you don’t want to find on page 24 an Olds-type attempt. Buy a Graham, you get Graham, not Levine. Brand names, all of which are carefully quality-controlled by market forces. But somehow the grass is greener in England. They do it better, it seems to me. There the poets aren't locked into straitjacket trademark styles and roles. Think of poor Louise Gluck: imagine her even adumbrating some of Duffy’s different modes. Gluck is stuck. All us USApos are.
What, in your work, matters more: sound or meaning?
Paul Valery said that poetry is a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense. But the argument (the hesitation) goes to the question of intent, or to use the term preferred by Octavio Paz, temptation. We oscillate (according to Paz) between the "religious temptation" and the "revolutionary temptation." If the poem is an autotelic entity, an end-in-itself, then sound is more important. But if it is (if it should try to be) a medium to convey philosophical/spiritual/intellectual/political truths, then obviously meaning is the foremost duty of the poet. It's Benn vs. Brecht. Oh, you got your Heaney who can do both, can reconcile the conflicting polar pulls, can wrestle those welter-threads through his Gordian eyelets and present us with a triumphant "harvest bow." Not me: compared to him, I'm knotless.

“Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments [...] I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."

DeLillo responded in November. "I was a semiconscious writer in the beginning," he writes. "Just sat and wrote something, or read the newspaper, or went to the movies. Over time I began to understand, one, that I was lucky to be doing this work, and, two, that the only way I'd get better at it was to be more serious, to understand the rigors of novel-writing and to make it central to my life, not a variation on some related career choice, like sportswriting or playwriting. The novel is different. . . . We die indoors, and alone, and I don't mean to sound overdramatic but you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, all of this happened over time, until eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It's not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there's no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that's all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood."

when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it’s being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn’t have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing—maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world.

I see Oswald, back from Russia, as a man surrounded by promises of fulfillment—consumer fulfillment, personal fulfillment. But he’s poor, unstable, cruel to his wife, barely employable—a man who has to enter his own Hollywood movie to see who he is and how he must direct his fate. This is the force of the culture and the power of the image. And this is also a story we’ve seen updated through the years. It’s the story of the disaffected young man who suspects there are sacred emanations flowing from the media heavens and who feels the only way to enter this holy vortex is through some act of violent theater. I think Oswald was a person who lost his faith—his faith in politics and in the possibility of change—and who entered the last months of his life not very different from the media-poisoned boys who would follow.

That question probably requires a book-length essay. I did at one point in Paris develop an addiction to Coca-Cola which I've never had before or since, but I don't know whether that was due to nostalgia for America or the fact that the French like it so much. Paris is “the city,” isn't it, and I am a lover of cities. It can be experienced much more pleasantly and conveniently than any other city I know. It's so easy to get around on the metro, and so interesting when you get there—each arrondissement is like a separate province, with its own capital and customs and even costumes. I used to pick a different section to explore and set out on a miniexpedition, often with a movie theater in mind where they were showing some movie I wanted to see, often an old Laurel and Hardy film since I love them, especially when dubbed into French with comic American accents. And then there is always a principal café in the neighborhood where you can sample some nice wine and look at the people. You get to know a lot of life this way. Sometimes I would do a Proustian excursion, looking at buildings he or his characters had lived in. Like his childhood home in the Boulevard Malesherbes or Odette's house in the rue La Pérouse.

“I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

-       Karl Marx

Matt Weiner: Everyone loves the Horatio Alger version of life. What they don’t realize is that these transformations begin in shame, because poverty feels shameful. It shouldn’t, but everyone who’s experienced it confirms this. Sometimes people say, I didn’t know we were poor—Don Draper knows he’s poor, very much in the model of Iacocca or Walton, who came out of the Great Depression, out of really humble beginnings. Or like Conrad Hilton, on the show. These men don’t take no for an answer, they build these big businesses, these empires, but really it’s all based on failure, insecurity, and an identity modeled on some abstract ideal of white power. I’ve always said this is a show about becoming white. That’s the definition of success in America—becoming a WASP. A WASP male.

Alan Watts: Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

Malkmus: With some songs, I have written narratives or I’ve tried to carry it through, but generally the things that were more genius, as far as I was concerned, were not that. The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They’re nice and pat. They’re more like I’m just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It’s not my true calling. Even though I like The Kinks somewhat, I don’t think it’s a big deal or it’s like magic. You want magic and something that surprises.

A song like, “In the Mouth a Desert.” That was on Slanted & Enchanted. If you ask me what that came from, I can’t say anything except that I took mescaline at Earth Day in New York. It was, like, ’91. On the way home, I heard the melody, or the rhythm. I was just playing it on my teeth. Simple thing, like [humming]. I didn’t have any lyrics. But that song came to me through drugs. Not many things do, because I don’t take drugs very often. …Maybe I should.

Never show a fool a first draft.

Fourth: Connecting with someone doesn’t have to be a serious conversation. I always envisioned comfort in my head as a complete shifting of gears, where you go from fun attraction based conversation to serious getting to know you conversation. As my understanding of game has progressed, I realize now in no way shape or form does comfort and rapport have to be serious. In fact, it’s a detriment for it to be serious, as this kills the vibe. I learned this the hard way by having a Persian Ten walk away depressed after being all over me the whole night because we had a long conversation about how abusive her dad is.  Real comfort should just be a vibing a wide range of topics and a deep exploring of topics. Really all rapport is the the ability to vibe positively on a wide array of subjects. Comfort can also be built by building a ‘we bubble’ where you frame the situation as you and her vs. the world. This realization can be summed up as follows: connections are happy, not sad. The shifting from attraction to rapport feels like more of shift in deciding on each other vs. getting to know each other, not a shift from fun to serious.

Guys say to me "Wow, you had such dedication" and I can't relate to that. To me, that's like telling a kid who goes to play basketball after school for a few years that he has dedication. It wasn't dedication. It was a routine. A habit. A hobby. I made the time for it in my life, and I never worried about how well I was doing. I assumed with blind faith that everything would take care of itself if I just kept going out and meeting people to get advice on how I was doing.

Jlaix and I were talking, and he was like "Dude, my skills are in like the stratosphere lately. It's getting so good it's scary." I was like "Think about it. Remember back in the day when we were dorks, and we were like 'all we have to do is go out for six months and we'll be decent'? Six months seemed like forever back then, but now six months breezes by like its nothing, and every time that happens our skills are going up at the same rate that they were back in the day. The improvement keeps compiling and that's why these results are showing up."

If you think back to the last six months or a year, it seems like nothing. That time passes so fast. You get older and decades start to fly by.

When you implement a habit, you're thinking about the outcome and how hard the training is. So you go through the one night and because its one of your first nights you remember every detail and it seems like a lifetime. And then you think "Six more months of THIS? Or a YEAR?!"

But that's the wrong thinking. If you're thinking like that there is no way you'll get anywhere. The point is to just keep going out and not try to get results. Just go out and do your exercises and it will come naturally. Don't think of it as "Six more months." Think "This is what I'm doing now. My day consists of this now. This is my lifestyle."

To me, it comes down to this: 1-Get an idea of what you want. 2-Formulate a plan of how often you need to show up to get there. 3-Accept that your new activity is a part of your life for the duration of the time you've decided, and never decide based on emotions if you're going to show up or not. Just show up. 4-Don't worry if you're getting results, just stick to the plan with blind faith, and make your criteria for success just to show up. 5-Make it a hobby, look at the details critically without taking advice dogmatically, and take the initiative to shift the focus of your training when your intuition tells you that it might help.

Don't focus on chasing outcome. Focus on sticking to habits. Make your criteria for success if you stuck to the habit.

To My Flowers

Why
did you just
come and
die.

WB Yeats attributed to his father the remark that "Poetry is the social act of the solitary man"

My then-boyfriend (later husband, later ex-husband) Carl Wilson and I began having parties every two weeks. And with my then-new friend Misha Glouberman, I started Trampoline Hall (a monthly barroom lecture series), and Carl had a music show called Tin Tin Tin, and for a few years we were just building this world of people around us. Anytime I met anyone I liked, I would invite them to our parties or to lecture at Trampoline Hall.

We did it because we were bored. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. I remember telling my grandmother about our isolation, and she said, “Have regular parties at your house.”

Your idea of working friendships sounds a little like a version of networking (a truly noxious term) but fundamentally different—more about figuring out yourself in the context of others and learning to identify certain qualities that matter to you.

