miss misc misery________12 December, 2011
so long, new jersey. you’ve been good to me (for the most part).
ethan feuer // new work
so long, new jersey. you’ve been good to me (for the most part).
these are some of my new (old) rules for existence. also known as ‘make more things, like yourself, like other people’. right click and ‘open in new tab’ to view images at a higher resolution.
these days i’m doing a lot of reading and a lot of writing. in the months before i head back to europe, i’ve set it as my goal to get at least one manuscript written and hopefully a second started. by the time i come back, i will have twenty or thirty pages drawn, inked, etc in addition to a complete draft text. armed with these, the idea is to convince a publisher who, in the words of neil gaiman, “publishes the kind of stuff [you] write” to, um, publish the stuff i write. if possible, i’ll have previews for both novels, but i’m going to focus on one (the older one) for now.
when i’m not writing (the other 16ish hours of the day), i’ve been chipping away at several different books. i reread twain’s huckleberry finn and have made various piecemeal inroads on john gardner’s very-nearly-but-not-quite-insufferably-pretentious on becoming a novelist and as well on janet burroway’s guide to narrative craft which is a little bit more to the point than either gardner or dorothea brande. instead of brande, i’m getting my 19th century on with good ol’ leo tolstoy, whose anna karenina has somehow actually managed to live up to its hype. one of my favorite passages is reproduced below. it’s not that i find barbs like this, which appear on virtually every page, representative of the degree of hyperrealism he’s often accused of–it’s more that i think they’re incredibly deft instances of characterization. he’s like the guys in the 1950s who handled uranium isotopes through all these long, spindly tools. only he never dropped it. the passage:
“He saw out of the window how she went up to her brother, put her arm in his, and began telling him something eagerly, obviously something that had nothing to do with him, Vronsky, and at that he felt annoyed.”
next up on the reading list are nabokov’s lolita, david mitchell’s cloud atlas, something by chekhov because they were clearly badasses, and that stupid copy of ghost world that i managed to acquire despite my feelings toward daniel clowes. and goodbye, chunky rice. and also good-bye.
hey there true believers,
i can’t believe how long it’s been since i’ve put anything up–sorry about that! anyways, i have a good reason: i was on vacation! at the end of school, i took a trip via eurail to the netherlands (that mecca of modern architecture), denmark, norway (fjords!) and then back south to paris via göteborg and berlin. what a blast! anyway, i took roundabouts 900 pictures over the course of those three weeks, so prepare yourselves for a torrent of photo goodness shortly. in the meantime, i’d like to take this opportunity to put up some overdue photos from other sights and events that happened here in paris. the first, attached to this post, was a show that myself, nick, brian, MJ, sohael, and lyon went to a couple of weeks ago. it was held under a bridge crossing the river seine (pont alexandre iii, to be exact), which was a fairly awesome venue. i got some pretty eccentric (and in some cases enjoyable) results from the dark conditions and extremely saturated lighting. next up, la défense!