“Find out who you are, and do it on purpose.”
—Dolly Parton (via nudewave)
“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening […] Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”
—
Alice Walker
This feels like what I’ve been going through lately.
(Source: bandbenterprises)
The Great Gatsby (2013)
AMONG THE WHISPERINGS AND THE CHAMPAGNE AND THE STARS.
by Chad Perman
I can’t handle how quickly modern culture moves. Mostly, I’m simply ill-equipped—needing time to think and reflect and sort out one’s thoughts feels dangerously close to being a handicap in the digital age. But at the same time, I’m in no way immune to the seductive pull of an ever-happening right now, with all the excitement and escapism that provides. I feel the tug of it, but also the need to pull back. Which in the end only leaves me with a kind of free-floating anxiety, an indecisiveness that effectively manages to keep a thing like contentment forever off my plate.
Look, to be frank, I read Gatsby once (during college, but outside of classes, because neither my high school or college classes ever taught it), and it didn’t do much for me. I don’t know if I was doing with the book what people were doing with this movie and going into it guns blazing, because I’d heard people rave about it non-stop and give me wide-eyed looks of disbelief when I’d said I hadn’t read it, if I was in the wrong place at my life to appreciate the story, or if I’d simply just not seen what was so delightful about it. I felt weird for feeling this way about it for awhile, and then just accepted it as one of those things for me, one of those things that a lot of people love and I just don’t connect with, and that’s ok. Not all art has to be everything to everyone.
Tonight I went into Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby wanting just that - Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation. I am, admittedly, an unabashed champion of his style, for the same reason I love Tarantino or the Coen Bros or David Lynch - you unmistakably know when they’ve had a hand in something you’re watching. Praise subtlety all you want, but I find it immensely boring a lot of the time. I’m not watching a movie (or a television show, for that matter) because I want a faithful adaptation of the book, or movie, or play, or whatever else it might be riffing off of. If I wanted that, I would just go right to the original material to begin with. I’m watching a movie because I want to see someone else’s interpretation of something, I want to live through someone else’s eyes for a few hours.
So I suppose it could be my general appreciation for Luhrmann’s vision of the world that propelled me to truly love this adaptation, but what is there to truly love about it, if not that? I don’t remember much about my experience reading The Great Gatsby since it didn’t fully hold me, but I do remember feeling sad and generally shitty about the story and the people in it, and reasonably so — it’s not exactly a feel-good kind of novel. But then, what I loved about Luhrmann’s adaptation is that there was this twinge of hope, this strange sort of optimism, even if only for a short time, that I either missed in the book or that maybe was only in Luhrmann’s interpretation of it. Either way, for the first time, the story resonated with me, and I found myself wanting to re-read The Great Gatsby—which I sort of already felt I should do, but more out of a sort of cultural obligation than any actual desire to do it. Now, though, I will probably re-read it within the year. And whether or not that’s the right reason or intention, or I find that the book still doesn’t grab me, isn’t that still worth something, at the end? Through Luhrmann’s eyes, I found a new appreciation for something that had previously left me cold.
That was sort of a long-winded way to say that I completely agree with Chad’s review above and you should all read it, but, there you have it.
“Going through a drawer I found the submissions/applications log I’ve kept off and on over the years. Just in case you think it’s all been roses I’d like to report that Yaddo rejected me (as recently as 2011). McDowell rejected me. Hedgebrook rejected me twice. The Georgia Review rejected me and Ploughshares rejected me and Tin House rejected me, as did about twenty other journals and magazines. Both The Sun and The Missouri Review rejected me before I appeared in their pages. Literary Arts declined to give me a fellowship three times before I won one. I’ve applied for an NEA five times and it’s always been a no. Harper’s magazine never even bothered to reply. I say it all the time but I’ll say it again: keep on writing. Never give up. Rejection is part of a writer’s life. Then, now, always.”
—
Cheryl knows.
(via therumpus)
Note to self / note to all of us
“…Art is simply inevitable. It was on the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and it’s because we are a species that’s driven by narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try and make sense out of all this chaos. And sometimes when you get a really good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that thing that’s impossible which is entering the consciousness of another human being—literally seeing the world the way they see it. Then, if you have a really good piece of art and a really good artist, you are altered in some way, and so the experience is transformative and in the minute you’re experiencing that piece of art, you’re not alone. You’re connected to the arts. So I feel like that can’t be too bad.
Art is also about problem solving, and it’s obvious from the news, we have a little bit of a problem with problem solving. In my experience, the main obstacle to problem solving is an entrenched ideology. The great thing about making a movie or a piece of art is that that never comes into play. All the ideas are on the table. All the ideas and everything is open for discussion, and it turns out everybody succeeds by submitting to what the thing needs to be. Art, in my view, is a very elegant problem-solving model.”
—
You’ve probably seen this everywhere, and if you haven’t yet, make the time to read it.
a bright wall in a dark room.: Out of Sight (1998)
YOU’RE A BANK ROBBER. THAT’S NOT A VERY MARKETABLE SKILL.
by Taylor Long
For years, I considered my love for Out of Sight to be a “guilty pleasure,” but I’m not sure why. I don’t remember the first time I saw it – probably on a late night run on HBO, Encore, or Starz – but I know I…
Oh hey, I wrote this thing about a film that I love for a film site (and now magazine!) that I love.
For the record, you all gave fantastic suggestions for this. Thanks thanks thanks!