I suppose I fell in love with Carl. I remember thinking around that time, “Well, now I’m ruined. Now I’ll never be able to be alone again.” I saw what was wonderful about human companionship. Before that, I was quite content to be alone, to be a solitary wandering person, and I thought I always would be. Love changed that. I mean, I still have my solitary wanderings, but there’s that additional dimension to my life, which is love of other people and collaboration and togetherness. It seems crazy to think there was a before and after with something so basic, but, what can I say, there was.

no raindrop / feels responsible / for the flood

Maybe Reeve turned you into a TV writer by giving you a weekly deadline.

WEINER

I’ve always said TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing. Even then I needed to talk about what I was doing. Once I knew that my writing would be read right away, even if it was judged—and once I knew that it would be shot right away—that was all I cared about.

And because I had gone to film school, I knew what commercial filmmaking was and knew I didn’t like it. In the nineties there was a stranglehold of formula on the movies. People would point to great movies like Chinatown as examples of how structure generates great works. But I always felt that these structures were derived from great works. The individual stories are organic, they come out of people’s heads. To say that the story of Jesus and the story of Moses are the same story is a horrible mistake. Are they both heroic? Yes. Do they both have inauspicious beginnings and unmarked graves? Yes. That does not make them the same story. But the studios were trying to consolidate films into a bulletproof system, they were trying to reverse engineer a hit—which, of course, is insane. In entertainment you’re a fool to try that.

INTERVIEWER

Meaning what?

WEINER

They were uncomfortable with a movie like The Godfather or a story like the Odyssey, where the only thing holding the events together is the characters. Now, there’s this monster, this obstacle, but there’s no real progression—the hero just keeps trying to get home. Sure, Michael Corleone starts off as a young war hero and ends up as the godfather, but the wedding takes up the first half hour of the movie. People liked to talk about “act breaks” and “rising action” leading to a climax, but what about Apocalypse Now? Someone’s on a journey, and sure, we’re heading toward a climax, but there are so many digressions. To me, those digressions are the story.

People would say to me, What’s holding this together? Or, How is this moment related to the opening scene, or the problem you set up on page 15? I don’t know. That’s where the character went. That’s the story. So many movies in the seventies are told this way, episodically, and they feel more like real life because you don’t see the story clicking. Movies like Days of Heaven—big movies that take time out to show the locusts. Do you need the crop duster in North by Northwest? No, but it is the most memorable part of the movie.

You’ve never heard of What Do You Do All Day? and it never went anywhere, but I still say it changed my life. Making that movie took me from being a frustrated, bitter person with no control over his life to a delusional, grandiose person with no control over his life. I was so high on the idea of having a job and writing jokes and going down to the stage and seeing the actors saying them and getting laughs. I couldn’t believe it.

I once worked at a job where there was a guy who said he went to Harvard. Someone finally said, You did not go to Harvard—that guy didn’t go to Harvard! And everyone was like, Who cares? That went into the show.

How could it not matter, when everyone was fighting so hard to get into Harvard and it was supposed to change your life? And you could just lie about it? Guess what—in America, we say, Good for him! Good for him, for figuring it out.

The important thing, for me, was hearing the way David Chase indulged the subconscious. I learned not to question its communicative power. When you see somebody walking down a dark hallway, you know that they’re scared. We don’t have to explain that it’s scary. Why is this person walking down a dark hallway when he’s on his way to his kids’ school? Because he’s scared about someone telling him something bad about his kids. He’s worried about hearing something that will reflect badly on the way he’s raised his kids, which goes back to his own childhood. All that explanatory stuff, we never even talked about it. And I try not to talk about it here. Why did that happen? Why do you think? You can’t cheat and tell people what’s going on, because then they won’t enjoy it, even if they say they want it that way.

You know how sometimes I give you a note that says, Why don’t you do X? and you say, That’s the thing I wanted to do? That’s what I learned at The Sopranos. That’s the note I try to give to everyone who writes here. Take the risk of doing the extreme thing, the embarrassing thing, the thing that’s in your subconscious. Before The Sopranos, when someone said, Make it deeper, I didn’t know what they meant. Or really, I knew in my gut—but I also knew that it was the one thing that crossed my mind that I wasn’t going to do. To have Peggy come into Don’s office after he’s had the baby and ask for a raise and be rejected, and look at the baby presents, so we know she’s thinking about her own baby that she gave away, and then to have her tell Don, “You have everything and so much of it.” There is something embarrassing about that. A scene that was really just about her getting turned down for a raise became a scene about her whole life. That was the sort of thing I learned from working with David Chase.

Another thing that happened when I began writing on The Sopranos was I noticed that people were always telling me anecdotes. They would throw out a line of dialogue they’d heard somebody say or that someone had said to them—and that was the story. I did not know how important that shit was. There’s an episode where Beansie and Paulie are reminiscing and Tony dismissively says, “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.” And it’s devastating. David Chase had witnessed that actual statement. Now I have a ton of stuff like that I’ve saved, things people have said to me that are concise and devastating and sum up some moment in their lives. When I’m talking to some woman on an airplane, and she says, I like being bad and going home and being good, that is very useful.

WEINER

I always had that kind of memory, I just didn’t know there was any value in it. One time we were doing a research call at The Sopranos. It was a two-hour conference call with a guy talking about emergency medicine. At the end of it, the writer’s assistant, who was taking notes, had a bunch of medical facts, but all of us writers had written down the same two ideas. All of us. Just those same two ideas in two hours.

INTERVIEWER

What were they?

WEINER

He said that everyone with insurance is a VIP. And he used the expression “wallet biopsy.” I think they’re self-explanatory. But that’s what being a writer is. I don’t know what makes something a story, but I know one when I hear it.

WEINER

You know in Reds, when they’re interviewing the witnesses, and Henry Miller says, People today think they invented fucking? That kind of thing. The old people you’re looking at, they may have been more carnal than we are—drunker, less responsible, more violent. So many of those film noirs are about how soldiers reintegrate themselves into society. The private detective is haunted by the shadow of having killed people in the war. Don’t even get me started on The Best Years of Our Lives. The move to the suburbs, the privacy, the conservatism of the fifties—that’s all being driven by guys who, for two years, had not gone to the bathroom in privacy.

So I spent a lot of money buying videotapes to watch movies from the period. I hired somebody to do research for me. Then, because I was working all day, I stumbled on the idea of dictating. I found that I was constantly thinking of dialogue and couldn’t write it down fast enough. I heard that Billy Wilder did it, too. He walked around with a riding crop while his writing partners would type. Joseph Conrad did it. So did Henry James. I’ve since kept track because some of my writer friends think it’s cheating. And it’s hard to believe you can be as eloquent as your characters, but you can be if you have the topic and you’re channeling them. Then you get to fix it afterward. It’s way better than sitting there and procrastinating while you write a new piece of description and try to perfect the sentence.

If you compose that way, it means the dialogue can all be said. John Slattery and I had an argument about something in the second episode, where there was a bit of a tongue twister. He was supposed to say, “Coop is going to want a carbon with your hand-picked team for Nixon on it. And I warn you right now, it includes Pete Campbell.” He said it was impossible to say, but I knew it could be said because I’d said it. I rattled it right off to him. Then he smiled and performed it and everything else I wrote for him. I started writing more tongue twisters for John. My favorite was, “He knows what that nut means to Utz and what Utz means to us.”

When I was just starting out, a writer explained to me the meat and potatoes of situation comedy. For instance, a scene where one guy thinks he’s talking about one thing and the other guy thinks they’re talking about something else sounds like a big cliché. But guess what? That’s comedy. The question is, Can you do it well? I’ve personally written some of the most clichéd comedy scenes on Mad Men.

But I find that giving each of the characters their own goal in the scene helps them talk in my head. And that’s usually the place for the most drama. Characters go in the story from having a private problem to having a public problem, even if they just lie about it. Which I guess is some convoluted definition of dramatic irony. Take the meeting in the episode “Hands and Knees.” Don has almost been caught by the government. Pete has to turn down North American Aviation and lie for Don or Don will go to jail. Pete also knows that Don is sleeping with Dr. Faye. Lane has been beaten by his father with a cane. Roger has lost their biggest account and sent Joan alone to get an abortion. Joan has not gotten an abortion. And Cooper is just there—he doesn’t know anything. So there are six secrets in the room, and when I was writing that scene, the hardest part was forcing the characters to talk about anything. Luckily we had the structure of another dumb meeting. The audience has so much information, and the characters don’t have any.

I try to be realistic, but the characters are smarter and more eloquent than regular people. It’s part of why I have them talk so slowly—or, really, listen so much—because I didn’t want the dialogue to be repetitive and snappy and sound phony. I wanted there to be real things like people saying, What? when they didn’t understand something, and coughing—things like that.

