Erica Lorraine Scheidt's Blog, page 9

Nina Poppe via Horse Hunting

As an artist so much of one does is based on faith - in a belief that exceed or ignores society's interest. Roni Horn in a 2006 Keynote to the Graduating Class of the Iceland Academy of ArtsRoni Horn, Still Water (The River Thames for Example), 1999

And here's the cover, designed by Elsie Lyons at St. Martin's Press with photography by Tess Kongteattikul. I love Tess's work which reminds me of another favorite photographer, Olivia Bee. More about the book (January 2013) here and here.

...and our memories of the story are action-based; it burns in our mind as a shining scene with silverware and spilled wine, but the percentage of action lines might be really low. So the goal might be to cut out as much action as you can but keep the image-burn effect of something was happening. Ben JahnPhoto: Memory Lake by We are Bandits

Two close friends blurbed my first novel. I am forever in their debt, and I found the whole process a bit humiliating. No strangers were willing to blurb me on the strength of the book itself, and my editor asked many people, far and wide. The whole thing made me feel jaundiced and annoyed.

My later books were beautifully blurbed by a several generous fellow writers I barely knew—people I now adore and feel indebted to, although I still barely know them.

I happily, freely offer and write blurbs for everyone I know or sort of know or who know people I know, and even people I don't know if I like their books, which, come to think of it, disproves my assumption that all blurbs are personal. I write blurbs for books I like and people I like. Kate Christensen in an interview with The Awl

Painting: The Lantern Parade by Thomas Cooper Gotch via Books vs. Cigarettes

Simon likes to record things that do not officially exist, did not happen, and cannot be seen. Others who possess this urge generally write fiction. Simon sets out to photograph the impossible and the forbidden: posing the unjustly convicted at the scene of crimes they never committed for "The Innocents," her breakout show at MoMA PS1 in 2003; capturing the braille edition of Playboy magazine, the CIA's art collection, and a repository of nuclear waste in "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar," her 2007 one-woman show at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and documenting every prohibited ­curiosity, counterfeit handbag, and drug confiscated from passenger luggage at JFK Airport in the space of five sleepless days and nights for "Contraband," exhibited at Manhattan's Lever House in 2010. Taryn Simon in W MagazinePhoto of the artist by Rineke Dijkstra for W Magazine

Everything must not be fussed over. Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: "He opened the door." There, it's open. Amy Hempel, the Art of Fiction, No. 176 in the Paris ReviewPhoto: wall of my studio at Headlands

One is prepared for friendship, not for friends. And sometimes not even for friendship, but at least we try: usually we flail in the darkness, a darkness that`s not foreign to us, a darkness that comes from inside us and meshes with a purely external reality, with the darkness of certain gestures, certain shadows that we once thought were familiar and that in fact are as strange as a dinosaur.

Sometimes that`s what a friend is: the distant shape of a dinosaur crossing a swamp, a dinosaur that we can`t grab or call or warn of anything. Friends are strange: they disappear. They`re very strange: sometimes, after many years, they turn up again and although most have nothing to say to us anymore, some do, and they say it. Excerpt from "Friends are strange", in Between Parentheses by Roberto Bolaño. New Directions. 2011.p.135 via Sparks and KicksShirt: Margaret Howell at Creatures of Comfort

First this:

There is this German word,Lohmaunsheit, which describes a certain ambivalent kind of affection one may feel with particular others, be the acquaintanceship friendly or romantic - do I want to be with you, or do I want to be you? At its core it is the instinct that longs for being an entity, a closed circuit, that recognizes oneself in another but the other, whilst almost entirely alike, also possessing just a fractionmore of something unnamable but undeniably real and really lacking in oneself, just the missing bit to being a complete person. Lohmaunsheit is longing with equal force for both togetherness with and the annihilation of someone, because they are the same. That is fine so far, were it not for the appendix - per definitionLohmaunsheit is always unrequited. It is you as the external me and me knowing that to be true because the feeling is just too strong, yet you just not seeing it, and me knowing that this negates our mirroring on a fundamental level, but that impossibility seeming impossible in itself. That is its inherent tragedy.—Karolina Elyse Watson, Everything

And then this:

you guys. i'm sorry to announce that i made this whole thing up. i made up a german-sounding word and ascribed a random melancholic-pretty definition to it, made up a quote from a made up source by a made up author to describe it. i did it after i saw something similar about an icelandic word on my dash, and i thought to myself, "that's so cool, even though they could have made that word up, how would i know, but what does that matter", so i decided to try myself to see what happened. a bunch of likes and reblogs happened but nobody called me out on it and now i feel like a jerk because i'm writing this explanation unasked and because i mean i do think myself that it really doesn't matter if a word or whatever is "real" or not as long as it resonates with you and gives you something, which incidentally is also what i think about authenticity in pop culture, e.g. lana del rey, so in hindsight it makes no sense that i did this in the first place. the end. From Herzschrittmacher

Photo: Chateau Marmont by Gia Coppola for Lula