Category: Stolen Valor

In my family there was an atmosphere of hearty wholesomeness that I, a sensitive young plant, scorned and rebelled against. But that strict middle-class home gave me a wall to pound on, something to sharpen myself against. At the same time my family taught me a number of values—efficiency, punctuality, a sense of financial responsibility—which may be “bourgeois” but are nevertheless important to the artist. They are part of the process of setting for oneself severe standards.

The notions of subjective and objective have been completely reversed. Objective means the non-controversial aspect of things, their unquestioned impression, the façade made up of classified data, that is, the subjective; and they call subjective anything which breaches that façade, engages the specific experience of a matter, casts off all ready-made judgements and substitutes relatedness to the object for the majority consensus of those who do not even look at it, let alone think about it – that is, the objective.

Minima Moralia: Notes from Damaged Life

We find [in Tibet] the singular phenomenon of the conscious—semi-“scientific”—practice of the creation and destruction of demons. It appears that in Tibet [the Arcanum of the Devil in the Tarot] is known, and it is practised as one of the methods of occult training of the will and imagination. The training consists of three parts: the creation of tulpas (magical creatures) through concentrated and directed imagination, then their evocation and, lastly, the freeing of consciousness from their hold on it by an act of knowledge which destroys them—through which it is realised that they are only a creation of the imagination, and therefore illusory. The aim of this training is therefore to arrive at disbelief in demons after having created them through the force of imagination and having confronted their terrifying apparitions with intrepidity.

Meditations on the Tarot, Anonymous

• “When we speak of ‘seriousness’ in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death—how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn’t so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted.”
• “It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.”
• “Get to too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.”
• “My overuse of the word [‘tendrils’] is a good example of what can happen when you spend too much time and energy on words alone. This advice has been given often and more compellingly elsewhere, but my specific piece of wrong procedure back then was, incredibly, to browse through the thesaurus and note words that sound cool, hip, or likely to produce an effect, usually that of making me look good, without then taking the trouble to go and find out in the dictionary what they meant. If this sounds stupid, it is. I mention it only on the chance that others may be doing it even as we speak, and be able to profit from my error.”
• “This same free advice can also be applied to items of information. Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything—or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance, and the possibilities therein for ruining a good story.”
• “Though it may not be wrong absolutely to make up, as I still do, what I don’t know or am too lazy to find out, phony data are more often than not deployed in places sensitive enough to make a difference, thereby losing what marginal charm they may have possessed outside the story’s context.”
• “Fascinating topic, literary theft. As in the penal code, there are degrees. These range from plagiarism down to only being derivative, but all are forms of wrong procedure. If, on the other hand, you believe that nothing is original and that all writers “borrow” from “sources,” there still remains the question of credit lines or acknowledgements.”
• “Lest others become enchanted as I was and have continued to be with [the technique of looting reference sources for plot material], let me point out that it is a lousy way to go about writing a story. The problem here is like the problem with ‘Entropy’: beginning with something abstract—a thermodynamic coinage or the data in a guidebook—and only then going on to try to develop plot and characters. This is simply, as we say in the profession, ass backwards. Without some grounding in human reality, you are apt to be left only with another apprentice exercise.”
• “Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of [Surrealism], and became fascinated instead with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects. What I had to learn later on was the necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill: any old combination of details will not do. Spike Jones, Jr., whose father’s orchestral recordings had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child, said once in an interview, ‘One of the things that people don’t realize about Dad’s kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.'”
• “Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live.”

(from the Introduction to Slow Learner, by Thomas Pynchon)

• No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
• It is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity.
• What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.
• The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
• [T]he mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.
• [T]he more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.
•  The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.
• It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.
• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
• The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

I was twenty-five before I realized stockings were sexy.

The Names, Don DeLillo

The artist bending to the necessities of his/her creative process ought, for aesthetics’ sake, eschew the strengths of the given medium.

Stan Brakhage

For all history is in some measure a fall of the sacred, a limitation and diminution. But the sacred does not cease to manifest itself, and with each new manifestation it resumes its original tendency to reveal itself wholly.

Mircea Eliade

So you thought you might like to/Go to the show/To feel the warm thrill of confusion/That space cadet glow

“In the Flesh?”, Pink Floyd

All human endeavour and progress are being swept aside to make room for hideous sounds.

Julius Harrison

We are not depressed; we’re on strike.

The Invisible Committee

Every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence, a priest is behind it. The priest cast the triple curse on desire: the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal. Facing north, the priest said, Desire is lack (how could it not lack what it desires?). The priest carried out the first sacrifice, named castration, and all the men and women of the north lined up behind him, crying in cadence, “Lack, lack, it’s the common law.” Then, facing south, the priest linked desire to pleasure. For there are hedonistic, even orgiastic, priests. Desire will be assuaged by pleasure; and not only will the pleasure obtained silence desire for a moment but the process of obtaining it is already a way of interrupting it, of instantly discharging it and unburdening oneself of it. Pleasure as discharge: the priest
carries out the second sacrifice, named masturbation. Then, facing east, he exclaimed: Jouissance is impossible, but impossible jouissance is inscribed in desire. For that, in its very impossibility, is the Ideal, the “manque-a-jouir that is life.” The priest carried out the third sacrifice, phantasy or the thousand and one nights, the one hundred twenty days, while the men of the East chanted: Yes, we will be your phantasy, your ideal and impossibility, yours and also our own. The priest did not turn to the west. He knew that in the west lay a plane of consistency, but he thought that the way was blocked by the columns of Hercules, that it led nowhere and was uninhabited by people. But that is where desire was lurking, west was the shortest route east, as well as to the other directions, rediscovered or deterritorialized.

“November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?”, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

From the glories of the Tang Dynasty
I recall only one date: the year
the usurper An Lushan
drove both Wang Wei and Du Fu

far from the corrupt court
into the mountains
where for the first time they were free
to write the only poems we remember.

Peter Dale Scott, “The Tao of 9/11”

Modern man does not realize how much his ‘rationalism’ (which has annihilated his ability to respond to numinous influences and symbols) has left him at the mercy of the psychic underworld of evil.

Carl Jung

“Angels and Devils”

“Snakes”