How many people say at the beginning of a story that the character is bored, and they start telling all these things about how he’s bored—he does this, and he goes to his mom’s house, and she’s talking, and he’s staring off, and then you go to his job and it’s the same every day. But actually, it only takes one shot to explain to the audience that the character is bored, and I mean bored with everything in their whole life. They did it on The Sopranos. When Tony was supposed to be laying low, they had a shot of him on the escalator in the mall.

The story is not, We built this great bridge, let’s watch people go across the bridge. The story is, The bridge is out, the bridge is broken, I’m going to try to build one. And then it gets blown up right before I finish it.

I remember when he’s on the A train, and a guy doing magic on the train says, “And now for my next trick I will make all the white people disappear,” and then the train stops at 59th before going express to 125th and all the white people get off and the alien is blown away by the magic trick.

Listen, when we are born, we are born a Buddha, a genius. Every one of us. In the belly of the mother, the family start to change you. The family. The family gives all the psychological limits they have to you. Then you go to school, society will limit you. Then you are in a country, culture will limit you. Family, social, culture. And there is historical limits. But they are limits. You are living in limits. In reality we are infinite, we don’t have limits. And ALL the fight of life, the opening of consciousness, is to open the limits of your family, of your society and your history cultural. In order to realize yourself what you are, who you are, you need to decide to be what you are and not what the others want you to be. They want you to be something. And you want to be yourself. But you may not be what the other want you to be.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

The three quarks are the three major characters in FW: the two twins who are opposite, and the third who was both twins combined and still a third independent character.  To understand thoughts like two twins who are the opposite of a third who combines both twins together, you’ve got to think in a Taoist way.  Like the joke: how many Zen masters does it take to change a light bulb?  Two: one to change it, and one to not change it.

'The task of art', McLuhan says, echoing Harold Innis, 'is to correct the bias of technologic advancement.’

Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a "minotaur" which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision, or vagueness is a minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process, he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in immediate relation to the slightest current of perception. 

His Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, a man of many ideas and many vices, is a freelance ad salesman.  Joyce saw the parallels, on one hand, between the modern frontier of the verbal and the pictorial and, on the other, between the Homeric world poised between the old sacral culture and the new profane or literate sensibility. Bloom, the newly detribalized Jew, is presented in modern Dublin, a slightly detribalized Irish world. Such a frontier is the modern world of the advertisement, congenial, therefore, to the transitional culture of Bloom. In the seventeenth or Ithaca episode of Ulysses we read: "What were habitually his final meditations?  Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.

Language and the arts would cease to be prime agents of critical perception and become mere packaging devices for releasing a spate of verbal commodities. Blake and the Romantics and the Victorians alike became obsessed with the actualization of Pope's vision in the new organization of an industrial economy embedded in a self-regulating system of land, labour, and capital. The Newtonian laws of mechanics, latent in Gutenberg typography, were translated by Adam Smith to govern the laws of production and consumption. In accordance with Pope's prediction of automatic trance or "robo-centrism," Smith declared that the mechanical laws of the economy applied equally to the things of the mind: "In opulent and commercial societies to think or to reason comes to be, like every other employment, a particular business, which is carried on by a very few people, who furnish the public with all the thought and reason possessed by the vast multitudes that labour."

For the name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

So persistent is Shakespeare in this auditory mode that he has none of the pictorial habit ... [of] displaying characters against local background. ... The sudden shift to painting people in their humours, or as dominated by a ruling passion (Don Quixote) corresponds to the sudden discovery of harmonics in musical narrative.  ...  The landscape could now function pictorially as humour or ruling passion in narrative, dreams or essay.

When a tribal man hears thunder, he says, "What did he say that time?"

Fashion, the rich man's foible distracts him from distraction by distraction.  Fashion is, as it were, the poor man's art, the usually unbought grace of life which he participates in only as spectator. In sensory terms fashion has a kind of infallibility about it.  As with hit tunes and hit pictures and hit entertainments, fashion rushes in to fill vacuums in our senses created by technological displacements.  Perhaps that is why it seems to be the expression of such a colossal preference while it lasts.  James Joyce gives it a key role in Finnegans Wake in his section on the Prankquean. The Prankquean is the very expression of war and agression.  In her life, clothing is weaponry: "I'm the queen of the castle and you're the dirty rascal." In the very opening line of Finnegans Wake — "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's..." Joyce thus indicates the reversal of nature that has taken place since the fall of man.  It is not the world of Adam and Eve, but one in which there is priority of Eve over Adam. Clothing as weaponry has become a primary social factor.  Clothing is anti-environmental, but it is also creates a new environment.  It is also anti- the elements and anti-enemies and anti-competitors and anti-boredom.  As an adjustment to the world, it is mainly an adjustment to a wolrd that has been made by fashions themselves and consists of imitations of older dress.

the last lines of the Portrait explain the relation of the young artist to the dead: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."  This verbal implication of ricorso, the millions of repetitions of the cognitive labyrinth, which is traced on the first page of the Portrait, is the task of making sense, of waking the somnambulists in the labyrinth of cognition.

“The poet is the vainest of the vain, the peacock of the peacocks . . . he muddles his waters so that they might appear deep

Leonard  Cohen once told me he was going to come out with his own cologne. It was going to be called “Indifference,” and its slogan was going to be “I don’t give a shit what happens”

Men’s greatest fear is that women will laugh at them, while women’s greatest fear is that men will kill them.

Don't admire people from afar. That is the surest way to create mythological beings. Get close to them, talk to them, see what they are like as people. Test them. If their behavior is the result of their conviction that they are a being who is going to die, then everything they do, no matter how strange, must be premeditated and final. If what they say turns out to be just words, they're not worth a hoot.

it is not what you do but what you deal with

As deida says; every moment of your life is either a test or celebration. It never ends and you cant get out of it. Therapy, financial or sexual mastery wont get you out of it. All you have to do is make a move and resistance will be there to test you. So truly there is no option or escape, you might as well relax. By relaxing you let go of a certian type of poisonous desire but maintain a certain passion. This is the journey to becoming natural

So then why write?

COLE

For the completely selfish pleasure of composition, which for me surpasses the trumped-up pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex. Since I do not write to teach anybody anything, it’s a completely selfish act, but it gives me a sense of equilibrium and a reason for existence. Nothing gives me as much pleasure, when I’m doing it well, as writing.

Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.

Loving him now means:

Letting him go
Loving myself
Becoming myself

I was told—I think this is true—that they won’t OK a script for production until they can answer the question “What’s the negation of the negation?”

Sokolow: I have a question about that phrase. I googled it, to learn where it came from. It was from Hegel.
I stole it from Hegel.

Camin: This is being printed, Mr. McKee! Watch it!
He’s one of the major philosophers of humankind. You’re allowed to steal from those guys. If you can understand it, it’s yours.

Sokolow: The way I remember you defining it, it’s about—especially in your third act—going to where the logic of your evil becomes even more evil.
I don’t know when you took my lecture, but when you did, I suspect that I didn’t actually explain how you get to the negation of the negation. I’ll do that now.

You take what is negative—like hate. Then you do one of two things: Either you disguise it with a lie, so it becomes hatred masquerading as love—like in great films such as Ordinary People. Or you take what is normally directed at the world and turn it inward on the character, so hatred becomes self-hate.

Those are the two techniques to take what is common, everyday antagonism and conflict and push it one step further, to the limit of things.

Sokolow: I don’t know who said this, but it always stays in my mind: Movies are statements, and television is conversation.
That’s nonsense. I don’t know what the fuck that means.

Walter changed every week. We never knew where the hell Walter was. Every time he did things one way, and we would feel that that was who he was, he would just reverse himself and do things in an opposite way.

And he would still do it in a believable character way.
That’s what a dimension is. A dimension is a consistent contradiction in the nature of the character. Walter was capable of being very gentle, and he was for five seasons with certain characters—and violent and brutal with others! The dimensionality fascinates the audience.

and wanted to communicate it and needed to communicate it to people. And the way that they communicated it was in books because that’s how people communicated what was in their hearts in the 1800s. We don’t just have the opportunity to produce books for people now, we have the opportunity to be in people’s lives every day. When people wake up and check their phone, and they’re scrolling through their Twitter, they can get your poetry right then. You get to reach people with lines of poetry immediately when they wake up. And on their lunchbreak everyday. And before bed at night, when they’re scrolling through. And you get to be right next to their friends, their family members. They’re reading updates from their mom, and then they read an update from you, the poet. You get to be in people’s lives on such a crazy level. This is the dream. This is the dream for poets.

You’ve worked on several different mediums, from album covers to magazine illustrations to graphic novels. Where would you say your influences stem from, are they strictly visual?

