Jim Jarmusch "Steal from Anywhere"

A Writer's Prayer

I thought this posting appropriate since I will be pursuing a masters degree at Harvard Divinity School in the fall. I returned home last night from a week long visit to the open house for admitted students, during which I was haunted be an insidious realization: I want nothing more than to write very good stories. This means not writing essays, not reading 1300 pages of scholarship per week. However, the program is extremely flexible, I will design my own focus, a number of the professors are novelists, and the diversity and dynamism of the students is inspiring. Two of the New Yorker's 20 under 40 fiction writers are recent graduates. And they're paying my tuition, and its fuckin Harvard. We'll see how it goes...

A Writer's Prayer by Wallace Stegner

“Lord, let me grow into such a man as has something to say! Let me be one of those that Henry James speaks of, one of those ‘upon whom nothing is lost.’ Let understanding and wisdom be engraved on my mind as deep as the lines of living on a wise and weathered face. Teach me to love and teach me to be humble and let me learn to respect human differences, human privacy, human dignity, human pain. And then let me find the words to say it so it can’t be overlooked and can’t be forgotten.”

Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei documentary coming soon

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry  TEASER from Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry on Vimeo.

Word Satori

Haven't posted one of these in a while. Just started reading Hemingway after a decade of resistance. This compact vignette from the collection  In Our Time  struck me with its poetical innovation. It was written before 1925!  I'm only now beginning to understand the debt many of my favorite authors, and consequently I owe Hemingway.

The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung onto the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him wham against the wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for  his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can't have more than three  matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he couldn't get the sword in. He couldn't hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand ang puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull ring. 

Chinese Contemporary

                                          Liu Wei

                                          Wang Qingsong

                                           Zhao Bandi

I came across these images while researching contemporary chinese dissident artists for a story. These artists however, are not necessarily dissidents.

I recently listened to an interview with Jonathan Safron Foer- candid, entertaining, verging on brilliant- in which he said that he would not have become a writer if it were not for the inspiration of the visual artist Joseph Cornell. I can think of a few other creatives who seem to be benefitting from Cornell's influence, i.e. Damien Hirst and Wes Anderson.

A SUMMER HOME from Justin Kane on Vimeo.

A movie I wrote with my mom on the back of an envelope while sitting on the side of a pond. Justin started filming the next day, and now its a Vimeo staff pick. Big ups to all involved!!!