The Write Advice 086: VIRGINIA WOOLF

The only advice… that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions… After all, what laws can be laid down about books?  The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear?  Nobody can say.  Each must decide that question for himself.  To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.  Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none…
     Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties with words.

 

How Should One Read A Book? (1925)


 

 

 

Use the link below to read more about the life and work of British novelist and essayist VIRGINIA WOOLF:

 

 

https://v-woolf-society.com/

 

 

 

 

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The Many Faces of the Novel (2014) by GRANT SNIDER

Re-posted from the blog INCIDENTAL COMICS

© 2014 Grant Snider

 

Use the links below to visit INCIDENTAL COMICS, the wonderful blog of North American cartoonist GRANT SNIDER, and purchase his many fine books from ABRAMS COMIC ARTS and CHRONICLE BOOKS:

 

 

http://www.incidentalcomics.com/


https://www.abramsbooks.com/contributor/grant-snider_15889594/


https://www.chroniclebooks.com/collections/read-aloud-childrens-books/products/what-color-is-night?_pos=1&_sid=48c1770e7&_ss=r

 

 

 

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Good Grief!! REMEMBERING CHARLES M SCHULZ

Think About It 019: JOHN PILGER

Imagine two cities.  Both are under siege by the forces of the government of that country.  Both cities are occupied by fanatics, who commit terrible atrocities, such as beheading people.

But there is a vital difference.  In one siege, the government soldiers are described as liberators by Western reporters embedded with them, who enthusiastically report their battles and air strikes.  There are front page pictures of these heroic soldiers giving a V-sign for victory.  There is scant mention of civilian casualties.

In the second city –– in another country nearby –– almost exactly the same thing is happening.  Government forces are laying siege to a city controlled by the same breed of fanatics.

The difference is that these fanatics are supported, supplied and armed by 'us' –– by the United States and Britain.  They even have a media centre that is funded by Britain and America.

Another difference is that the government soldiers laying siege to this city are the bad guys, condemned for assaulting and bombing the city –– which is exactly what the good soldiers do in the first city.

Confusing?  Not really.  Such is the basic double standard that is the essence of propaganda.  I am referring, of course, to the current siege of the city of Mosul by the government forces of Iraq, who are backed by the United States and Britain, and to the siege of Aleppo by the government forces of Syria, backed by Russia.  One is good; the other is bad.

What is seldom reported is that both cities would not be occupied by fanatics and ravaged by war if Britain and the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003.  That criminal enterprise was launched on lies strikingly similar to the propaganda that now distorts our understanding of the civil war in Syria.

Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al-Qaida and al-Nusra and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today.

'Inside The Invisible Government: John Pilger On War, Propaganda, Clinton And Trump' 

[New Matilda, 28 October 2016]


 

Use the link below to visit the website of Australian journalist and filmmaker JOHN PILGER:

 

https://johnpilger.com/

 

 

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Artist unspecified

Special thanks to PA for sharing this cartoon.

Much appreciated as always!

 

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Think About It 018: NANCY JO SALES

Mobile dating went mainstream about five years ago; by 2012 it was overtaking online dating.  In February, one study reported there were nearly 100 million people –– perhaps 50 million on Tinder alone — using their phones as a sort of all-day, every-day, handheld singles club, where they might find a sex partner as easily as they’d find a cheap flight to Florida.  'It’s like ordering Seamless,' says Dan, the investment banker, referring to the online food-delivery service.  'But you’re ordering a person.'
      The comparison to online shopping seems an apt one.  Dating apps are the free-market economy come to sex.  The innovation of Tinder was the swipe — the flick of a finger on a picture, no more elaborate profiles necessary and no more fear of rejection; users only know whether they’ve been approved, never when they’ve been discarded.  OkCupid soon adopted the function.  Hinge, which allows for more information about a match’s circle of friends through Facebook, and Happn, which enables GPS tracking to show whether matches have recently 'crossed paths,' use it too.  It’s telling that swiping has been jocularly incorporated into advertisements for various products, a nod to the notion that, online, the act of choosing consumer brands and sex partners has become interchangeable.

'Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse' [Vanity Fair,  6 August 2015]


 

Use the link below to read the full article by North American journalist NANCY JO SALES:

 

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating

 

 

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The Write Advice 085: DAVID HARE

I have respect for any artist who wants to drag art closer to reality, and whose inspiration is the wealth of the external universe.
      There are, after all, only three disciplines to which human beings can go for help in understanding their own predicaments: to art, to science and to religion.  There is so much to know, and we have such short lives in order to learn, that I cannot understand any writer who, at some level, does not value curiosity over opinion, nor seek enlightenment over self-expression.  What else will persuade the sated consumers that fiction can offer them something which the melodrama of football or the lassitude of magazines cannot?
      It is precisely because there are so many stories being told that audiences need to be refreshed.  Why fabulate?  Because if we do not, everyone else will.  We must fabulate because we all, as spectators, need to be reminded that the lowest levels of fabulation, as much as in half-baked novels as on half-baked television, do not tell us very much about reality, or about ourselves.
      Bad and conventional story-telling serves only to dull us. Such story-telling reduces the world.  How much more desperately, then, we need our sense of wonder restored.
      And let me be clear: not only do I look to leave the theatre or the television set knowing more, but most especially I hope to know more about now.  A lifetime's experience of story-telling has convinced me that nothing is harder in the arts than to be contemporary.  It may be true that we are breeding generations who will prefer to watch the security cameras in department stores rather than go to the Royal Shakespeare Company.  But it is interesting to note that, in television, the fly-on-the-wall documentary which three years ago was all the rage is now more or less extinct, while Eastenders and Casualty ride on regardless.  The makers of these rightly admired and formidable programs know something which the low-level documentarists did not: that the editing and organisation of reality is a genuine skill. 
      In response to the ubiquity of the real, we need not to abandon fiction, but, on the contrary, to make that fiction more original, more distinctive.  The enemy of art is not reality, but formula.

Interview [The Sydney Morning Herald,18 October 2004]



Use the link below to read an interview with British playwright DAVID HARE about his controversial 2015 memoir The Blue Touch Paper:

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/playwrights/david-hare-interview-sense-of-guilt-drove-my-life-for-so-long/

 

 

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Words for the Music 007: RICKIE LEE JONES

RICKIE LEE JONES
c 1979

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS IN 1963

RICKIE LEE JONES

from the 1979 Warner Bros LP 

Rickie Lee Jones

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS IN 1963

 

The most as you'll ever go
Is back where you used to know
If grown-ups could laugh this slow
Where as you watch the hour snow
Years may go by

Years may go by

So hold on to your special friend
Here, you'll need something to keep her in

Now you stay inside of this foolish grin
Though any day your secrets end
Then again
Years may go by

And years may go by

You saved your own special friend
'Cuz here you need something to hide her in
And you stay inside of that foolish grin
When everyday now secrets end
And then again
Years may go by

And years may go by

Years may go by

  Years may go by…  

Words and music © 1979 Rickie Lee Jones

Some singers have the ability to transport the listener to a unique time and place the moment they open their mouths.  On paper, a song like On Saturday Afternoons in 1963 looks like a brief wisp of a thing, a few throwaway lines that, while poetic, hardly qualify as earth-shattering.  But the magic happens when Rickie Lee Jones sings those words in her own haunting and inimitable way, against a musical background that is at once wistful and resigned, defining and celebrating childhood even as it appears to be lamenting the inevitable passing of it.

I defy anyone with an open heart to listen to this song and not feel profoundly moved by it.  It proves why the greats are great and why certain albums become classics while others languish, ignored and forgotten, in perpetual obscurity.  There's no trickery here, no trendiness, no hiding behind hype or effects or overly slick arrangements.  Just honest raw emotion, delivered by one human being to other human beings in a way that's both truly affecting and instantly comprehensible.

And all in a pithy, self-contained work of art that lasts less than three minutes.

Sit back and marvel, as I often have and still do, at the sheer unadorned beauty of it.


 

Use the link below to visit the website of North American singer/songwriter RICKIE LEE JONES:

 

 

http://www.rickieleejones.com/

 

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 

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Last updated 5 April 2021