Poet Patricia Lockwood offers ideas on how to keep writing in the unstable, toxic, distracting times we live in.
creativity
Posted inArts & Culture, Current Events, Nonfiction, Quotes
A Portrait of the Artist as a Monster
Does art exist in the world of personality and petty grievance and predation, or does it float in a morally-neutral ether? Depends who you ask.
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Quotes, Science & Nature
Mothering Is Not the Enemy of Creative Work
Journalist Erika Hayasaki uses science to show how motherhood can improve creativity.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Putting Creativity on Your Tab
Dropping acid at the office? Everybody’s doing it.
Posted inArts & Culture, Business & Tech, Nonfiction, Quotes
Why Don’t You Just Get One of Those Creative Jobs?
At The Paris Review, writer and creative director Glenn O’Brien narrates the comic struggle of artists who decide to go into advertising.
Posted inNonfiction
Borges and $: The Parable of the Literary Master and the Coin
Thirty years ago, the world lost a great literary mind—the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Today, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens revisits the financial conditions that produced this life of pure literature, finding unexpected hope in the darkest period of Borges’ forgotten past.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
‘The World Is Full of Obvious Things’: A Sherlock Holmes Reading List
Sherlock Holmes feels uncannily contemporary these days — from his dizzying array of post-hipsterish quirks (Cocaine user! Virtuosic violin player! Exotic tobacco aficionado!) to a social aloofness that feels straight out of a Millennial INTP‘s playbook. (His knack for Twitter-ready aphorisms doesn’t hurt, either.) I’ve been rereading Conan Doyle’s stories for almost 20 years, and the guy has never felt more fresh.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Fight Club of Motivational Books
The professional cannot take rejection personally because to do so reinforces Resistance. Editors are not the enemy; critics are not the enemy. Resistance is the enemy. The battle is inside our own heads. We cannot let external criticism, even if it’s true, fortify our internal foe. The foe is strong enough already. A professional schools […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Loneliness and Isolation: Necessary Ingredients of Creativity?
(Vincent) Van Gogh likely had a cadre of mental issues, none of which were suitably diagnosed while he was alive. Yet what seemed to weigh heaviest on him was the inevitability of his loneliness. According to his letters to Theo, he felt he had one of two options: content himself with loneliness or try to […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Old Music Industry: ‘A System Specifically Engineered to Waste the Band’s Money’
During the 90s there was something of an arms race to see who could write the biggest deal. That is, the deal with the most money being spent on the band’s behalf. In a singularly painless contest the money would either be paid to the band as a royalty, which would take that money out […]