Talking Writing
>Why don’t we read photographs?
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Saïd Nuseibeh reflects on writing and the power of an image @ Talking Writing.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you will rarely find twenty words written about a photograph. There are many reasons for this. Having spent the past 26 years of my life as a professional photographer, a few of them stick out and worry me like splinters.
I’ve long taken it for granted that photography is a form of writing, the difference being only a matter of alphabet. To my mind, I am articulating with light rather than with words, but my intention is the same as that of a literary author: I want to communicate observations and ideas about the world around us that merit preservation.
Saïd Nuseibeh on Amazon As with literary works, some photographs are epic, some lyrical. Some tell a story, others reveal a state of mind. Some misrepresent, some augment. Some are factual, others suggestive.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )So why don’t people discuss photographs as often and as intelligently as they do writing?
>I have a story I don’t know what to do with
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Teresa Williams on creativity and how good writing happens @ Talking Writing.
I wandered my rooms, read, took a walk, mailed some things. Came back, couldn’t sleep. Got up at six a.m., dressed, and walked back into town. Sat down to my first breakfast in a long time. The Portuguese Bakery: two eggs, sunny-side-up, sausage, and bread. Walked back, tried to sleep. Couldn’t. Read. Tried again, and then, finally, a wonderful, long, dream-filled sleep.
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I dreamed I was a student and I was unprepared. The teacher was a thin, enigmatic, intense man with curly hair. It was night, and everyone sat around a wooden table in the woods. The trees were black-barked and bare. A full moon shone though lacy branches.
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I love Aiken’s phrase in “Tetelestai”: “ache with tremendous decisions.”
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Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Reading great stories, realizing how far my stories are from greatness.
>Suavity and charm
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Jeff Ousborne considers the importance of the sound of writing and music @ Talking Writing.
We don’t listen to old pop songs for their subject matter: I love my baby; my baby left me; my baby still loves me; I’m leaving my baby; why doesn’t my baby love me?
We listen to them, in Victorian critic Walter Pater’s words, for the “suavity” and “charm” that “gives them a worth in themselves.”
Suavity and charm: two underused words when we consider the highest aspirations of art. Yet both suggest an effortless, seamless, maybe even magical embodiment of style—in a quicksilvered paragraph from The Great Gatsby, in those terraced arches at the top of the Chrysler Building, or in the filigreed verse of an Elvis Costello song.
In his 1877 essay “The School of Giorgione,” Pater also writes that “[a]ll art constantly aspires to the condition of music.”
The oracular quality of his words may seem overly academic. I first encountered Pater’s criticism when I was in graduate school, after I read such disciples of his as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Oscar Wilde. But it’s only since I began writing songs a few years ago—both on my own and with my bandmates—that his claim about art and music has sunk in.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )My songs are scratchy pastiches of the sloppy guitar pop from my teenage years, as well as twice-baked homages to earlier confections by the Velvet Underground, the Byrds, and Big Star. My rudimentary music does not aspire to the condition of “art”; it barely achieves the condition of music. But it has made me reflect on the relationship between form, content, and meaning. And that’s Pater’s subject.
>In the blood-warm heat against the sun-baked walls
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Ellen Cantarow’s 1985 essay on Khartoum published for the first time @ Talking Writing.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Cairo, March 1985
Cairo was only my way station to Khartoum, still sealed off from the press: The coup against the U.S.’s man, General Gaafar Nimeiry, was still underway. At the Sudan embassy, the ambassador received me. A few perfunctory courtesies; then he invited me for a drink.
I recognized him from all of Doris Lessing’s stories about Africa and the several Ousmane Sembene films I’d seen about the African bourgeoisie. Harris tweeds, very cultivated, westernized, charming, but African all the same, chivalry just the other side of a raging sense of male superiority and what I imagined he thought was the “easiness” of the western woman. I begged off with a vague excuse.
I moved out of my hotel, the General, and stayed with friends in Zamalek, waiting. One evening, they entertained me by taking me to hear Angela Davis address Egyptian feminists. The Egyptians came dressed in skirts and blouses with pearls, pumps, and stockings—the sort of thing League of Women Voters might have worn in the 1950s. Angela herself was sleek, with short-cropped hair, enormous studious glasses, a graceful drop of long white beads over an equally graceful drop of long coverall black sweater.
“She’s lovely!” a pale beige Egyptian lady to my right exclaimed in English. “I thought she would be much darker.”
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