Tell me about where you live

Shat in a bush on China beach while looking at the golden gate bridge, pondering about how jumpers either choose the side facing the city if they're sad to go, facing the dark Pacific if they're glad to go
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Shat in a bush on China beach while looking at the golden gate bridge, pondering about how jumpers either choose the side facing the city if they're sad to go, facing the dark Pacific if they're glad to go

Dark shit, man.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
I thought it was Nash, but it's Eric Ravilious

Here's another one

Ravilious-Wilmington-Giant.jpg

well crikey that's weird because i'd never heard of Ravilious until today and that was just a couple of hours ago when i read a few pages from Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane, a section about the landscape / Nature writer Peter Davidson - who wrote a poem about Ravilious and was obsessed with his death / disappearance during WW2.

the first painting especially is really great
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
I like to walk up the hill, the HGVs hurtling towards you at 40 miles per hour, the road bending, all that weight and speed tilted towards you.

Today I was up at the Point, a little piece of parkland, with caves carved into rock beneath it, and one of the best views in all of London. I saw the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen. I was in tears. It was too beautiful to be real but too vivid to be a dream.

I remember in Autumn walking through the park in this great sweeping world of yellow. Caught up in all this glorious yellow.

One of the weird things about living is the uncomfortable relationship you get into with the people in the local corner shop. They know too much about you. Have seen you in too many different states.

This is why I find your disdain for the prose of Don Dellilo so hard to comprehend. Those sentences could've been ripped from one of his novels. Not just the style but the mode of perception, ie abstracting transient experience into something with greater, maybe sublime or cosmic, significance.
 

luka

Well-known member
This is why I find your disdain for the prose of Don Dellilo so hard to comprehend. Those sentences could've been ripped from one of his novels. Not just the style but the mode of perception, ie abstracting transient experience into something with greater, maybe sublime or cosmic, significance.

That sounds like a pretty good reason in itself. But maybe it also tells me to try and write a novel in the prose style I use to make forum posts. You might be on to something. I might have been trying too hard.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
But maybe it also tells me to try and write a novel in the prose style I use to make forum posts. You might be on to something.

Absolutely. Great writing can and should emerge from a community with a shared language and sensibility, not some loner just grinding and pouring every accumulated bit of knowledge and life experience until they just burn out. In fact, I suspect more than one great novel has been the result of a conspiracy or brain trust of writers delegating responsibilities to specialists (one handles dialogue for example, one big picture plotting and outlining, one for names of people/places, etc.) Each episode of Saturday Night Live requires 20+ writers, most big budget films employ hundreds (of people, to clarify, maybe thousands in the case of a Marvel film), so why should the novel require only one or two real contributors, working on $0 budget?
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Absolutely. Great writing can and should emerge from a community with a shared language and sensibility, not some loner just grinding and pouring every accumulated bit of knowledge and life experience until they just burn out. In fact, I suspect more than one great novel has been the result of a conspiracy or brain trust of writers delegating responsibilities to specialists (one handles dialogue for example, one big picture plotting and outlining, one for names of people/places, etc.) Each episode of Saturday Night Live requires 20+ writers, most big budget films employ hundreds (of people, to clarify, maybe thousands in the case of a Marvel film), so why should the novel require only one or two real contributors, working on $0 budget?

Assuming this isn't already happening it's a great idea

This is how pop songs are made these days too

I've often fantasised about tossing off a megaselling thriller. Not sure if it's easier fantasised about than done or if its just that nobody who's fantastised about it has actually bothered to write one.
 
so why should the novel require only one or two real contributors, working on $0 budget?

Because, while many do not, some people certainly do have sufficient talent and imagination to write great novels?
What you're suggesting sounds like a great excuse not to write until you've assembled a team. Resistance. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield explores this.

I doubt any really great novel is anything less than the singular vision of one author, though there will be an annoying exception, no doubt.
 

droid

Well-known member
I have a fictional writing project that would benefit hugely from specialised musical knowledge - it seems to expand the more work I do and has been racing away from me for years... might revisit here later in the year when i'm not being flayed alive by other commitments.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Quite a number of novels have been written by two people and some by more (eg Luther Blissett) but I dunno about huge teams of hundreds.
 

version

Well-known member
I was thinking about doing a countryside thread. I love hills and that. Rivers. Trees. Fucking absolutely love them.

Trees, now--Slothrop's intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what's happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop's family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. "That's really insane." He shakes his head. "There's insanity in my family." He looks up. The trees are still. They know he's there. They probably also know what he's thinking. "I'm sorry," he tells them. "I can't do anything about those people, they're all out of my reach. What can I do?" A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, "Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn't being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That's what you can do."
 

luka

Well-known member
Trees, now--Slothrop's intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comes in among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sitting very quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life, aware of what's happening around it, not just some hunk of wood to be cut down. Slothrop's family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper. "That's really insane." He shakes his head. "There's insanity in my family." He looks up. The trees are still. They know he's there. They probably also know what he's thinking. "I'm sorry," he tells them. "I can't do anything about those people, they're all out of my reach. What can I do?" A medium-size pine nearby nods its top and suggests, "Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn't being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That's what you can do."

I don't know if you know but Rilke was initiated by a tree. I had an almost identical experience with a plant.
 
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