Finding a Language in which Making Art is Possible At All

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Donald Barthelme, Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews

The problems that seem to me to define the writer’s task at this moment (to the extent that he has chosen them as his problems) are not of a kind that make for ease of communication, for work that rushes toward the reader with outflung arms — rather, they’re the reverse. Let me cite three such difficulties that I take to be important, all having to do with language. First, there is art’s own project … of restoring freshness to a much-handled language, essentially an effort toward finding a language in which making art is possible at all.

Britain At Its Finest

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Will Coldwell, “Throwback Thursday: On Holiday in the 1980s – In Pictures,” The Guardian 3 April 2014

Caption: A photo that captures Britain at its finest: “That’s my stepdad rocking the sandals-and-socks combo,” says the reader who submitted it. “I’m wearing a Royal Wedding T-shirt showing Charles and Diana in punk attire.” Photograph: gallix/GuardianWitness

This is a picture of me (right) and Allen taken by my mum in Jersey, July 1981. When it featured on the Guardian‘s home page, they added a “How to wear socks with sandals” fashion piece just above!

There Are Only Realists

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“That’s what’s curious when people say, of writers, This one’s a realist, this one’s a surrealist, this one’s a super-realist, and so forth. In fact, everybody’s a realist offering true accounts of the activity of mind. There are only realists.”
– Donald Barthelme, “The Art of Fiction N° 66” by J.D. O’Hara, The Paris Review 80 (Summer 1981)

Leaving the 20th Century

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“What We Wore by” by Jesse Barron, i-D Magazine 2O December 2013

punktwins

What We Wore by Nina Manandhar

From the Clapham Soul Heads and the Anarcho Punks in Dreamland to the Spliffy-Chicks and Teenage Shoegazers, British subculture and street style from 1950 to 2010 has been one of the most thriving, varied and crazy anywhere in the world. In What We Wore, photographer Nina Manandhar invited fashion, music and art stars including Dizzee Rascal, Carrie Munden and Alasdair McLellan as well as the general public to submit photos from their youth with explanations of their life and style. The result is an eye-grabbing melange of young twin punks, bleach blonde boys and photo collages of kids in visors and hoodies with ‘WHERE MY DOGS AT???’ cut ‘n’ pasted along the top. Instagram your own with #whatweworeuk or submit at submit@what-we-wore.com and see the top picks in Autumn 2014 when What We Wore, which will be published by Prestel, will be on shelves.

Everythingitis

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Will Self, “The Selfish Gene” by Elizabeth Day, The Observer (“The New Review” section) 5 August 2013: 9

Does he ever get writer’s block?

“No. I get what I call ‘everythingitis’… where I get obsessed with the idea that everything has to be in the book.”

Will Self, “Five Minutes With: Will Self” by Matthew Stadlen, BBC News 2 February 2013

Well the book has to be in some way a kind of synecdoche of the entire world. …You get this creeping feeling that everything has to be in it, so you’re wandering around the streets and you see a plastic comb lying in the gutter and you think, “Have I got plastic combs in the book?” … and then you hear somebody refer to President Mobuto of Zaire and you think, “Is President Mobuto in the book?” and eventually it becomes this affliction called everything-itis.

Very, Very Quiet

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Deborah Levy, Interview by Mariella Frostrup, Open Book, BBC Radio 4 30 January 2014

Deborah Levy: After my father was arrested — along with Nelson Mandela and other family friends, who were fighting for human rights in the Apartheid era — I kept being asked to speak up at school. Speak louder, speaker louder — I was asked to repeat things all the time.

Mariella Frostrup: And that hadn’t happened before…

Deborah Levy: No. And so it wasn’t really that I’d become mute; I’d become very, very quiet. And I don’t think I wanted to speak — I was probably frightened about what my voice might sound like, because I was very sad. So, one day, in the playground, the school bully — who was a very tough Afrikaans girl, with white pointy teeth — asked me with uncharacteristic pity in her voice, “Are you dumb?” And I kind of shrugged because it wasn’t a yes or no answer. I was beginning to discover the power of silence, and I began to realise that what we don’t say is what really interests people. And that was an insight I was going to put to work later as a writer.