MORE SIMIC

"Seeing is determined not by the eye but by the clarity of my consciousness. Most of the time the eyes see nothing."

- Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller

PAXTON'S METHOD

Make 20 of them and pick the best one.

7 REECE MEWS

 

- Francis Bacon's studio photographed by Perry Ogden, 7 Reece Mews

PROCESS

"I sit down to write with a blank page and a blank mind. Wherever the organ of reality (the brain) wants to go I follow with the blue-pencil of consciousness. Poetry is sanity, full brain thinking, where the shape of the thought is more important than the particular thought. It is a way of mind more than a technique."

- Russell Edson

ON THE UNEMPLOYED

"His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research work has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed time-- inner time --which is the result of their unemployed state."

- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

WORKING

When you ask most people who they are, they define themselves by their jobs. "I'm a doctor." "I'm a radio announcer." "I'm a carpenter." If somebody asks me, I say, "I'm Nora Watson." At certain points in time I do things for a living. Right now I'm working for the institution. But not for long. I'd be lying to you if I told you I wasn't scared.

I have a few options. Given the market, I'm going to take the best job I can find. I really tried to play the game by the rules, and I think it's a hundred percent unadulterated bullshit. So I'm not likely to go back downtown and say, "Here I am. I'm very good, hire me."

You recognize yourself as a marginal person. As a person who can give only minimal assent to anything that is going on in this society: "I'm glad the electricity works." That's about it. What you have to find is your own niche that will allow you to keep feeding and clothing and sheltering yourself without getting downtown. (Laughs.) Because that's death. That's really where death is.

- Nora Watson, editor (age 28), from Studs Terkel's Working

MENTAL BLOCK

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."

 -Chuck Close

FIRST THING

"Just get something on the page, you have nothing to lose except your life, which you’re going to lose anyway. So get with it, enjoy this special moment that brings you to the writing table. Relax into the writing and enjoy the creative bowel movement, remembering all is lost anyway."

-Russell Edson