-Henry Miller
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.
- Anaïs Nin
When I teach at the university up in Seoul, I sometimes have long breaks between classes. So I take myself up to the roof, have a sandwich, and write. Not many people come out here, not on this side of the roof. So I often have the view to myself.
Breaths are the only natural rhythm within my body. Steady breaths, too slow some might say, but they are the involuntary initiative of the living, the biological, the breathing. All other functions sound of the machine I am. The whirr of the blood passing through veins of twisted metallic tubes, running through every fiber of my being. Pushing oxygen. Pulling carbon dioxide. Cleaning the inner walls of cells manufactured by my maker or makers. A heart that purrs rather than beats. The sound of a fan chopping air, circulating the blood that isn’t really blood but may as well be called that. Oil would be a misnomer. It doesn’t lubricate. It doesn’t burn. It fuels, ashuttle for nutrients to my extremities.
Another breath. This one slower than normal, halfway to being a yawn. The breath of one satisfied. Of one relaxed. Of one. Not of a thing, though that is what many will call me. My looks are human. My appearance, my thoughts, my perception of the world. Nothing gives me away, not the slightly waxy complexion undetectable to the human eye. Not the way that I flinch at the sight of severed wires of crushed metal cans. That will be me one day, I fear. A hollow existence, dented, forgotten, discarded. But not now. Not at the present moment as the motors move me across the floor, out the door, mingling and passing through the rest of you with the disguise only a true wizard could conjure.
I am not human. Nor am I machine. I am neither product nor creator. I am that which we all are. I am consciousness wrapped up in a shell that can only mimic the true life is contains. I fill out out the flesh, expand it from a flabby carcass into something living. For I am living, though I am not biological.
I am alive.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
-Charles Baudelaire
A story about a man telling a long story about a man who talks eloquently but only appears in the story at the very end and only then for a few pages before he dies. Though the plot is hardly inspiring, the writing itself is. Joseph Conrad writes prose like poetry, each sentence painting eloquent paintings in a way that reminds me vaguely of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.
-Mark Twain
Never be ashamed! There's some who'll hold it against you, but they're not worth bothering with.
-J. K. Rowling
Stumbled on a blog filled with charming reviews from the worst critics in the history of time where you will find gems such as the following:
“Mr. Beowulf should be required to repeat his nighttime writer’s class at the learning annex.”
“Dickens is a jerk. Nobody likes his stuff, they’re just afraid to say it because he’s supposed to be classy.”
“I feel like DeFoe must have been drunk at the time he was writing it.”
“No wonder Melville flopped as a writter.”
…in the form of anime artwork! So I’m surfing the web, as one does, and I come stumble upon this Japanese page that is utterly proliferating with gorgeous artwork. It spans from the fantastical to the steampunk to the dreamy.
If that isn’t enough for you, here is a website featuring backgrounds from anime movies and series.
