Producing, Generating, Making

I once added a P.S. to a post card with a poem of mine:

An excerpt from a series of poems from the uncanny valley between obviously too bad to be meant seriously and just bad but respectable.

DFW, The Depressed person, BIwHM

The word “pathetic”, the therapist candidly shared, often felt to her like a defense-mechanism the depressed person used to protect herself against a listener’s possible negative judgements by making it clear that the depressed person was already judging herself far more severely than any listener could possibly have the heart to.

DFW, ‘Pop Quiz 9’, BIwHM

There are right and fruitful ways to try to ’empathize’ with the reader, but having to try to imagine yourself as the reader is not one of them; in fact it’s perilously close to the dreaded trap of trying to anticipate whether the reader will ’like’ something you’re working on, and both you and the very few other fiction writers you’re friends with know that there is no quicker way to tie yourself in knots and kill any human urgency in the thing you’re working on that to try to calculate ahead of time whether that thing will be ’liked’.

Plus of course it almost always turns out that the people at the party actually didn’t like you, for the simple reason that you seemed so invent and self-conscious the whole time that they got the creepy subliminal feeling that you were using the party merely as some sort of stage to perform on and that you barely even noticed them and that you’d probably left without any idea whether you even liked them or not, which hurts their feelings and causes them to dislike you […]

Nick Cave, Sean O’Hagan, Faith, hope and carnage

Yes, otherwise the false line, the meaningless line, will always ambush you when singing it live.

It’s about having a deep understanding of what you’re doing but, at the same time, being free enough to let the chips fall where they may. It’s about preparation, but it’s also about letting things happen.

David Bayles & Ted Orland - Art & Fear

What is natural and what is beautiful are, in their purest state, indistinguishable. Could you improve upon the Circle?

For most artists, making good art depends upon making lots of art and any ddevice that carries the first brushstroke to the next blank canvas has tangible, practical value.

[…] J.S. Bach committed to writing a prelude and fugue in each of the twenty-four keys […]

Fears about artmaking fall into two families: fears about yourself, and fears about your reception by others. In a general way, fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing hour own work.

This NYT article claims that Leonard Cohen has written up to 180 verses for his masterpiece ‘Hallelujah’. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/30/movies/hallelujah-leonard-cohen-a-journey-a-song-review.html

Relevant blog post: https://swapnilchauhan.com/blog/procrastination-and-the-fear-of-not-being-good-enough