It is received wisdom that in order to get a book published you should start by placing short stories in literary magazines. Like most received wisdom, this is hogwash…
Young Castle called me “Scoop.” “Good morning, Scoop. What’s new in the word game?”
“I might ask the same of you,” I replied.
“I’m thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?”
“Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.”
“Or the college professors.”
“Or the college professors,” I agreed. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think my
conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”
“I just can’t help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems …”
“And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?” I demanded.
“They’d die more like mad dogs, I think—snarling and snapping at each other and biting their own tails.”
I turned to Castle the elder. “Sir, how does a man die when he’s deprived of the consolations of literature?”
“In one of two ways,” he said, “petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
"
Doing as others told me,
I was blind.
Coming when others called me,
I was lost.
Then I left everyone,
myself as well.
Then I found everyone,
myself as well.
— Rumi
(Source: bagankify, via figmentdotcom)
“I love watching animal movies on television, and they always say, don’t run away, and don’t turn your back, and don’t lie down flat. I love it—it’s from my childhood. How do you prevent dying? How do you prevent being eaten, or mauled, by a monster? I still worry about it!” - Maurice Sendak.
In honor of the illustrator and writer’s 85th birthday, Newsweek and Blank on Blank are proud to present this animated short about the beloved, late author, which is based off of audio we had left over from a 2009 interview conducted by Newsweek’s Andrew Romano and Ramin Setoodeh.
(Source: charlotte-nyc)
- book: this character was really really ugly
- movie/series: no
“I did a couple of writing seminars in Canada last year with high school kids. These were the bright kids, they all have computers, but they can’t spell. Because spell-check won’t [help] you if you don’t know through from threw. I told them, ‘If you can read in the 21st century, you own the world.’ Because you learn to write from reading. But there are so many other byways for the consciousness to go down now; it makes me uneasy.”
(Source: kazuos)
"Answer this question: does your publication use unpaid interns as the prevalent mode of determining full-time jobs? If so, then I’m sorry to inform you that your publication is perpetuating a privilege-based upward mobility, and it’s ruining journalism."
— David Dennis, “Unpaid internships and a culture of privilege are ruining journalism,” The Guardian (via gracebello)
(Source: Guardian, via gracebello)
This is a subject that actually comes up on a semi-frequent basis between my boyfriend and I, and I’d love to hear outside opinions: He HATES the ending. He doesn’t understand why Christine leaves with Raoul, and the Phantom lets her. Now, he’s only seen the movie (Gerard Butler version) and seen…
(I’m reading the book right now)
But yes, I have a really good theory. And it can be summed up in one sentence.
Because the Phantom’s not a monster.
(now I’ll elaborate on that because wow one sentence responses are lame)…
Thanks for putting so much thought into my question! You’ve convinced me, and made a few things clear which I had forgotten from not having read the book in a few years.
I still understand my partner’s misunderstanding though, because the way the story is presented on screen (and to a lesser extent, on stage), makes it more ambiguous who you’re supposed to be rooting for - or is that just me? I don’t completely get the sense from the Crawford/Brightman or the Butler/Rossum portrayal that he sees her as mainly an object. From my perspective it looks like the Phantom is offering her passion and artistic fulfillment, while Raoul (duelistsheiress mentioned this) is the safe choice who offers emotional and financial stability. If I had this choice to make myself, I would probably choose my soul mate. Yet the concept of “soul mate” is probably too simple and inappropriate for this story.
But of course, Leroux is who we ultimately must go back to in order to judge these relationships, and his writing makes it much more obvious that Erik is someone whom Christine pities and cares for and yet is better off without.
Have you seen Love Never Dies? From the summary alone I’ve been trying to avoid it like the plague, but I hope I’m not missing a masterpiece or anything…
The Ending of The Phantom of the Opera?
This is a subject that actually comes up on a semi-frequent basis between my boyfriend and I, and I’d love to hear outside opinions: He HATES the ending. He doesn’t understand why Christine leaves with Raoul, and the Phantom lets her. Now, he’s only seen the movie (Gerard Butler version) and seen it on Broadway (yes, I realize I caught a good one who actually enjoys musicals), while I’ve also read the book - which makes the outcome a bit more understandable (though I’m not too ecstatic about it either). Whenever we watch the movie he actually turns it off after ‘Point of No Return’…
I’m not quite sold on how I feel about it, so does anyone have any enlightening reasons why the ending is “better” or worse” than it could have been otherwise? Why did Leroux write it the way he did?
WHERE IS THIS?!
“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
- Henry Miller