I wouldn’t say strictly visual, no. I’ve learned a lot of tangible, practical things from studying all kinds of things: comics, illustration, movies, prose, etc. But I think I’ve learned more from just hanging around creative people and talking to them and learning from their example.

Could you give some examples?

I suppose I’m talking about the kind of osmotic learning that comes from getting to know other artists (or writers or musicians or whatever). If you go over to the house of someone whose work you admire, and you look at their bookshelves and ask about things that jump out at you, that right there can be kind of an education. I’ve even learned a lot from just going to an art store with other cartoonists. Invariably they’ll know about some drafting tool I’d never heard of, or have some preference for some brand of ink that they’ve arrived at after years of trial and error. And on a broader scale, it’s really useful to watch how someone – especially someone who’s been at it for longer – deals with issues that arise in their art and just in life in general.

If I wrote a story that was strategically pandering to some target audience, and then someone from that audience said, ‘Hey, I really related to that story,’ that wouldn’t feel like any great accomplishment. But if I can write about fairly particular, somewhat idiosyncratic characters, and then have a range of people say they felt a connection to that character, that feels like I pulled something off.

But as we know, television is not a democracy but an oligarchy. They don’t hire a lot of guys who run around saying oligarchy. Many times a boss will call me and say “I’ll have to let you go” and I’ll say “Why” and they’ll say “Well you sell more than everybody else at the plant, but you’ve been saying Oligarchy in the break room too much at lunch. In fact the suggestion box is filled with pieces of paper that complain about that.” And I’ll say “well sir, Oligarchy, holy fuck” and then I know it’s time to pack up my duffle bag and hit the lonely road.

Basic SEAL training is six months of long torturous runs in the soft sand, midnight swims in the cold water off San Diego, obstacles courses, unending calisthenics, days without sleep and always being cold, wet and miserable.
It is six months of being constantly harassed by professionally trained warriors who seek to find the weak of mind and body and eliminate them from ever becoming a Navy SEAL.
But, the training also seeks to find those students who can lead in an environment of constant stress, chaos, failure and hardships.
To me basic SEAL training was a life time of challenges crammed into six months.
So, here are the ten lessons I learned from basic SEAL training that hopefully will be of value to you as you move forward in life.
Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed.
If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack—rack—that’s Navy talk for bed.
It was a simple task—mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle hardened SEALs—but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.
If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another.
By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.
If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.
And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.
#1. If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

During SEAL training the students are broken down into boat crews. Each crew is seven students—three on each side of a small rubber boat and one coxswain to help guide the dingy.
Every day your boat crew forms up on the beach and is instructed to get through the surf zone and paddle several miles down the coast.
In the winter, the surf off San Diego can get to be 8 to 10 feet high and it is exceedingly difficult to paddle through the plunging surf unless everyone digs in.
Every paddle must be synchronized to the stroke count of the coxswain. Everyone must exert equal effort or the boat will turn against the wave and be unceremoniously tossed back on the beach.
For the boat to make it to its destination, everyone must paddle.
You can’t change the world alone—you will need some help— and to truly get from your starting point to your destination takes friends, colleagues, the good will of strangers and a strong coxswain to guide them.
#2. If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle.

Over a few weeks of difficult training my SEAL class which started with 150 men was down to just 35. There were now six boat crews of seven men each.
I was in the boat with the tall guys, but the best boat crew we had was made up of the the little guys—the munchkin crew we called them—no one was over about 5-foot five.
The munchkin boat crew had one American Indian, one African American, one Polish American, one Greek American, one Italian American, and two tough kids from the mid-west.
They out paddled, out-ran, and out swam all the other boat crews.
The big men in the other boat crews would always make good natured fun of the tiny little flippers the munchkins put on their tiny little feet prior to every swim.
But somehow these little guys, from every corner of the Nation and the world, always had the last laugh— swimming faster than everyone and reaching the shore long before the rest of us.
SEAL training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed. Not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education and not your social status.
#3. If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not the size of their flippers.
Several times a week, the instructors would line up the class and do a uniform inspection. It was exceptionally thorough.
Your hat had to be perfectly starched, your uniform immaculately pressed and your belt buckle shiny and void of any smudges.
But it seemed that no matter how much effort you put into starching your hat, or pressing your uniform or polishing your belt buckle—- it just wasn’t good enough.
The instructors would find “something” wrong.
For failing the uniform inspection, the student had to run, fully clothed into the surfzone and then, wet from head to toe, roll around on the beach until every part of your body was covered with sand.
The effect was known as a “sugar cookie.” You stayed in that uniform the rest of the day—cold, wet and sandy.
There were many a student who just couldn’t accept the fact that all their effort was in vain. That no matter how hard they tried to get the uniform right—it was unappreciated.
Those students didn’t make it through training.
Those students didn’t understand the purpose of the drill. You were never going to succeed. You were never going to have a perfect uniform.
Sometimes no matter how well you prepare or how well you perform you still end up as a sugar cookie.
It’s just the way life is sometimes.
#4. If you want to change the world get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward.

Every day during training you were challenged with multiple physical events—long runs, long swims, obstacle courses, hours of calisthenics—something designed to test your mettle.
Every event had standards—times you had to meet. If you failed to meet those standards your name was posted on a list and at the end of the day those on the list were invited to—a “circus.”
A circus was two hours of additional calisthenics—designed to wear you down, to break your spirit, to force you to quit.
No one wanted a circus.
A circus meant that for that day you didn’t measure up. A circus meant more fatigue—and more fatigue meant that the following day would be more difficult—and more circuses were likely.
But at some time during SEAL training, everyone—everyone—made the circus list.
But an interesting thing happened to those who were constantly on the list. Over time those students-—who did two hours of extra calisthenics—got stronger and stronger.
The pain of the circuses built inner strength-built physical resiliency.
Life is filled with circuses.
You will fail. You will likely fail often. It will be painful. It will be discouraging. At times it will test you to your very core.
#5. But if you want to change the world, don’t be afraid of the circuses.

At least twice a week, the trainees were required to run the obstacle course. The obstacle course contained 25 obstacles including a 10-foot high wall, a 30-foot cargo net, and a barbed wire crawl to name a few.
But the most challenging obstacle was the slide for life. It had a three level 30 foot tower at one end and a one level tower at the other. In between was a 200-foot long rope.
You had to climb the three tiered tower and once at the top, you grabbed the rope, swung underneath the rope and pulled yourself hand over hand until you got to the other end.
The record for the obstacle course had stood for years when my class began training in 1977.
The record seemed unbeatable, until one day, a student decided to go down the slide for life—head first.
Instead of swinging his body underneath the rope and inching his way down, he bravely mounted the TOP of the rope and thrust himself forward.
It was a dangerous move—seemingly foolish, and fraught with risk. Failure could mean injury and being dropped from the training.
Without hesitation—the student slid down the rope—perilously fast, instead of several minutes, it only took him half that time and by the end of the course he had broken the record.
#6. If you want to change the world sometimes you have to slide down the obstacle head first.
During the land warfare phase of training, the students are flown out to San Clemente Island which lies off the coast of San Diego.
The waters off San Clemente are a breeding ground for the great white sharks. To pass SEAL training there are a series of long swims that must be completed. One—is the night swim.
Before the swim the instructors joyfully brief the trainees on all the species of sharks that inhabit the waters off San Clemente.
They assure you, however, that no student has ever been eaten by a shark—at least not recently.
But, you are also taught that if a shark begins to circle your position—stand your ground. Do not swim away. Do not act afraid.
And if the shark, hungry for a midnight snack, darts towards you—then summons up all your strength and punch him in the snout and he will turn and swim away.
There are a lot of sharks in the world. If you hope to complete the swim you will have to deal with them.
#7. So, if you want to change the world, don’t back down from the sharks.
As Navy SEALs one of our jobs is to conduct underwater attacks against enemy shipping. We practiced this technique extensively during basic training.
The ship attack mission is where a pair of SEAL divers is dropped off outside an enemy harbor and then swims well over two miles—underwater—using nothing but a depth gauge and a compass to get to their target.
During the entire swim, even well below the surface there is some light that comes through. It is comforting to know that there is open water above you.
But as you approach the ship, which is tied to a pier, the light begins to fade. The steel structure of the ship blocks the moonlight—it blocks the surrounding street lamps—it blocks all ambient light.
To be successful in your mission, you have to swim under the ship and find the keel—the center line and the deepest part of the ship.
This is your objective. But the keel is also the darkest part of the ship—where you cannot see your hand in front of your face, where the noise from the ship’s machinery is deafening and where it is easy to get disoriented and fail.
Every SEAL knows that under the keel, at the darkest moment of the mission—is the time when you must be calm, composed—when all your tactical skills, your physical power and all your inner strength must be brought to bear.
#8. If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moment.

