Memoir Manifesto by Deb Olin Unferth Guest editor Deb Olin Unferth offers insights into the art of the memoir and introduces the present and future stars of the genre. Photograph via Flickr by Alice Carrier Let’s have no more insults hurled at the memoir, shall we? A few years ago, when I began writing a memoir, I read piles of them to get a feel for the genre. In the final decades of the twentieth century, the autobiography transformed, as writers began to see the disadvantages of writing blanket summaries of their lives and comprehensive lists of events: the messiness involved in such a project, the inevitable incompleteness, the necessary lack of an arc (if one was going to be honest). Then we begin to see the pivotal classics, such as Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family (1982), Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life (1989), Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995). When Meakin Armstrong of Guernica brought up the possibility of my guest-editing a section, I immediately knew what I wanted to do: a section on innovative memoir.
William S. Burroughs on the Art of Cut-up Writing In late 1920, the Dadaist writer Tristan Tzara wrote "dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love," which included a section called "To Make a Dadaist Poem," and it gave these instructions: Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Decades later, the Beat writer William S. You can watch Burroughs demonstrating his cut-up technique above, and forever find this clip in our collection of Cultural Icons, which lets you see great writers, filmmakers, and thinkers talking in their own words. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Also consider following Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and sharing intelligent media with your friends. Related Content: Gus Van Sant Adapts William S. William S. William S.
Che cos'é la comunicazione multimediale - Nicola Amato Web Page Quando parliamo di multimedialità ci riferiamo alla compresenza e interazione di più mezzi di comunicazione in uno stesso supporto informativo. Si parla di contenuti multimediali , specie in ambito informatico, quando per comunicare un'informazione riguardo a qualcosa ci si avvale di molti media, diversi tra loro, quali possono essere le immagini in movimento di un video, le immagini statiche delle fotografie, la musica e il testo; i nuovi media insomma. Ad esempio, un' enciclopedia multimediale, come può essere la famosissima “Wikipedia” su Internet, a differenza di una normale enciclopedia cartacea, permette di associare ad ogni voce non solo la sua spiegazione testuale, ma anche fotografie, disegni esplicativi, filmati, suoni, commenti audio, etc. Concetti molto legati alla comunicazione multimediale sono quelli dell'interattività e dell'ipertestualità, che andremo a vedere nei prossimi paragrafi. Multimedialità e interattività Ma vediamo meglio di che cosa si tratta. Ipermedialità
Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” … …he admonished gravely. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.” This rule doesn’t require an explanation. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. Which Steinbeck covered.
'The Black Dog' by W. H. C. Pynchon The Dog, J. Laurent, 1874. From Archivo Ruiz Vernacci, Fototeca del IPCE, Madrid. by W. “And if a man shall meet the Black Dog once it shall be for joy; and if twice, it shall be for sorrow; and the third time he shall die.” In a corner of our country not far removed from two of its great cities, there is a low range of mountains, the hoary evidences of ancient volcanic action. The West Peak stands at an angle of the range. It was late in the spring of 18— that I visited West Peak for the first time. The old horse knew that he was bound for home and he took the road at a very good gait. And this is how I met the Black Dog the first time—for joy. I don’t know just how we came to do it. We talked till late that night, and, as the fire died down to a mass of glowing embers, he told me how he himself had twice seen a black dog upon the mountain, but he laughed at the legend, saying that he did not believe in omens unless they were lucky ones. “I did not believe it before. Transcriber’s note:
www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/burroughs-cutup.html In writing this chapter I have used what I call "the fold in" method that is I place a page of one text folded down the middle on a page of another text (my own or someone else's)--The composite text is read across half from one text and half from the other-- The resulting material is edited, re-arranged, and deleted as in any other form of composition--This chapter contains fold ins with the work of Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Paul Bowles, James Joyce, Michael Portman, Peter Weber, Fabrizio Mondadori, Jacques Stern, Evgeny Yevtushenko, some newspaper articles and of course my own work-- At a surrealist rally in the 1920's Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theatre. Andre Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut ups on the Freudian couch. In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random.
