Guest Blog Post, Samuel Kolawole: Where My Stories Grow From
An inscription written on the chassis of a crawling commuter omnibus triggered the beginning of my…
The books that will move you, inspire you, make you cry, make you think, make you laugh. Are there any books that you would add?
What are your Rumblr editors reading this week? Well…
Molly: I just started Renata Adler’s Speedboat on the train this morning. I’m reading this book for book club, but also to be honest I picked this book for book club. It is episodic in a way I find lovely, that has it’s own strange momentum. I am still whirling over these first few lines:
Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written—disrupting a cliche and, presumably, creating a genre.
Claire: I’ve been very slowly working my way through the stories in Lydia Davis’s Varieties of Disturbance; they’re too small and smart and polished for me to read too many at once. Right now I’m in the middle of “Mrs. D and Her Maids,” and it’s so funny and so full, it’s such a great pleasure to watch Lydia Davis’s brain whirring along at this brilliant speed.
Lucy: I am reading Lincoln Cushing’s All of Us Or None, a compendium of social justice–related posters from the Bay Area. In 1977, the Oakland Museum of California began acquiring some 200 posters from activist Michael Rossman. Many of the prints, silkscreens, and paintings are hilarious (“Women Invented Cheese”), others terrifying (a classic Saturn-chewing-on-his-children image over the words “Amerika is Devouring Its Children”), but all are artful. Forever a center of envelope-pushery, the protest art to come out of the Bay Area is, like the place, impassioned, unexpected, and often quite beautiful.
Using discarded tin cans found on the hot Arizona desert ground, David Emitt Adams has created timeless pieces he calls Conversations with History. The
Have fun writing senryu and enter your poems for a chance to get published in a future issue of Writer’s Digest magazine. This challenge is totally free and completely fun!
Deadline for entries: May 31, 11:59 p.m. (Atlanta, Georgia time)
Imaginative Skeptics
Author Ian McEwan recently visited ASU for a lecture in partnership with the ASU Origins Project…
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.
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Brian Eno (via jessiethatcher) I could reblog/post this every day as a constant reminder. (via notational) And I’m sticking it up here for people who define the “good” in Make good art in ways that I definitely didn’t intend… (via neil-gaiman) |