The ninth week of training is referred to as “Hell Week.” It is six days of no sleep, constant physical and mental harassment and—one special day at the Mud Flats—the Mud Flats are an area between San Diego and Tijuana where the water runs off and creates the Tijuana slue’s—a swampy patch of terrain where the mud will engulf you.
It is on Wednesday of Hell Week that you paddle down to the mud flats and spend the next 15 hours trying to survive the freezing cold mud, the howling wind and the incessant pressure to quit from the instructors.
As the sun began to set that Wednesday evening, my training class, having committed some “egregious infraction of the rules” was ordered into the mud.
The mud consumed each man till there was nothing visible but our heads. The instructors told us we could leave the mud if only five men would quit—just five men and we could get out of the oppressive cold.
Looking around the mud flat it was apparent that some students were about to give up. It was still over eight hours till the sun came up—eight more hours of bone chilling cold.
The chattering teeth and shivering moans of the trainees were so loud it was hard to hear anything and then, one voice began to echo through the night—one voice raised in song.
The song was terribly out of tune, but sung with great enthusiasm.
One voice became two and two became three and before long everyone in the class was singing.
We knew that if one man could rise above the misery then others could as well.
The instructors threatened us with more time in the mud if we kept up the singing—but the singing persisted.
And somehow—the mud seemed a little warmer, the wind a little tamer and the dawn not so far away.
If I have learned anything in my time traveling the world, it is the power of hope. The power of one person—Washington, Lincoln, King, Mandela and even a young girl from Pakistan—Malala—one person can change the world by giving people hope.
#9. So, if you want to change the world, start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud.

Finally, in SEAL training there is a bell. A brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see.
All you have to do to quit—is ring the bell. Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at 5 o’clock. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the freezing cold swims.
Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT—and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training.
Just ring the bell.
#10. If you want to change the world don’t ever, ever ring the bell.

You can’t put the we, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” before the self, the old lady. This was what the Nazis did, thinking that the best of the we made it reasonable to kill some individuals on their way.

Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can’t be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine.

Nigeria is the Federal Republic of Anyhowness. There's an uninspired improvisation – it's not jazz. And it's not modern dance. It's uninspired; it's the person who looks in the fridge and says, well, there's that pasta from last week, and I guess I have some tofu from last night. I'll mix it together. And you don't have to live that way. You could have more energy. How can a place be so interesting, full of history, and real human conflict, and at the same time, as slow as molasses.

I’ve learned from talking to people over the last few years on my podcast (WTF with Marc Maron) that people who work hard find something. There’s a certain amount of entitlement when you’re a young comic living the life, like, “Oh, it’ll happen,” even if you’re getting high every day and sleeping until three. The truth of the matter is that eventually you’re going to have to do the work. You’re going to have to find your consistency and your groove—somehow.

You just have to do it. There’s no schooling; there’s no anything. Find a place where you can get on stage and do it. Do you have favorite comics? Watch them. It’s very self-explanatory: You stand up there, by yourself, and you try to get laughs. I usually say, “Look, you might bomb, you might do great, but you’re not going to always do great, you’re not always going to bomb.” You have to figure out, once you do it, whether or not you’re infected with the bug that makes you keep wanting to do it. When you get off that stage, no matter what happens—whether they hated you or loved you—you have to get up there again. And if you do get up there . . . well, good luck, and welcome to the life.

Among them are the cleaner, the builder, the fanner, the sentinel, the gatherer, the undertaker, and the packer. The cleaner is responsible for the general upkeep and tidiness of things. The nurse is occupied with the care of the larvae, which must be fed a thousand times and receive many “wellness visits.” The builder constructs the honeycombs. This is a collective effort, as the beautiful combs are fabricated from secreted wax, and is delicate, exhausting work. The fanner regulates the temperature of the hive, beating its wings together constantly to air out the hive and dry the nectar. The sentinel watches the entrance and protects the colony from its enemies from other hives, who desire to rob the reserves. You might say that it is like a poetry reviewer or critic. The gatherer supplies provisions for the hive by flying away to hunt for nectar, pollen, and water. It makes between ten and a hundred journeys each day. Some bees become gatherers straightaway, but others never reach this high function. Flying at a mad speed, the gatherer exhausts itself quickly and dies after only four or five days. Some poets are gatherers, like Sylvia Plath, for instance. The undertaker bees carry their dead brothers and sisters out of the hive.

“Beauty,” as a noun meaning “physical attractiveness,” comes from the early fourteenth century Anglo-French beute, and as a word connoting “a beautiful woman” it originates later in the century. “Beautician” is first recorded in American English in 1924 (in the Cleveland, Ohio, telephone directory). “Ugly,” as an adjective describing a “frightful or horrible” appearance, is older. It has a Scandinavian origin, probably from the Old Norse uggligr, meaning “dreadful, fearful.” In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s daring sonnet, “Pied Beauty,” he defines beauty as “all things counter, original, spare, strange,” which seems perfect, allowing us to praise chestnuts, cattle, trout, finches, and plotted fields.

And so one can imagine that in amorous seduction the other is the locus of your secret — the other unknowingly holds that which you will never have the chance to know

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. Admittedly, there is the primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California, but when this is gone, the secondary brilliance of the journey begins, that of the excessive, pitiless distance, the infinity of anonymous faces and distances, or of certain miraculous geological formations, which ultimately testify to no human will, while keeping intact an image of upheaval. This form of travel admits of no exceptions: when it runs up against a known face, a familiar landscape, or some decipherable message, the spell is broken: the amnesic, ascetic, asymptotic charm of disappearance succumbs to affect and worldly semiology.

Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

Particularly in the case of all professional of press-images which testify of the real events. In making reality, even the most violent, emerge to the visible, it makes the real substance disappear. It is like the Myth of Eurydice : when Orpheus turns around to look at her, she vanishes and returns to hell. That is why, the more exponential the marketing of images is growing the more fantastically grows the indifference towards the real world. Finally, the real world becomes a useless function, a collection of phantom shapes and ghost events. We are not far from the silhouettes on the walls of the cave of Plato.

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.

My immediate realm of thought is bureaucratic and like a traffic jam. My ordinary state of mind is very much like the waiting room at the DMV… So to penetrate this chattering and this meaningless debate that is occupying most of my attention, I have to come up with something that really speaks to my deepest interests. Otherwise I nod off in one way or another. So to find that song, that urgent song, takes a lot of versions and a lot of work and a lot of sweat.

But why shouldn’t my work be hard? Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with my payload.

moving somewhere like a grad student for a few years and having the arrogance to feel like I know that place. That feels as arrogant and American as bombing people. New York is one of the most provincial and isolated places I know. They never get asked questions about escape, or if they are it's always about the price-of-rent bullshit. I mean, there are still 60-year-old men in that city running around telling anecdotes about how they knew the fucking Ramones. There are people running around with the same tattoos and uniform on and reading the same shitty books. They're the ones who need to escape. Their fashion is the spiritual equivalent of bell bottoms, but nobody asks them questions about escaping. You can be a shitty artist anywhere.

It was written in the late 1940s, but it takes place between the future and the past.

Misled about everything, [the public] can only spout absurdities based on lies — these poor wage earners who see themselves as property owners, these mystified ignoramuses who think they’re educated, these zombies with the delusion that their votes mean something.

How harshly the mode of production has treated them! With all their “upward mobility” they have lost the little they had and gained what no one wanted. They share poverties and humiliations from all the past systems of exploitation without sharing in the revolts against those systems. In many ways they resemble slaves, because they are herded into cramped habitations that are gloomy, ugly and unhealthy; ill-nourished with tasteless and adulterated food; poorly treated for their constantly recurring illnesses; under constant petty surveillance; and maintained in the modernized illiteracy and spectacular superstitions that reinforce the power of their masters. For the convenience of present-day industry they are transplanted far from their own neighborhoods or regions and concentrated into new and hostile environments.

Offering rather than begging

These characters don't demonstrate their emotions. They just have them.

But to demand that a work be “relatable” expresses a different expectation: that the work itself be somehow accommodating to, or reflective of, the experience of the reader or viewer. The reader or viewer remains passive in the face of the book or movie or play: she expects the work to be done for her. If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.

I understand better how much of writing a novel is about self-examination, self-transformation. I spend vastly more time nowadays trying to figure out what’s stopping me from doing the work, trying to figure out how I can become the person who can do the work, investigating the shame and fear: the shame of self-exposure, the fear of ridicule or condemnation, the fear of causing pain or harm.

