“We have all read more books than Shakespeare ever did.”
MAPPING
Narrative method, mythical shapes, hysterical realism, literary maximalism, codified things, unauthentic representation.
The Berlin Reunion
“Earlier this week, 1.5 million people filled the streets of Berlin, Germany to watch a several-day performance by France’s Royal de Luxe street theatre company titled “The Berlin Reunion“. Part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Reunion show featured two massive marionettes, the Big Giant, a deep-sea diver, and his niece, the Little Giantess. The storyline of the performance has the two separated by a wall, thrown up by “land and sea monsters”. The Big Giant has just returned from a long and difficult – but successful – expedition to destroy the wall, and now the two are walking the streets of Berlin, seeking each other after many years apart. I’ll let the photos below tell the rest of the story.“
via Katie West
Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944)
“Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings were amongst the first abstract art. She belonged to a group called ‘The Five’ and the paintings or diagrams were a visual representation of complex philosophical ideas.”
“At the Academy of Fine Arts she met Anna Cassel, the first of the four women with whom she later worked in “The Five” (de Fem), a group of artists who shared her ideas. The group of female artists The Five was engaged in the paranormal and regularly organized spiritistic séances. They recorded in a book a completely new system of mystical thoughts in the form of messages from higher spirits, called The High Masters (“Höga Mästare”). One, Gregor, spoke thus: “all the knowledge that is not of the senses, not of the intellect, not of the heart but is the property that exclusively belongs to the deepest aspect of your being…the knowledge of your spirit”.”
Booklet with drawings by Hilma af Klint.
“The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”
Svanen (The Swan), nr 17, Group 9, Series SUW, October 1914 – March 1915. This abstract work was never exhibited during af Klint’s lifetime.
Sawley Map ca 1190
…performs an encyclopedic function, bringing together and organizing in a visual compendium a wealth of accumulated geographical knowledge from the Bible, Greek legends, Alexandrian adventure tales, and ancient cosmographies.
making of Star Guitar
Crow
“When God, disgusted with man, Turned towards heaven, And man, disgusted with God, Turned towards Eve, Things looked like falling apart. But Crow Crow
Crow nailed them together, Nailing heaven and earth together-”
Roald Dahl (and Hemingway) on writing.
“One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing for a year, you go away and have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice.
“But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go.
“But if you stop when you’re going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, then you are in trouble!”
Edit 2018: I revisited this post to find the source of this quote as I did not originally provide a link. Consequently I found this post on SilverBirch Press which describes a bit more about the relationship between the two writers (there’s a phot too>).
“He wrote his plays to make money. “
1. Everyone – all levels of society – went to see Shakespeare’s plays. There weren’t many other forms of entertainment: no TV; no cable; no DVDs; no videos, hand-held electronic game players, or personal CD players; no CDs; no movies; and only the rudiments of a newspaper. People went to the bear-baiting or bull-baiting ring for a thrill, they went to a public execution or two – and they went to the theatre.
2. Shakespeare wrote his sonnets to be applauded and remembered as a writer. He wrote his plays to make money. And he made lots of it.
3. He wrote 37 plays, and some of them were real dogs.
4. Shakespeare’s wife was pregnant when they got married.
5. Shakespeare and his wife had three children before he left them all in Stratford-upon-Avon for the big-time, big-city life in London.
6. Shakespeare never went to college.
7. Reading Shakespeare is hard. Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed – acted and seen on a stage. About half of Shakespeare’s plays weren’t even published until after his death.
8. In Shakespeare’s time, a woman’s value depended solely on who her husband was, and how valuable he was.
9. Experiencing a play in the Globe Theatre in 1603 was sort of a cross between going to an Oscar de la Hoya fight and an N Sync concert.
10. In Shakespeare’s plays, you can find drunks, ghosts, teenagers running away from home, boy who gets girl, boy who loses girl, king who loses everything, woman caressing her lover’s body that is minus its head, woman caressing her lover’s head that is minus its body, weddings and celebrations, and murder by stabbing, suffocation, poison, decapitation, and drowning in a vat of wine.
– Peggy O’Brien, from the “Acknowledgments” section of The Shakespeare Book of Lists by Michael LoMonico
Film vs Comics
One of my big objections to film as a medium is that it’s much too immersive, and I think that it turns us into a population of lazy and unimaginative drones. The absurd lengths that modern cinema and its CGI capabilities will go in order to save the audience the bother of imagining anything themselves is probably having a crippling effect on the mass imagination. You don’t have to do anything. With a comic, you’re having to do quite a lot. Even though you’ve got pictures there for you, you’re having to fill in all the gaps between the panels, you’re having to imagine characters voices. You’re having to do quite a lot of work. Not quite as much work as with a straight unillustrated book, but you’re still going to do quite a lot of wo-rk.
I think the amount of work we contribute to our enjoyment of any piece of art is a huge component of that enjoyment. I think that we like the pieces that engage us, that enter into a kind of dialog with us, whereas with film you sit there in your seat and it washes over you. It tells you everything, and you really don’t need to do a great deal of thinking. There are some films that are very, very good and that can engage the viewer in their narrative, in its mysteries, in its kind of misdirections. You can sometimes get films where a lot of it is happening in your head. Those are probably good films, but they’re not made very much anymore.
Paul Greer 