writing

/ˈrʌɪtɪŋ/

noun

1. the activity or skill of writing.
“parents want schools to concentrate on reading, writing, and arithmetic”
2. the activity or occupation of composing text for publication.
“she made a decent living from writing”

And Everything Is Going Fine

| Paul Greer

Spalding

 

By A. O. SCOTT
NY Times Published: December 9, 2010

“Here is a description of some of the most innovative and important American theater of the last quarter of the 20th century. A man sits at a table and starts talking. If he has props, they are minimal — a spiral notebook, a record player, a box of pictures — and his costume is correspondingly modest, consisting usually of a flannel shirt, blue jeans or chinos, and sneakers. He speaks mostly about himself, digressing from anecdotes about his childhood and professional life into more serious confessional territory, though always with reserve and good humor.

When Spalding Gray, the man at that table, began performing his autobiographical monologues in the late 1970s and early ’80s — first as a member of the Wooster Group, then on his own — they felt radical and revelatory, like bulletins from newly discovered artistic territory. By 2004, when Mr. Gray committed suicide by jumping from the Staten Island Ferry, his work was a familiar and widely appreciated feature of the cultural landscape. He made occasional appearances in movies, television series and conventional plays, but his great role, his great project, was himself.”

via WolfAndFox

Saw “Swimming to Cambodia” when I was quite young and it made a huge impression on me, found & read transcriptions of his other performances (no internet). It hurt me when I found out that he had gone.

“First he tells, then he shows.”

| Paul Greer
Harold Pinterby Dmitri Kasterine modern bromide print from original negative, 2009, based on a work of 1977
Harold Pinter by Dmitri Kasterine. Modern bromide print from original negative, 2009, based on a work of 1977

 

“Pinter did what Auden said a poet should do. He cleaned the gutters of the English language, so that it ever afterwards flowed more easily and more cleanly. We can also say that over his work and over his person hovers a sort of leonine, predatory spirit which is all the more powerful for being held under in a rigid discipline of form, or in a black suit…The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected. In sum, this tribute from one writer to another: you never know what the hell’s coming next.”

— David Hare in Harold Pinter:A Celebration Faber and Faber 2000 p 21

“How many times have we heard the tired injunction, “Show, don’t tell”? Of all the specious screenwriting rules peddled by gurus fleecing the young, this is the most annoying of the lot, because it’s plain to anyone who’s ever bothered to watch a play or a film carefully that the best writers invariably achieve their effects by mixing showing and telling. It’s how you configure showing and telling that makes you great. In fact, it’s the amount of one you mix with the other to which we give the name “personal style”. Read one page of Shakespeare, a writer fond of interior monologue. First he tells, then he shows. And that’s how Pinter does it as well.”

 – Adultery, alcohol and menace,

via i12bent

American Vampire

Quote | | Paul Greer

“Here’s what vampires shouldn’t be: pallid detectives who drink Bloody Marys and work only at night; lovelorn southern gentlemen; anorexic teenage girls; boy-toys with big dewy eyes.
What should they be? Killers, honey. Stone killers who never get enough of that tasty Type-A. Bad boys and girls. Hunters. In other words, Midnight America. Red, white and blue, accent on the red. Those vamps got hijacked by a lot of soft-focus romance.”

— Stephen King

“Avis d’orage en fin de journée”

Quote | | Paul Greer

“Il faut que je vous fasse un aveu: je suis absolument en faveur du plagiat. Je crois que si on veut arriver à une nouvelle renaissance des arts et des lettres, le gouvernement devrait encourager le plagiat (…) Je ne plaisante pas car les très grands auters n’ont pas fait autre chose que d’être des plagiaires et ça leur a très bien réussi: Shakespeare, Molière… Cette habitude d’utiliser une histoire inventée par un autre vous libère de ce qui n’est pas important. L’histoire n’a pas d’importance, ce qui est important c’est la façon dont on la raconte. Ce qui est important c’est l’attention porté aux détails.”

[I have to confess to you: I am absolutely in favor of plagiarism. I believe that if we are to arrive at a new renaissance of the arts and letters, the government must encourage plagiarism (…) I’m not joking. The greatest authors, Shakespeare, Moliere, haven’t been anything other than plagiarists, to their great success… The custom of using a story created by someone else frees you from the unimportant. The story isn’t important, what is important is the way the story is told. What is important is the attention brought to the details.]

— Jean Renoir

Dennis Potter’s Final Television Interview with Melvyn Bragg

Quote | | Paul Greer

“The blossom is out in full now, it’s plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white. It’s the whitest, frothiest blossomest blossom that ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the now-ness of everything is absolutely wondrous.”

–- Dennis Potter – 5 April 1995

“No symbols where none intended”

Image | | Paul Greer
Doodles from the “Watt” notebooks by Samuel Beckett
Doodles from the “Watt” notebooks by Samuel Beckett

“Although popularly thought of as a rather dour and ascetic writer, there is a wonderfully playful aspect to Samuel Beckett’s creative output: the pictorial array of raggle-taggle characters and baroque broidery that scampers through his notebooks and manuscripts. Continuously—from decorating 1930s exercise books to embellishing the scraps of paper bearing his 1970s Mirlitonnades—doodling provided an amiable outlet when, yet again, he found himself up against the obduracy of words.

Beckett’s interest in the visual arts is well known. During his exhaustive travels around Germany in the 1930s he kept notes detailing his responses to the Old Master and more modern paintings that he had seen. More communally, throughout his life he formed close friendships with a number of artists including Jack B. Yeats, Bram Van Velde, Henri Hayden, and Avigdor Arikha. However, his appreciation of Fine Art seems to have had no discernibly direct effect on his own spontaneous drawings, which repeatedly appear to have earthier, and more mixed, antecedents.”