Scrivere per il web Anche nella comunicazione di impresa ogni strumento deve avere il suo linguaggio. Scrivere un discorso è diverso da scrivere una brochure. Scrivere il bilancio annuale della società è diverso da scrivere una presentazione o un documento tecnico. Ma nel caso della scrittura online è tutto molto più complicato, perché Internet si evolve in continuazione e non si fa in tempo ad elaborare non tanto delle regole quanto delle idee, che queste sono già superate. A lungo, la scrittura è stata la vera cenerentola di Internet, stretta da una parte dalla programmazione e dalla tecnica, dall'altra dal predominio della grafica. Eppure imparare a scrivere per il web è particolarmente importante e urgente.
H. P. Lovecraft’s Advice to Aspiring Writers, 1920 by Maria Popova “A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe’s will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.” “If there is a magic in story writing,” admonished Henry Miller, “and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.” And yet, famous advice on writing abounds. In January of 1920, iconic science fiction and fantasy author H. P. Much like Jennifer Egan did nearly a century later, Lovecraft stresses the vital osmosis between reading and writing: No aspiring author should content himself with a mere acquisition of technical rules. … All attempts at gaining literary polish must begin with judicious reading, and the learner must never cease to hold this phase uppermost. Lovecraft notes the equal importance of non-reading as intellectual choice:
Web Film & Video: Georges Perec - Récits d'Ellis Island, Part 1: Traces (1978-1980) Duration: 60 minutes Part 1: Traces Part 2: Mémoires, 60 min Produced by: Institut National d'Archives (INA) Written by: Georges Perec Directed by: Robert Bober Sound: Jean-Claude Brisson In 1978, Robert Bober and Georges Perec set out to in the search of traces of Ellis Island, that is, as Georges Perec put it, of "the very site of exile, the place of the absence of place, the non-place, the nowhere." They traveled to New York to film what was left of this "Golden Gate", nicknamed "the Island of Tears" by the immigrants. One of the objectives of the filmmaker and the writer was to gather testimonies of survivors who, as children, passed through Ellis Island. However, they also wanted to understand how and why they both felt that this place concerned them personally. Georges Perec in UbuWeb Sound
Larry Keenan - Beat Generation & Counter-Culture Photography Galleries Thanks to Larry Keenan's masterful photography, we are left with a visually potent view of the Beat Generation and beyond. Keenan's photo-documentation is necessary, for it captures many essential moments -- of Ginsberg, Whalen, Cassady, Corso, McClure, Dylan, and many others. Without Keenan's illustration of people and events that have already hooked us deeply, we would no doubt be struggling along empty-eyed, wondering where's the color, the depth, the light, and the angle of the Beats? We know their literature; we know something about their personal biographies. Yet equally (if not more) important is knowing what everything looked like. Keenan has transcended a few decades of American history and created a movie for us that is shot in still-frames, but which is alive and three-dimensional and momentous.
L’allegra confusione dei racconti Josh Rolnick, The Millions, Stati Uniti Non sono uno di quegli scrittori che hanno sempre voluto fare lo scrittore. Chiedetelo a mia madre: io volevo diventare un entomologo. “Allora”, disse l’agente, “i suoi racconti mi piacciono. Sta lavorando a un romanzo?”. Ero seduto nella prestigiosa Dey House, l’ottocentesca sede vittoriana dell’Iowa writers’ workshop, davanti a un agente letterario, il quinto o il sesto da quando ero arrivato ad Iowa City. Me l’aspettavo, quella domanda. No, pensai, guardandola dall’altra parte della scrivania, non ce l’ho un romanzo. Lei inarcò le sopracciglia: “Continua”. Tutto qui. Non sono, però, uno di quegli scrittori che hanno sempre voluto fare lo scrittore. Feci domanda per lavorare al Daily Targum, il giornale studentesco. Seduto da solo alle cinque di mattina con una merendina al cioccolato e una tazza di caffè amaro, aspettando l’arrivo dei quotidiani, cercavo di immaginare un futuro diverso. C’era una nuova opzione. Era un saggio convincente.