Andrei Codrescu: Google Kills Creativity

Poet, novelist, and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu recently delivered a lecture about art, the Internet, and his latest book, The Poetry Lesson (Princeton University Press, 2010), at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In this clip he talks about how Google is killing creativity and what Facebook is "really" all about.

Shelley Jackson: Skin

The "mortal work of art," as Shelley Jackson called her 2003 story "Skin," each word of which has been tatooed on the skin of over two thousand volunteers, has found new form in this clip. The author recently asked her original volunteers to record a video of their word tattoo. She then edited the word videos together to create a new story for the Berkeley Art Museum.

Pat Conroy

In this clip, produced by Open Road Media, novelist Pat Conroy talks about his early years as the eldest of seven children raised in a strict military household in Beaufort, South Carolina. "I was making up stories about my life at a very early age," says the author of The Prince of Tides and The Lords of Discipline. "I was writing fiction long before I knew I was writing fiction."

Robot (Kafka) Love

In this clip by Seth Weiner, a robot re-enacts the typing of a love letter from Franz Kafka to Felize Bauer, who Kafka met on August 13, 1912. In the letter, which can be found in Letters to Felice (Schocken, 1987), Kafka "makes reference to typing the letter on a typewriter and expresses the impact the new writing device has on his train of thought."

Lit From Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing

by
Author: 
Kevin Haworth and Dinty W. Moore, editors
Published in 2011
by Ohio University Press

Lit from Within offers creative writers a window into the minds of a wide variety of poets, novelists, and nonfiction writers. From Billy Collins to Maggie Nelson to Robin Hemley, the collection presents thought-provoking pieces on issues of craft and the elements of the writing life.

March 7

Choose a clichéd phrase ("fit as a fiddle," "think out of the box," "running on empty," etc.) and turn it around. Use the new meaning created by this reversal to fuel a poetic meditation.

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