Andy Warhol: Self-portrait in Drag, 1981.
From
The 10 best … photographic self-portraits
A documentary of Nine Inch Nails’ 1994-1996 “Self Destruct” tour, including concert and behind-the-scenes footage. Part one of the 1997 “Closure” VHS. Includes NSFW content.
Now on Tumblr: Nine Inch Nails and How to Destroy Angels
Saw this concert my sophomore year in high school. Twas my very first concert ever!
COMING SOON!
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
Anaïs Nin, born on this day in 1903, on why emotional excess is essential to creativity (via explore-blog)
A deep, early love of poetry should be mandatory for all writers.
Most of us are full up with bad stories, boring stories, self-indulgent stories, searing works of unendurable melodrama. We must get all of them our of our system in order to find the good stories that may or may not exist in the fresh water underneath.
You don’t step out of the stream of your life to do your work.
Novel writing, I soon discovered, is like channel swimming: a slow and steady stroke over a long distance in a cold, dark sea.
The ability to write and the ability to teach are not the same, and while I’ve known plenty of people who could do both, there are also plenty of people who can do only one or the other, and plenty who do both who should be doing neither.
Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of “The Collected Stories” by Grace Paley.
If we could learn everything we needed to know about writing fiction by seeing it masterfully executed, we could just stay in bed and read Chekhov.The answer to how important a master of fine arts degree is to becoming a fiction writer is, of course, not at all.
No one should ever go into debt to study creative writing.
If you wind up boring yourself, you can pretty much bank on the fact that you’re going to bore your reader.
As far as I’m concerned, writer’s block is a myth.
Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it.
Lessons on writing from Ann Patchett, adding to our ongoing archive of writerly advice.
Also see advice from Kurt Vonnegut, H. P. Lovecraft, Neil Gaiman, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Zadie Smith, David Ogilvy, Margaret Atwood, John Steinbeck, and Isabel Allende.
(via explore-blog)
How I learned to stop worrying, and love failure
I was inspired to write this post today because of Shane’s guest blog called Start:
One of the loudest voices in my head, the real dick of all the voices, likes to tell me that what I’m making won’t be perfect. It’s an impossible standard to live up to,…
1 Dont rape
2 Dont be prejudice
3 Dont be sexist
4 Love your children
5 Love your neighbor
6 Love yourself
Dont let your opinions obstruct the aforementioned list.
Life advice from Kurt Cobain, born on this day in 1967, from his journals
Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
Open-access champion Aaron Swartz, who took his own life last month, adds to the ongoing case for the usefulness of useless knowledge. (via explore-blog)
