Timothy Miller's Blog, page 14

Reading Club

 Full disclosure:

She's my sister. But do you realize how hard it is to get relatives to read your work?

Edward Albee

 “Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.”

― Edward Albee

Midwest Book Review: the Dutch Painter

 From MBR:
A welcome addition to the growing library of Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter" by Timothy Miller does full justice to the exploits of that master detective which was originally created by Sir Conan Doyle. A 'must read' selection for all dedicated mystery buffs, as well as the legions of Sherlock Holmes fans, and also readily available for personal reading lists in a digital book format (Kindle, $9.99), this paperback edition of "The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter" from Seventh Street Books is an especially and unreservedly recommended for all community library Mystery/Suspense collections.

Aaron Sorkin

 

"I like dialogue. It sounds like music. What the words sound like are as important to me as what the words mean."

-- Aaron Sorkin

I'm not insane!

Have saber, will travel.I mean, I had this figured out long before any German scientists.

"The story of van Gogh's madness was part of a coverup, the authors say, by none other than van Gogh's friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin."

For the full article, 
check out NPR 

Scion Society hazing

 The admissions test was brutal.
First they blindfolded me. Then:

(Actually I just had to give my name)1) They asked me whether the train from Paddington at 8.30 would get me to Devon by noon.

2) They asked me to discern five different types of tobacco ash by smell alone.

3) They asked me to recite "The Great Rat of Sumatra" word for word.

4) They asked the middle name of Watson's fifth wife.

5) They asked me in which story Holmes first mentions "the little grey cells."

6) They told me to put on a deerstalker cap backwards.

7) They swore me to secrecy.

But I passed! I'm now a member of the Crew of the Lone Star Barque Society (based in Dallas). I can put a swagger in my step.

Claude Levi-Strauss

 

"Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing."

Contraband

 Psst! I just got my copy of Maus . 

It literally came in a plain brown wrapper. Keep it on the downlow, willya? They're coming down hard on readers, and I've already got Beloved and Ulysses against me.

You say goodbye, and I say hello.

 

Which one are you?As an artist, which are you?

Lennon or McCartney?

The raw or the cooked?

I mean, there are those artists who want to dig into themselves, confess themselves, use themselves as their source material. And then there are artists who hide behind their art, who use their art to please, to put on a hundred different masks. I think it's true no matter what medium you work in: writing, acting, painting, etc.

Of course art by it's very nature is a kind of hiding; even if it is a revelation, it's always at one remove. One can always deny it if questioned by Pilate. Yet it is also an invitation to follow the clues, no matter how tortuous or obscure, to the soul. So there's a dialectic involved.

I adore Lennon, but I'm definitely a McCartney, hiding behind the mask of Dr. John Watson. (Not that an artist can't occasionally break the mold: McCartney's Yesterday or Lennon's For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.)

Reflections on Reflections

 There comes a time in every draft of a novel when things start to click together, to reflect each other. For instance, did you know that King Tut photographer Harry Burton preferred sunlight for his pictures? Which meant he had to use a complicated setup of mirrors and reflectors to bring the sun INTO the tomb. (I didn't know this, and had to rewrite that whole section.)

But then I realized that must have been the exact method used by Geoffrey Hodson, 50 pages earlier, to create the illusion of dancing fairies!

Research always shows you the way.