“The concept of social identity seems to address the fascination of Tumblr that’s not happening with the other social networks. People are sharing these extensions through a different prism. Instead of creating multiple-identities, it appears as if Tumblr fosters both our voyeuristic tendencies (looking in on someone’s Tumble posts) and our expressionist ones (exhibiting your personality via what you decide to share, be it video, audio, text, links, thoughts, or whatever), allowing users to represent themselves in a more complete and dynamic way. Tumblr is positioned to be the antithesis of Twitter and Facebook because it’s a platform for the cross-section of the open digital generation, one that believes in watching and exhibiting. And cats.”
Quotes
An Englishman in New York
“Persistence is your greatest weapon. It is in the nature of barriers that they fall. Do not seek to become like your opponents. You’ll have the burden and the great joy of being outsiders. Every day you live is a kind of triumph. This you should cling on to. You should make no effort to try and join society. Stay right where you are. Give your name and serial number and wait for society to form itself around you because it most certainly will. Neither look forward where there is doubt nor backward where there is regret. Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside that you want but whether there is anything inside you have not yet unpacked.”
American Vampire
“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.”
“Avis d’orage en fin de journée”
“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.]
C&C
“The thing I have come to love about Tumblr is that it’s not just writing in community. It’s reading and thinking and inspiring discipline and teaching in community. Some of the best things I’ve read anywhere have been on Tumblr by people I can email later that night. And correspondingly, I think some of the better things I’ve written this year were fleshed out and finished and offered up publicly because I know that would mean something to a community of not just friends but writers. I knew I would receive thoughtful feedback (when the writing warranted it) and might even prime the pump for someone else—returning the favor they’d done me with their piece I couldn’t stop reading the month before. And if my writing is flat—contrived or lazy or some flimsy imitation—well, I’ll know that through them too.
Writing in this community is life-giving and adds a fuel and urgency I haven’t felt in more static, one-dimensional platforms.
The book itself is a community of a different sort. Sometimes I envision it as a lit up apartment building, and I am standing across the street at night. I live across the hall from these people, quite literally, our stories are housed together but I don’t know most of these people yet. There’s a bundle of kinetic excitement I drag into each new story I read. A bundle of anticipation of new stories I’ll hear from writers I already love and all the moments I’ll meet from people I am related to but not in relation with.”
–
Erica, Coming & Crying: C&C Contributors, part 12
via meaghano
“Osborne’s first Budget? It’s wrong, wrong, wrong!”
“If you have a household that can’t pay its debts, you tell it to cut back on spending to free up the cash to pay the debts. But in a national economy, if you cut back on your spending, then economic activity goes down, nobody invests, the amount of tax you take goes down, the amount you pay out in unemployment benefits goes up and you don’t have enough money to pay your debts.”
“I have a horror of copying myself.”
“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. That is why we must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it – except from our own works. ”
“It is also an experimental theatre”
“It is not through the dissemination of ideas that cinema, and it’s personalised form, television, win the battle for our minds. Their influence works in quite a different way. An actor on the stage impresses the audience by the general orientation of his movements and by the conviction with which he delivers his lines; on the big or little screen, the same character is broken down into a sequence of exact details each of which affects the spectator in a separate and subtle way. What we have here is a school of gesture, a lesson in dramatic art in which a particular facial expression or motion of the hand supplies thousands of viewers with a supposedly adequate way of expressing particular feelings, wishes and so on. Thus the still rudimentary technology of the image teaches the individual to model his existential attitudes on the complete portraits of him assembled by the psychologists. His most personal tics and idiosyncrasies become the means by which Power integrates him into its schemata. The poverty of everyday life reaches its nadir by being choreographed in this way. Just as the passivity of the consumer is an active passivity, so the passivity of the spectator lies in his ability to assimilate roles and play them according to official norms. The repetition of images and stereotypes offers a set of models from which everyone is supposed to choose a role. The spectacle is a museum of images, a showroom of stick figures.”
[hand-drawn animation]
“If [hand-drawn animation] is a dying craft, we can’t do anything about it. Civilization moves on. Where are all the fresco painters now? Where are the landscape artists? What are they doing now? The world is changing. I have been very fortunate to be able to do the same job for 40 years. That’s rare in any era.”
Paul Greer 