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publicación de Vídeo reblogueada desde Fairytales of Life
What makes a great story?
For Ken Burns a great story is 1+1=3. A great story is a lie. A great story is everything and much more. In this short documentary he shares with us his experience in storytelling and his inspirations for creating great stories. More about the project you can find here on The Atlantic.
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Here’s an excerpt of the short story “New York Mining Disaster” by Haruki Murakami:
For me, on the other hand, it was the Year of Funerals. Friends and former friends died one after another, like ears of corn withering in a drought. I was twenty-eight. My friends were all about the same age — twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Not the right age to die.
A poet dies at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty-four. But after that you assume that everything is going to be all right. You’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six-lane highway — whether you want to be or not. You get your hair cut; you shave every morning. You aren’t a poet anymore, or a revolutionary or a rock star. You don’t pass out drunk in phone booths or blast the Doors at four in the morning. Instead, you buy life insurance from your friend’s company, drink in hotel bars, and keep your dental bills for medical deductions. That’s normal at twenty-eight.
Murakami says in his prologue for the short story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: “Essentially I consider myself a novelist, but a lot of people tell me they prefer my short stories to my novels. That doesn’t bother me, and I don’t try to convince them otherwise. I’m actually happy to hear them say that. My short stories are like soft shadows I’ve set out in the world, faint footprints I’ve left behind. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart, and it makes me happy as a writer to be able to share these intimate feelings with my readers.”
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“Aliens, love… Where are they?” by talented John Hodgman. So funny and beautiful.
“Even in my own life, there are memories I have that are difficult to explain — happenings that are so odd and unaccountably weird, that it is difficult to imagine they were not the result of prolonged and frequent contact with aliens throughout my life.”
John Hodgman
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publicación de Foto reblogueada desde smileypants
HERE IS SOME HELPFUL ADVICE FOR THE CRIMINAL ELEMENT, FROM MARK TWAIN.
To the next Burglar.
There is nothing but plated ware in this house, now and henceforth. You will find it in that brass thing in the dining-room over in the corner by the basket of kittens. If you want the basket, put the kittens in the brass thing. Do not make a noise — it disturbs the family. You will find rubbers in the front hall, by that thing which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonier, I think they call it, or pergola, or something like that.
Please close the door when you go away!
Very truly yours,
S.L. Clemens
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publicación de Foto reblogueada desde book pickings
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Jonathan Gottschall
“Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.”
Educator and science writer Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively. What emerges is a kind of “unified theory of storytelling,” revealing not only our gift for manufacturing truthiness in the narratives we tell ourselves and others, but also the remarkable capacity of stories — the right kinds of them — to change our shared experience for the better.
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publicación de Foto reblogueada desde "The whole world is moving & I'm standing still.."
(Fuente: what-about-the-beatles)
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Image: Haruki Murakami by Brigitte Friedrich, 2007.
I have been lucky enough to get “Sputnik Sweetheart”, by Haruki Murakami, for my recent birthday. I had not read him for quite a long time and I felt like revisiting an old friend when I read the opening lines:
“In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains - flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado’s intensity doesn’t abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions.”
Also, I found this short video in which Murakami sets out the things that helped him as a child without siblings: “the cats, the books and the music”. He also describes how music helps him write.
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“If you give it good concentration, good energy, good heart and good performance, the song will play you.”
Levon Helm
Thank you, Levon.
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“But in the morning he appeared at breakfast at the usual hour, and took his usual place at the table. Aged and bent he looked, and quite bowed down; and yet he looked a wiser man, and a better man, than in the days when in this life he wanted nothing - but Facts.”
“Hard Times”, Charles Dickens
Image: Word cloud about Dickens’ “Hard Times” by The English Department of St Columba’s College in Dublin. They have created “seven word-clouds formed from the entire texts of Charles Dickens’ most famous fiction” by using this fun toy for generating word clouds: Wordle.
