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The point is that I need things to look and be a certain way in order to get into the full creative spirit. Wagner had to wear silk robes and work in a room with heavy drapes to keep a lot of the sunlight out, while Shostakovich could, and did, work in the middle of chaos like the German assault on Leningrad. I can crank out words and music in the middle of unpropitious circumstances if need be, but I prefer to have a work space and work environment that are creation-ready, and little totems nearby to help: Hot black coffee in an interesting mug, sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga pencils (HB2), cream-colored lined paper (I like Archives 18-stave orchestral book), my green-marble Waterman fountain pen nearby to ink things I’m going to keep.

- Greg Stepanich

“Land [founder of Polaroid] nurtured an idealistic vision of photography. He dreamed of a camera that would release the artist in everyone. ‘‘My basic faith,’ Land wrote, ‘is in the random competence of people in all walks of life, at any level of income, of any derivation. There is a common sense of beauty and of manual aptitudes.’”

- Phil Patton, on Polaroid’s announcement it would close its U.S. factories making instant film

“Let us open up our doors for writers the way that so many, not only in Brooklyn but across the country, have done for musicians (check out www.dodiyusa.org for an idea). The internet and its social networking sites have made the promotion of independent arts events not only extremely easy but extremely cheap (if not altogether free). If we as readers become the curators of our own literary events, we take the power out of the hands of publicists and publishers with bookselling agendas, and create a more organic experience. Furthermore, by hosting readings and performances outside of bars, we open doors to the under-21 crowd, which has a great literary energy but little access to events outside of the undergrad sphere.”

- Bryan Miltenberg at The Millions

“So, apropos of practically nothing (and not with a bang but a whimper) I tossed in a quotation from “The Waste Land.” That, I thought, will show him I’ve read a thing or two besides my press notices from Vaudeville.

Eliot smiled faintly — as though to say he was thoroughly familiar with his poems and didn’t need me to recite them. So I took a whack at “King Lear”…
That too failed to bowl over the poet. He seemed more interested in discussing “Animal Crackers” and “A Night at the Opera.” He quoted a joke – one of mine – that I had long since forgotten. Now it was my turn to smile faintly…

– Groucho Marx on his dinner with T.S. Eliot, quoted at Today in Literature

“I jumped at the chance to see him in concert, and managed to squeeze into the fifth row of the packed nightclub to gaze up at his thick hands laying that pulsing tremolo over those Bo Diddley chords on that beautiful box-shaped guitar. Bo Diddley was pretty old in 1987, but he wasn’t too old to snarl his lyrics, or to enjoy himself.”

- Levi Asher on Bo Diddley

“Miroslav Holub once said that when things were really bad in Eastern Europe, ‘it is a very poetic situation.’ It is a terrible thing to say, but Joseph [Brodsky] was blessed with ‘a very poetic situation.’ No American poet has had the opportunity to enjoy such terrible historical circumstances.”

- William Wadsworth interviewed by Valentina Polukhina at Words Without Borders

“My first ever review for that prestigious organ was due to appear and I was beside myself with glee and anticipation.

I grabbed the paper, flung the correct change at the newsagent, and opened the paper. There it was. My review. In glorious black and white type. And — wait a minute! what’s this? — credited to the poet Anthony Thwaite. I was gutted! Floored! And me poor mother … well, I doubt she’ll ever recover.”

- Mark Thwaite

“Next thing you know, Dunkin’ Donuts will be selling a Big Black compilation entitled Songs About Dunkin’.”

- Jeff Gomez

“The ‘marketing’ crisis is a failure of capitalism, yet another example of its increasingly crude, bottom-line mentality, with the marketing of books now being outsourced to the writers themselves. Should we cheerfully give in to this?

- Dan Green (and be sure to catch the ever lively comments to Dan’s post)

“The fact is, most newspapers no longer come close to providing much of interest to reading enthusiasts, because they haven’t a clue as to what they are interested in. Reading litblogs would help, but I suspect the world they would encounter there would seem alien to them. After all, what kind of people would prefer reading Shakespeare to reading David Broder? Nevertheless, that global network of book lovers is only going to grow and strengthen. Whatever the future of publishing may be, it is a future that will be inextricably bound up with that network.”

– Frank Wilson

“One thing Frank said that really resonated was how dull movies and television have become since blogging has taken hold…The active nature of reading and sharing thoughts on same via the blog, plus the lively exchange of commentary, is so engaging it renders the experience of passively sitting in front of a box or big screen, flat, dull, dead, and plain boring in comparison.”

– Nigel Beale

ed. I had the same thought last night as I relaxed by writing a blog post instead of watching a movie

“I have my doubts about the rest of the paper, but there are only a handful of arts sections in the world that can compete with this one.”

- Chad Post on the New York Sun

“One of the most important things that distinguish man from other animals is that man can get pleasure from drinking without being thirsty.”

- MA GASTRONOMIE

“Part of the tension felt right now, perhaps, is that blogging and the internet have allowed for enthusiasm to encroach upon the terrain of criticism at a time when the arts landscape itself seems to be shrinking. Ebert (and Scott in his praise for him), however, provide a useful reminder that audiences perhaps gravitate most towards unique voices that are able to offer both enthusiasm and criticism rather than attempt to demarcate the boundaries between the two.”

- Max Magee

“Paul Theroux is the kind of guy who travels to Malawi in a train and looks out the window and then writes about how the people outside all look very dumb and bored and unhappy and Malawi is an unhappy country… I think it’s utterly uninspiring, both as language and as perception… Günter Grass wrote a book about India, for example. I actually went through the book and counted how often he described shit. There are 289 mentions of shit in this small book. If you’re so obsessed with shit, there’s no need to go to India, just describe your own latrine—that would be just as representative of your neurosis. But if you are claiming to describe something out in the world, that’s another matter.”

- Ilija Trojanow quoted from Pen America 8 on the Pen America blog

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