Category Archives: aesthetics
Noted: ‘Steal Like an Artist’
Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.—Steal Like an Artist Austin Kleon is a writer and visual artist—collage and sketches and mashups—whose magical new … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, discovery, experimental, flow, NOTED, postmodernism
Art, craft, and the elusive self
I knew Dave Owen in another life—my Hoosier period—and since then he’s become an admired landscape painter in southern Indiana. In his thoughtful new blog post “With the Artist Added,” at David Owen Art Notes, Dave reflects on the nature … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, discovery, emotion, freewriting, NOTED, technique, working method
Review: Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory’
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov. Knopf, 268 pages. “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, honesty, memoir, REVIEW, theme
Review: Dillard’s ‘Living By Fiction’
Living By Fiction by Annie Dillard. Harper Perennial. 192 pages. The cultural assumption is that the novel is the proper home of significance and that nonfiction is mere journalism. This is interesting because it means that in two centuries our … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, Dillard—Saint Annie, experimental, fiction, journalism, narrative, postmodernism, REVIEW, structure, style
Real art for our virtual times
David Shields’s audacious Reality Hunger has provoked much discussion and many mixed notices. Thomas Larson, journalist, essayist, and critic, has just weighed in in Agni Online, wittily calling the book “an improvised explosive device applied to the sacred cow of … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, creative nonfiction, experimental, fiction, narrative
Finding a font for our words
The New Yorker online recently excerpted a passage from Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City concerning a man who believes his mind to be controlled by the magazine’s font. This mention allowed The New Yorker to reveal: “Fiction editor Deborah … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, design, working method
The poetic prose of ‘Nat Turner’
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Vintage. 480 pages. William Styron told interviewers he worked slowly, writing his thick books by hand, in No. 2 pencil, on yellow legal pads. In Sophie’s Choice his alter ego reads his … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, REVIEW, syntax, voice, working method
A few more words
I own a few sacred words, words of such beauty I desire to be worthy of them. I adore these watery two: lacustrine, of or pertaining to a lake, and pelagic, of or pertaining to the open seas or oceans. … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, audience, reading, vocabulary
A writer’s words
The more I consider words, the more beautiful and useful and strange they seem individually and in combination: What does “hopelessly endearing,” used in a recent New Yorker review to describe an actor’s smile, literally mean? Yet the phrase captures … Continue reading
Filed under aesthetics, audience, Dillard—Saint Annie, reading, vocabulary