The one writer I completely couldn’t stand was D. H. Lawrence. I ­wanted to kill him for having inflicted Sons and Lovers on me. Much later, I went back and read the book again, or read half of it, because I felt that the Joey and Patty material in Freedom had some kinship with the Morels. And I could see why I’d hated it when I was eighteen: It hit way too close to home. But frankly I still found it kind of unbearable. I wanted to say to Lawrence, No, you have not found a way not to make Mrs. Morel’s sexualized engulfment of her son icky and excruciating. In a way, it’s great and heroic that Lawrence was willing to write such an excruciating book, to lay it all out there. But for me the book also became a shining example of how not to approach this radioactive material—a reminder of the pressing need to find a structure and a tone and a point of view that would ironize it enough to make it fun.

Certainly, we disguise ourselves from ourselves beautifully. We all know that we use words to lie. To evade. To avoid. Of course, to misunderstand intentionally.

Yes. But also recognizing, crucially, that the amorphous, unconscious, naked soul is a horror. The most terrifying scene in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge is the one in which Malte, as a boy, starts putting on party masks from a trunk in his family’s attic, one after another, until finally one of them takes control of him. He sees his masked self in the mirror and goes momentarily insane with terror that there is no him, there’s only the mask. Years later, as an adult, walking around in Paris, he sees a woman on a park bench who puts her face in her hands and then looks up with a naked face, a horrifying Nothing, having left the mask in her hands. Malte is essentially the story of a young writer working through a fear of masks to a recognition of their necessity.

watched a man attempt to drown himself in a toilet

Linklater pulled McConaughey aside and said, “It’s the last day of school and Wooderson’s already probably been with the cheerleader or the popular girl. Do you think he’d go for the redheaded intellectual?” “Sure,” McConaughey replied. “And what if he tried to pick up on her?” asked Linklater. “Give me 30 minutes,” said McConaughey.
“I came back and he said, ‘Want to shoot it?’” recalls McConaughey, who had simply spent the 30 minutes meditating. “So I was sitting in the car, nervous because I was about to have my first acting scene and I was improvising it. I thought, Who’s my man? Who’s my man? I’d been listening to this live Doors album where Jim Morrison barks out between two of the songs, ‘All right, all right, all right, all right!’ I didn’t know what it meant. So I was like, OK, Wooderson: I’m about rock ’n’ roll, weed, cars, and women. I’m in my car, I’m listening to Nugent’s ‘Stranglehold,’ and I’m high. And there’s the woman. I got three out of four. ‘All right, all right, all right!’ I figured I was batting .750, so that’s what the three ‘All right’s’ were about.”

There was nothing to be done; a circumstance that happily suited our disinclination to do anything

I remember way back when, there was a review of Slacker where the guy wrote, “There’s no film like it, but the question is: Should there be?”

I do think that you put your finger on what is central about making movies, what makes it something that you—that I—never want to stop. Just as you never want to stop seeing them. There is something that happens among people and what it finally is, is a sort of melding of unconscious. When you do your best, you’re depending to a large extent on your unconscious, when you’ve done this for some length of time, because you’re waiting for the thing you can’t think of. You’re waiting for the surprise of shooting that day. And when a large group of people is waiting for today’s surprise, and they’re all in the same place, and you have the people that you do it with every time, and you love them and they love you, something begins to happen. Over the weekend I went to see Oprah do a thing she does in a theater, telling people how to be their best, live their best life. And she charges a lot for it, and the money goes to the charity of the town in which she’s done it. And she has this gift, she can hear 2,500 people sitting in the dark. She can connect with what they’re thinking.

Yes, she’s amazing.

And in hearing them, remarkable things happen. She says remarkable things, and funny things, and so forth. But, in a weird way, we need the unconscious and the souls of the people that are making the movie to make some kind of connection with the unconscious of what Gloria Swanson called “those wonderful people out there in the dark”—we are those wonderful people out there in the dark—and that that connection still lives even as everything says to us, “Your call is important to us.” Which is a lie. I mean, everything is a lie.

Everything is.

But the unspoken things are not all lies yet.

I’m afraid I’m still so in love with the, for want of a better word, process, and the thing I love most about movies and that I love most about other people’s work is the small things. You think about your favorite thing in a movie or in a play or in a performance… it’s always something very small, it’s so small that you can barely tell other people about, but it just makes you gasp, because it’s like a little pebble of something true. And harvesting them—because, after all, the acting is done by other people—is still something that I think is so thrilling. I think the thing is just to keep doing it because with luck you can catch that wind, it can still be done.

men on their purpose lack the time to indulge in jealousy.  It's a luxury of value leaching men who wish they were women.

-it's a feminine desire to be admired like a flower and pursued.  That's what women want, not proper men

-men want to initiate, hunt, and conquer.  I do not want to be chosen by women I want to conquer my own fears, which then projects onto women and I conquer them as well

Atwood calls debt an imaginative human construct derived from a sense of need or greed and a sense of fairness in reciprocity and equivalent values. She cites a study by Frans de Waal that suggests a sense of fairness may be a genetic trait shared with other primates, and a study by Robert Axelrod which illustrates, given a level playing field, that the tit-for-tat strategy (or 'Do unto others as they have done onto you' strategy) was the most superior strategy in game theory.

Polly Stenham

Looking around the brewpub, listening to the chatter, and staring into the bright blue eyes of my would-be employer, you can almost hear the words of Google CEO Eric Schmidt echo against the minimalist decor: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about.”

The future is going to be a struggle between vast systems of competing psychopathies, all of them willed and deliberate, part of a desperate attempt to escape from a rational world and the boredom of consumerism.

the end of genre boundaries and style tribes—along with a new emphasis on sensibility over taste—is probably the most distinctive attribute of “youth culture” after the Millennium (and part of what makes a “hipster” so hard to identify).

Artistic freedom means that the amateur filmmaker is never forced to sacrifice visual drama and beauty to a stream of words...to the relentless activity and explanations of a plot...nor is the amateur production expected to return profit on a huge investment by holding the attention of a massive and motley audience for 90 minutes...Instead of trying to invent a plot that moves, use the movement of wind, or water, children, people, elevators, balls, etc. as a poem might celebrate these. And use your freedom to experiment with visual ideas; your mistakes will not get you fired

a sort of masterpiece of nothing. Personal little celebrations and joy…miracles of everyday, little moments of Paradise

All Joan’s guidance, military and moral, came from a source she called “voices.” All the blame of her trial was gathered up in this question, the nature of the voices. She began to hear them when she was twelve years old. They spoke to her from outside, commanding her life and death, her military victories and revolutionary politics, her dress code and heretical beliefs. During the trial Joan’s judges returned again and again to this crux: they insisted on knowing the story of the voices. They wanted her to name, embody and describe them in ways they could understand, with recognizable religious imagery and emotions, in a conventional narrative that would be susceptible to conventional disproof. They framed this desire in dozens of ways, question after question. They prodded and poked and hemmed her in. Joan despised the line of inquiry and blocked it as long as she could. It seems that for her, the voices had no story. They were an experienced fact so large and real it had solidifed in her as a sort of sensed abstraction—what Virginia Woolf once called “that very jar on the nerves before it has been made anything.”² Joan wanted to convey the jar on the nerves without translating it into theological cliché. It is her rage against cliché that draws me to her. A genius is in her rage. We all feel this rage at some level, at some time. The genius answer to it is catastrophe.

I say catastrophe is an answer because I believe cliché is a question. We resort to cliché because it’s easier than trying to make up something new. Implicit in it is the question, Don’t we already know what we think about this? Don’t we have a formula we use for this? Can’t I just send a standard greeting card or paste in a snapshot of what it was like rather than trying to come up with an original drawing? During the five months of her trial Joan persistently chose the term voice or a few times counsel or once comfort to describe how God guided her. She did not spontaneously claim that the voices had bodies, faces, names, smell, warmth or mood, nor that they entered the room by the door, nor that when they left she felt bad. Under the inexorable urging of her inquisitors she gradually added all these details. But the storytelling effort was clearly hateful to her and she threw white paint on it wherever she could, giving them responses like:

 ... You asked that before. Go look at the record.

... Pass on to the next question, spare me.

... I knew that well enough once but I forget.

... That does not touch your process.

... Ask me next Saturday.

 And one day when the judges were pressing her to define the voices as singular or plural, she most wonderfully said: “The light comes in the name of the voice.”

The light comes in the name of the voice is a sentence that stops itself. Its components are simple yet it stays foreign, we cannot own it. Like Homer’s untranslatable MOLY it seems to come from somewhere else and it brings a whiff of immortality with it.

her legendary final words to the judges: “Light your fires!”

