Pages to Pixels

Video – ‘The End of Publishing’

Christian Harder — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:08:54 +0000

View the video here.

I’m on a video binge right now. There are a lot of cool, appropriate videos out there for us literary inclined folks. Who’da thought?

This video is a little simplistic, but fairly interesting look into the modern world of the written word.I tend to agree with this video’s over all message; the younger generations are more interested in literature than they’re given credit for.

Hopefully interested above and beyond the likes of Twilight too.

God Save the Books, C. Harder

PAGES TO PIXELS HAS MOVED!!!!!

Christian Harder — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:57:50 +0000

This blog has moved to www.pagestopixels.com

You’ll find:
-updated theme
-ease of use
-RSS feeds
-Social communicativeness
-More interesting posts!

Jack London Quotes

Christian Harder — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:28:20 +0000

Jack London‘s To Build a Fire is one of my favorite short stories. It’s so bitter and even-handed. Of the Naturalist authors, Jack’s one of the best.

He’s got some interesting (and accurate) appraisals of life. I found some great quotes by him today, so check it out:

“I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself.”

“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well”

“Life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.”

I haven’t gotten quotes up here in a bit, so I’m happy about that. Hope everyone’s doing well. I’m trying to squeeze the last lazy juice out of my spring break melon.

God Save the Books,
C. Harder

Beats on Film – Pull my Daisy

Christian Harder — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:57:49 +0000

If you haven’t heard of it, check out Pull My Daisy. In this 26:13 minute film, Kerouac and Ginsberg show a typified depiction of the Beat generation.

The film tells a story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a bishop over for supper. However, the brakeman’s Beat-like friends crash the party, with comic results.

The movie’s form matches its content; it seems improvised and spontaneous, something that Beat literature is renowned for. Check it out, there is hardly any video footage of the famous Beats.

God Save the Books,

C. Harder

The House at Walden

Christian Harder — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:45:43 +0000

Thoreau's house at Walden. Photo credit goes to Tom Brosnahan.

In my wide-eyed high school days, nothing got me going more than Throeau, Whitman and the transcendentalists. I still regard Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a literary bible. I still certainly have an affinity for transcendentalists, so I couldn’t help but put this up.

It’s rare to see the places where writers actually worked. Especially ones predating the 20th century. Especially ones that the writer based their seminal works on. Anyway, I’m beating around the bush. Checkout Thoreau’s house at Walden.

For those of you who don’t know, Thoreau was one of the big three transcendentalist authors (Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau) who retired to a solitary pond (Walden) to reflect on the root certainties of life. His best-known work, named Walden after the pond, was set entirely in the solitude and grasp of Nature.

That’s why this house is so important. It’s the foundation for a great American classicist’s writings.

Hope everyone’s doing well. The summer weather is surely surely coming along slowly.

God Save the Books,
C. Harder

Poem of the Day – William Butler Yeats

Christian Harder — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:05:44 +0000

Recently, the poems of the day have been longer. Therefore, it’s appropriate to post one that’s short and to the point. I stumbled across this wonderful short today, and had to post it.

It’s amazing what Yeats does with 6 lines. His speaker is assertive, whimsical, and disillusioned, and it results in a wonderful vignette. Also, don’t ignore the use of rhyme. It’s classy these days to dismiss rhyme as archaic, but used correctly, it’s very powerful.

A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

-William Butler Yeats

God Save the Books,
C. Harder

Read this and become a Beat

Christian Harder — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:37:59 +0000

The following titles are Ginsberg’s suggested reading for his class, “Literary History of the Beat Generation”. He taught this class at Naropa Institute in 1974, and strongly believed that these titles were the essential makeup of all that is Beat.

Today’s readers love to constantly speculate and project their ideas about the Beats; that’s why having a Beat writer’s legitimate record of the essentials is interesting. This list is a roadmap to all converging elements and influences of the Beat generation that no one can argue with.

No more of the “I feel Kerouac’s frustration with society’s myopia”, or that “Ginsberg’s Howl is both externally literal and figurative,” shit.

In Ginsberg’s own words the list has:
“suggestions for a quick check-out & taste of antient scriveners whose works were reflected in Beat literary style as well as specific beat pages to dig into.”

