March 2014
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When I was a clown, I put up ads on Craigslist and boards one neighborhood over, where more toddlers lived, and I started getting calls. My deal was I’d show up with balloons, facepaint, already dressed -- this was important, I was the clown at the door not the lady who turned into one -- and then I charged by the hour. I loved it. I felt like a superhero whose comic hadn’t come out yet.
by
Mairead Case
Peter Drake: "As far as the fame and success dynamic is concerned, I think it may be getting worse. I believe that there are many more ways to survive and build a healthy and happy creative life now than there have ever been, but I think most people's notion of success is seen as fame. There is also so much money being spent inside of a collusive circle of investors at the highest end of the marketplace and very little of it trickles down to emerging or mid-career artists. Artists who are not a part of that system are barely seen as significant. Still if this book proves anything, it is that the life of an artist is varied, rich and very deeply experiential."
by
Danielle Sherrod
"Certainly an inspiration for the first novel was a book of Joseph Roth's brilliant essays on Berlin, written in the 1920s and the deepening shadows of the early '30s; although he was writing about what he observed around him, they of course reveal a great deal of the author himself. The same could be said of Robert Walser's and Walter Benjamin's Berlin. The more infused a city's portrait is with the author's own spirit, the better. There's of course a whole modernist tradition exploring the relationship between self and city. When you're writing about a city you're both there and not there; you inhabit it fully yet at the same time maintain the necessary degree of detachment for observation and contemplation. It's more of an ongoing dialogue with oneself than with others."
by
Carlos Fonesca Suárez
"Living doesn't get serious, which is to say seriously rich, until one understands entropy is a process that is always-already happening, not just in, say, the galaxies, but also in your mitochondria. Understanding (not just knowing) that changes everything. It's the most beautiful and alarming and revitalizing and hideous and liberating and imprisoning thought a human being can have, and so she or he should have it at least two or three times a minute. When talking at length about travel and curiosity, it's a foregone conclusion I also have to talk at length about the hole-in-the-heart realization that -- echoing Beckett -- birth is the death of us. Otherwise, the ideas of travel and curiosity would have no immediacy, no currently."
by
Alissa Nutting
"In the medieval period, people would refer to what we now call perverse sex as "unnatural sex," meaning it was against the laws of nature and the natural laws of God. Later it became known as "deviant," "abnormal" and a host of other titles. Not only does the phrase change over time but the type of sex acts included in the categories change as well. For example, homosexuality used to be seen as acceptable in ancient Greece, became a sin and a capital offense in the medieval period, and in the modern period today is acceptable enough for same-sex people to marry in many countries. Perversity is mutable. People's views have changed so dramatically over time that there is really very little we can still call perverse."
by
Danielle Sherrod