Maybe Hölderlin was pretending to be mad the whole time, I don’t know. What fascinates me is to see his catastrophe, at whatever level of consciousness he chose it, as a method extracted from translation, a method organized by the rage against cliché. After all what else is one’s own language but a gigantic cacophonous cliché. Nothing has not been said before. The templates are set. Adam long ago named all the creatures. Reality is in chains. When Francis Bacon approaches a white canvas its empty surface is already filled with the whole history of painting up to that moment, it is a compaction of all the clichés of representation already extant in the painter’s world, in the painter’s head, in the probability of what can be done on this surface. Screens are in place making it hard to see anything but what one expects to see, hard to paint what isn’t already there. Bacon is not content to deflect or beguile cliché by some painterly trick, he wants to assassinate it right there on his canvas. So he solicits the interventions of chance. He makes what he calls “free marks” on the canvas, both at the beginning when it is white and later when it is partly painted or completely painted. He uses brushes, sponges, sticks, rags, his hand or just throws a can of paint at it. His intention is to disrupt its probability and to short-circuit his own control of the disruption. His product is a catastrophe, which he will then proceed to manipulate into an image that he can call real. Or he may just hang it up:

David Sylvester: You would never end a painting by suddenly throwing something at it. Or would you?

Francis Bacon: Oh yes. In that triptych on the shoulder of the figure being sick into the basin, there’s a whip of white paint that goes like that. Well I did that at the very last moment and I just left it.¹⁴

Free marks are a gesture of rage. One of the oldest myths we have of this gesture is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise. Why did Eve put a free mark on that apple? To say she was seduced by the snake or longing for absolute knowledge or in search of immortality are posterior analytics. Isn’t the simple fact of the matter that she was bored? Adam had just performed the primordial act of naming, had taken the first step towards imposing on the wide-open pointless meaningless directionless dementia of the real a set of clichés that no one would ever dislodge, or want to dislodge—they are our human history, our edifice of thought, our answer to chaos. Eve’s instinct was to bite this answer in half. 

You can’t escape investigation. The facts about you and your whole existence have been collected or are being collected. Banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, tax examiners, passport offices, reporting services, police agencies, intelligence gatherers. . . . Devices make us pliant. If they issue a print-out saying we’re guilty, then we’re guilty. . . . It’s the presence alone, the very fact, the superabundance of technology, that makes us feel we’re committing crimes.

“Chris was trying to figure out the formula to make a movie, but all he really needed to do was be who he is onstage.” By writing a movie inspired by his own life, Rock found a way to put his disparate obsessions onscreen, depicting a world in which Woody Allen is no less or more important than Tupac Shakur. Rudin describes “Top Five” as “half a Richard Linklater movie and half a Robin Harris concert film,”

Chronology imposes narrative when all else fails.

At that point, your body has learned to do this thing, the releasing of the song out into the world, which is not about what the performer feels, but what the listener feels.

The man behind that whirlwind of often cartoonish funk truly gets an airing in this remarkable book. Clinton writes that, “underneath the [crazy, psychedelic] image, I was a much more reserved, centered, circumspect person. It was freedom generated by misdirection, and it allowed me to focus on my real self, the identity I was nurturing away from any kind of spotlight.”

But there is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand—the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living plasm vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and yet it is neither.

Creative naturalism is the beautiful revenge of people who feel they’re being outrun by time and human opportunity: the real thing speeds past you, impervious, so you reconjure it on the screen, where you and everybody else can live in it forever . “I always had that personality—I think it’s a writer’s sensibility—where you’re there but not there,” Linklater says. “I had to make a peace with myself. It’s like, well, you’re not in the moment. But just by contemplating it, by searching for the depth of the moment, that is itself an experience.”

It looks to me as though that prosthetic-memory project is going to be what we are about, as a species, because our prosthetic memory now actually stands a pretty good chance of surviving humanity. We could conceivably go extinct and our creations would live on.

The Presley visage, The Face, is an icon in places where the Beatles are merely four stick figures with long hair. It is a plumpish oval with smooth cheeks, a Greek nose, heavy-lidded “bedroom” eyes, and thick lips with a pronounced rise at both points of the bow-shaped upper, all surmounted by the famous quiff. The nose is an unbroken prow from the forehead, unswerving as that of the discus-thrower. The eyes both beckon and veil; they were deepened with eye shadow throughout his career. The mouth is encyclopedic in its implications: it is the classic “sensual,” as well as the forbidden “Negro,” and its upper lip is poised to curl into a snarl. Remove the nose and the face is undeniably feminine, made all the more so by the dyed and piled nest of hair, itself challenged by the “hillbilly” sideburns.

History is a connective tissue, or the dream of one, a name for life outside oneself, for that which connects all human beings except the subjective observer, a narrative that even though it takes up the whole world can only be seen from a distance. The bomb is a challenge to this notion, because while it manifestly is history, a cause and effect and article of history, it also invades internal life, not as a consequence of altering external life the way ordinary war does, but by its potential to do so, sheathed but omnipresent. The bomb, undetonated, makes history within the psyche.

One relieves the other. Poems are like sweating while you’re working on a novel. A novel gives you something to do while you’re waiting for your poems.

Robin Williams was our fucking dad.

Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.

Somehow "write what you know" has turned into "only ever write about yourself."

1.     Always take the initiative.

2.     Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.

13. Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape.

17. Don’t be fearful of rejection.

20. A badge of honor is to fail a film theory class.

21. Chance is the lifeblood of cinema.
22. Guerrilla tactics are best.

I recall, for example, Flaubert saying that it is splendid to be a writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts;

my favorite account comes from Joe Boyd’s 2006 memoir White Bicycles, in which the producer describes the mood backstage immediately after Dylan’s performance: “The atmosphere was somber and silent… The old guard hung their head in defeat while the young, far from being triumphant, were chastened. They realized that in their victory lay the death of something wonderful. The rebels were like children who were looking for something to break and realized, as they looked at the pieces, what a beautiful thing it had been.”

Rejection is temporary pain - quitting is eternal pain.

Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice: He said, "Well that's very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth."

A lot of people don't know this, but the blues, which is an American music, is not what you think it is. It's a combination of Arabic violins and Strauss waltzes working it out. But it's true. 

But Tillman eventually realized that love and intimacy could be as enlightening as anything he’d experienced before—if not more so.

“It’s like an antibody to narcissism and self-oblivion and not knowing yourself,” he says. “It relentlessly forces you to ask: ‘Why does this person love me? What is it about me that makes this person want to spend their life with me?’ And ideally, you start to see yourself through the eyes of this person instead of your own highly distorted perception of yourself.”

But I guess they have to keep making them because teenagers see them and go, 'Wow, that's edgy.' If you're 18 right now, you think you invented platform shoes. You think you're doing something new. You think you've invented something so ugly that it's beautiful.

When we were young, we knew things. We knew basic history, even as it related to fashion. Now, when something reappears, an 18 year old has no clue that it's a revival. Despite the fact that they're almost always online they don't get references.

I think that's part of why visual things are becoming so derivative. Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board.

The great bohemians had the steely tunnel vision that can sometimes achieve genius. Celebrity is indiscriminate, embracing the inauthentic, kitsch and trivial. It is part of a web of mass distraction, designed to smash the diamond of an individual’s will into a thousand smithereens of tweets and trivialities.

The budget is the aesthetic.

Often as a poet I want each line to be so original and fresh that sometimes I’m led astray, straining to make each line the great line of the poem. You seemed to know better, and allow flatter lines such as “I give up my tongue” to serve as counterpoint. Your lines tend to integrate and cooperate as much as they stand out. You’re more interested in the summation of a poem’s effects than simply, what you said before, highlighting pyrotechnics.

MS: Well, if you do that, you’re destroying the poem. I mean, that’s why I dropped punning. There’s so many puns that they call attention to themselves at the cost of the poem’s success. And what are, they after all? “Oh, ha-ha-ha.” You laugh a little, but you are also lifted out of the poem and into the wit of the poet. Very often that’s not where you want to stay or where you contracted to be when reading.

Surrender strikes me as an all-important aesthetic, even ethos, for you. Why “surrender”?

MS: Because it allows you total entry into the work. If there is resistance, then something in you is not willing to experience what’s been offered. So you have to surrender yourself to the enticements of the poem. The poem aims to seduce you into belief. So you have to surrender yourself to whatever the poem is offering to you

INTERVIEWER

Was marijuana useful beyond that book?