Here are links to the original photocopies:
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3

Here are select titles from the reading list:

William Blake
Songs of Innocence and Experience, Thel
Sherwood Anderson
Hands

William S. Burroughs
Big Table, Naked Lunch

Neal Cassady
The First Third

Diane Di Prima
Revolutionary Letters:April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa, 4, 24, 31, 37, 38, 54, 62, 63

Emily Dickinson
I Died for Beauty, I Heard a Fly Buzz, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Success is Counted Sweetest

Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot, A Raw Youth

T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Pictures of the Gone World: 2, 10, 13, 17

Allen Ginsberg
Kaddish

John Clellon Holmes
Go, “The Great Rememberer”

John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Melancholy, Ode to Nightingale, Lines Supposedly Addressed to Fanny Brawne

Jack Kerouac
Mexico City Blues

Andrew Marvell
The Garden, To his Coy Mistress, The Bermudas, The Mower to the Glow Worms

John Milton
L’allegro and Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Sonnet on his Blindness

Edgar Allan Poe
Ulalume, Annabel Lee, The Raven, The Bells

Arthur Rimbaud
Drunken Boat, Season in Hell, Illuminations, letters

William Shakespeare
The Tempest, Sonnets, Hamlet, Songs

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mont Blanc, The Cloud, Skylark, Adonais, Ozymandias, Ode West Wind, Epipsychidion

Henry David Thoreau
How I Lived and What I Lived For from Walden

Walt Whitman
Song of Myself

William Butler Yeats
The Crazy Jane series, Sailing to Byzantium, The Second Coming, Among School Children

It’s especially interesting to note that Beat influences date back to 1605 with Milton. The classical roots of such a reactionary and revolutionary period of literature speak to the intricacies of literature’s progression.

God Save the Books,
C. Harder

Ron Smith on Poems.com

Christian Harder — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:05:33 +0000

Browsing around Poems.com, I found a recent interview with high school teacher and esteemed poet, Ron Smith. I was lucky enough to be under his tutelage while attending St. Christopher’s and thought I’d get this article out there.

He’s a wonderful poet that skillfully and effectively captures the southern aesthetic. For me, a Richmond native, his writing is reminiscent of my home and natal life. All you readers should check him out.

I’ll have one of his poems up very soon. Anyway, I’m on break now and hopefully I’ll have the newly designed and formatted blog up and running soon. Hope everyone’s doing well.

“My sense is that the cultural slippage of poetry and serious fiction generally continues. There are so many fine writers today who have such a paltry audience. It can be terribly disheartening. If only people knew what they were missing! So many more people have read Dan Brown’s Codethan have read Cormac McCarthy’s Road.”

Read the interview here.

God Save the Books,
C. Harder

Daily Musings

Christian Harder — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:42:38 +0000

It’s not that humans can directly find ultimate communion with nature- its not a relationship of communication or dialogue, but still one of fundamental importance. Humans are becoming more and more absorbed in the trappings of modernization, and as we do, we fall away from the basic nature of the world, which is something we need to be aware of to function to the fullest of our capability in our environment. We’ve created an artificial buffer between ourselves and our natural setting, and henceforth we become lost in artificial superficialities.

10 Great Quotes about Writing

Christian Harder — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:21:08 +0000

Another list. Hopefully a helpful one. A lot of writing and literature is mimetic.We are taught in schools and workshops that reading is an essential part of being a writer.

Because of this, we absorb and imitate what we read. As Anne Lamott noted in Bird by Bird, if her students read Hemmingway they wrote concisely, if they read Kerouac they wrote frenetically. It’s a natural human response to external input.

Granted, some of the finest work is not emulative. When writers break or reverse the ‘mold’, some of the finest literature is written. But imitation is not a bad practice, and it helps you gain a sense of what’s truly important: Your narrative voice.

Anyway, since we copy the writers we read, it’s apt to post some writer’s quotes about writing. That way we can all imitate them without having to actually read hundreds of pages. Time saver!

“The reason one writes isn’t the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say”.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

“For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.”
-Catherine D. Bowen

“There is more pleasure to building castles in the air than on the ground.”
-Edward Gibbon

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
-Ray Bradbury

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
-Sylvia Plath

“Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
-Mark Twain

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
-William Wordsworth

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
-Anton Chekhov

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

“21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind”
-Jack Kerouac

Just brushing the surface. Even a simple Google search will find you with more. It’s fun that writer’s quotes are so similar to their writing.

God Save the Books,
C. Harder