Tiah Beautement's Blog, page 98
May 26, 2013
On writing
It’s a healthy ideal to write without pressure or expectation, with integrity, but it’s contrary to a successful writing career. Media interest and money convert into pressure on a writer to conform, to write for an audience, for sponsors, our latter-day patrons. It’s an insidious and compelling pressure, something for which fledgling writers are unprepared. - Louis Greenberg, Trying to Pass: Building a Career in Reading & Writing
May 23, 2013
On The Snow Child
Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child - She could not fathom the hexagonal miracle of snowflakes formed from clouds, crystallized fern and feather that tumble down to light on a coat sleeve, white stars melting even as they strike. How did such force and beauty come to be in something so small and fleeting and unknowable? You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact Mabel had come to suspect the opposite. To believe, perhaps you had to cease looking for explanations and instead hold the little thing in your hands as long as you were...
May 22, 2013
On Picasso and the culture rebirth of Chicago
But the fact is, it has a long stupid face and looks like some giant insect that is about to eat a smaller, weaker insect. It has eyes that are pitiless, cold, mean. But why not? Everybody said it had the spirit of Chicago. And from thousands of miles away, accidentally or on purpose, Picasso captured it. - Mike Royko, One More Time
May 21, 2013
On The Shining Girls
Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls - She's even been practising making out with the back of her hand. Which was as effective as tickling yourself. It's why you need other fingers, other tongues. Only other people can make you feel real - - Glossy hair and bright eyes under heavy make-up and fluffy hairstyles. They wear their privilege like it's something they pull on with their socks in the morning. - - Being a Cubs fan is about being an optimist against all odds or rational. - - They sit in companionable silence watching a man in a shiny blue...
May 20, 2013
On being clueless
Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn't the faintest idea what the heck is really going on. - Mike Royko
May 19, 2013
On struggling artists
What is the worst job you've done? Besides having to answer this endless series of questions? I guess it was when I was starting out and had to do that unfortunate series of bacon ads. - Miss Piggy, Q&A Miss Piggy
May 16, 2013
On Sister-Sister
Rachel Zadok, Sister-Sister - I sink into the dent, run my fingers over the rusted scars. If I wanted, I could sense what twisted the metal. Ghosts clamour in my ears. They want to tell me their stories, but I don't like to listen. Everybody's got a story. I have a story of my own - - I'm caught in the singing, swaying-swaying, and I don't suss his game until the ropes are halfway up my legs. - - Sindi had not expected the dead to take up so much space. - - We'd just turned nine when the rain...
On rooms with books
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them. - Mark Twain
May 15, 2013
On grace
Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. - Mark Twain
May 14, 2013
On history
Yet to enter history through childhood experience shifts one’s perspective not away from history but instead to an earlier time just before history has finally shaped us. Is there a child who existed before the conventional history that we tell of ourselves, one who, though invisible to us, still shapes events, even through this absence? - Susan Griffin, Our secret