DYER

Ah, “that useful substance,” as Pynchon reasonably calls it. The kind of grass we had back in the mid to late eighties was very conducive, not just to having fun, but creatively as well. Read back the next day, a lot of what I’d written stoned the night before might be nonsense, but there’d be the germ of something I couldn’t have accessed in my normal state, and that something could be worked up properly while clear-eyed. Marijuana is so integral to But Beautiful that it’s scandalous I wasn’t able to claim what I’d spent as a tax break. But then, in this century, when skunk came completely to dominate the marketplace, I gradually gave it up. It wasn’t giving me any of the things I’d looked for and was giving me a lot of the things I wasn’t—paranoia, brain damage.

Although I’m dumb about science, allow me a scientific analogy. The whole drive of the grand unified theory is to try and push physics back to the moment of the big bang, with the idea that the four fundamental forces, which are gravitation, strong and weak nuclear forces, and—I can’t remember what the fourth fundamental force is—but anyway the whole idea of the grand unified theory is that, if you can get within a millisecond of the big bang, the four forces are all one force. Before there were particles, before there was light, before there were the ten thousand things, the binding force of the universe was unitary, singular. My feeling is that literature, or the sort of specialization in genre that we experience now in literature, is like the cooling down of the universe. When language was first used to try to entrap human experience and render it, this gesture was before genre. When Montaigne called what he had done essays, there was no word yet for it, until he applied that word, ex post facto. Did Plato understand the suppleness of trying to make philosophy known through the dialogue form, did he know that he was mixing genres, did he really care that his form was different from what Horace or Ovid were doing, or was it simply natural and organic to him? Maybe he was using intuition and language and letting the Greek tongue go where it would go. Sure, as the literary universe cools towards its absolute zero, there is genre . . . and using different genres to do different things is appropriate and exciting. Each genre is a relief from the other. But the anticategorical truth is more complex. I want to be back at the big bang. I want to evade naming and hierarchies. So, I don’t even think of my poems as poems, and I’m sure there are a lot of poets who don’t think of them as poems either. They’re just things that I started doing that made me laugh. I don’t think of The Black Veil as nonfiction. These tendencies, which appear various, are therefore one tendency—delight in language. Let taxonomists figure out what it means.

Imagination, binding itself to dull viewpoints, puts an end to stories. The imagination is looking for new ways to ex­press virtue. Society just now is in the grip of certain common falsehoods about virtue—not that anyone really believes them. And these cheerful falsehoods beget their opposites in fiction, a dark literature, a literature of victimization, of old people sitting in ash cans waiting for the breath of life to depart

Here we see the difference between a didactic novelist like D. H. Lawrence and one like Dostoyevsky. When he was writing The Brothers Karamazov and had just ended the famous conversation between Ivan and Alyosha, in which Ivan, despairing of justice, offers to return his ticket to God, Dostoyevsky wrote to one of his correspondents that he must now attempt, through Father Zossima, to answer Ivan’s argu­ments. But he has in advance all but devastated his own position. This, I think, is the greatest achievement possible in a novel of ideas. It be­comes art when the views most opposite to the author’s own are allowed to exist in full strength. Without this a novel of ideas is mere self-indulgence and didacticism is simply ax-grinding. The opposites must be free to range themselves against each other and they must be pas­sionately expressed on both sides. It is for this reason that I say it doesn’t matter much what the writer’s personal position is, what he wishes to affirm. He may affirm principles we all approve of and write very bad novels.

“We never had a budget,” Graver said. “We just started filming. What I didn’t fully understand was … that Orson worked seven-day weeks, every single day.”

“He just loved the filmmaking process more than anyone I’ve ever met,” said crew member Michael Stringer. “His vision was what everyone else was focusing on—and that’s an intoxicating process.”

The reason these books feel so much like life is that there’s only one main character. For all of his gifts, Knausgaard ­never leaves an indelible impression of other people. I have only a limited sense of his ­father and mother despite having read hundreds of pages about them, and the figures Knausgaard meets in Hafjord, his teaching colleagues, the girls he falls for and his students, tend to merge. You never get inside these people. It’s impossible to be inside them without altering the focus of Knausgaard’s solipsism. This wouldn’t work with most writers. They wouldn’t be interesting enough, tormented enough, smart, ­noble, pitiless or self-critical enough. With Knausgaard the trade-off is more than worth it. His is such an interesting brain to inhabit that you never wish to relinquish the perspective any more than, in your own life, you wish to stop being yourself. One of the paradoxes of Knausgaard’s work is that in dwelling so intensely on his own memories he restores — and I would almost say blesses — the reader’s own.

Peter wanted to see Bob Dylan’s childhood home, so we drove there first; it was just a few blocks away, up a steep hill behind the hotel. It looked exactly like all the other houses in the neighborhood, a small wooden duplex with a grassy patch in front. There was no sign indicating that Bob Dylan grew up here, nor was there a statue of him. That seemed appropriate, for in contrast to the other 1960s artists who were still alive, there was nothing about Bob Dylan to remind one of a statue, nothing about his music or his role had become rigid or clearly defined, no final form enclosed him. In fact, it was as if he weren’t really a person at all, but had somehow dissolved into his music. His old songs were constantly in motion, and the new songs emerged from the same stream. As he traveled around, permanently on tour, you couldn’t tell what came from him and what belonged to the American song tradition; he was just playing the music. On “The Basement Tapes,” you can hear how he discovers this mode for the first time, how he begins to live in the music, as he keeps tossing out one tune after the other, song after song, some of it fantastic, some of it junk, some of it interesting, some of it nonsense, and it doesn’t matter in the slightest, for the whole point is the lightness; that all demands for perfection and completion, for flawlessness, have been suspended; and the motion.

All writers, artists and musicians know the feeling: when you disappear into what you are doing, lose yourself in it and are no longer aware that you exist, while at the same time the feeling of existing is profound and total and what you make is never better. Work created in this state really shouldn’t be published in the artist’s name, because it has been created precisely by the artist’s nonpersonal, nonindividual, selfless side. Bob Dylan is the master of the selfless self, the king of the not-one’s-one, a deeply paradoxical figure who lived and breathed the music of this deeply paradoxical country.

He would say, ‘Masochists and slaves ask “Why?” Masters ask “How?” I will answer no question that begins with the word “why.” ’

A film is never good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet'. – Orson Welles

SG: There is a kind of trust in the idea that the mind has its own natural rhythm, and that the hand and its orientation across the page has its own natural rhythm.

SG: A question that I was going to ask you earlier, actually, is: when you imagine—and maybe this is silly, but—the landscape of the mind, what does that look like to you? We were talking about meditating and you said it changed the way you see, so: how do you see your mind?

WK: I’ve never been asked that and I’ve never thought about it so let me think about it for a second. It’s probably very psychoanalytic but I’m going to say it’s not as metaphysical as you’re inviting me to be. I think my relation to my mind is that it’s like an emotionally stunted, really interesting and kind of demonically possessed, really unruly and undisciplined and unsocialized child, a Siamese twin that I’m stuck with. I really do feel like my mind is a problem child that I carry around that’s somewhat of a burden but also my secret toy and my greatest pleasure. There’s so much stress that my mind produces and so many fantasies and so much self-sabotaging ideation, and so much distortion of fantasy and reality. I think of my mind as a terribly unedited noise machine that needs to be tamed. Most of the things I do, like writing—writing engages and stimulates my mind but it lays it out. There’s a feeling of catharsis afterwards. Painting allows my mind to go without me needing to pay attention to it, and playing the piano really regularizes.

Mentorship is totally hierarchical as a reigning reality. It suggests that someone has the keys to the kingdom. I think your own horizontal friendships are way more important and really are the future.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is — solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate — ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice.

‘What sort of poetry should I write at the age of sixty-five’ is a sensible question, but to ask ‘what should I write in the year 1972?’ is sheer folly. It can only result in submission to the fashion of the moment, a desperate attempt to be ‘with it’. Plato tried to model political life on artistic fabrication: this as we know, can only lead to political tyranny. The error made by all too many artists today is the exact opposite: they try to model artistic fabrication on political action so that, instead of trying to make an artistic object of permanent value, they surrender to the tyranny of the immediate moment and produce meaningless ‘happenings’.

Only pseudo-artists bother their heads about being original. To think consciously of being original is to have one’s eye fixed not upon the work to be made but upon the works of others, one’s efforts centred upon not doing what others have done or are doing, instead of upon what one should be doing oneself; and the result is most certain to be fake.

We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music, than we can possibly absorb; and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind it than yesterday’s newspaper. The focus on nowness leads in short to a situation where ‘the work of art is a random happening, which neither the artist or the public are expected to interpret or judge; all they can do is register that it has occurred.

… After all, it’s rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into
background noise for study
or hung as a status-trophy by rising executives,
cannot be ‘done’ like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon
being read or ignored …

“It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.”