for thinking people
October 25, 2021
Translating texts into other forms of art is something that fascinates me. Especially when some sort of semi-random, computer-mediated process is involved. There’s something idealistic about it, having to do with aesthetics, beauty, and the meaning behind art which, remember, is holistic. And so, Text to Art is a little program I put together to explore this very thing: How turning a text – a poem, a novel, or a simple sentence – into a visual design would look like.
July 5, 2021
I don’t know; that’s the only honest answer to the question above. That’s also the reason why I phrased it as a question. Do writers have any social responsibility? I will try to get a bit closer to the truth during the process of composing this post. If it can help you, too, in some way, all the better.
As a first thing, we would need to lay down some important theoretical foundations. When we wonder whether writers have social responsibility, there are two elements we need to define or clarify:
Most misunderstandings arise from using the same word but meaning different things – think of “love” or “success” – so being as clear as possible about our definitions is important. So, I’ll begin with trying to clarify these terms in my own head first, and then I’ll try to see how (if at all) they play ball together.
May 17, 2021
“The meaning of novels: What’s so novel about a novel”. If you think the title is a bit insane, that’s what you get when you make a post out of a discussion between me and Igor da Silva Livramento, friend and fellow writer, academic, and creative-writing advisor. We talk about novels, language, and whatever else comes to mind. Igor is also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn, and also take a look at his blog and his page on Bandcamp.
Chris: This convo kind of started with my suggesting “No news is good news, I suppose”, which you expertly picked up.
Igor: No news is neither good nor bad, because there is no news to be valued or assessed. Yet, a certain literary background allows you to use this sentence the way you did. In a sense, it is a paradox. But it is only a paradox insofar as that paradox is the clearest and most direct way of saying what is condensed in the sentence. But how so? As I always say, but few people listen to me: Logic concerns only a very limited subset of human languages. Everything that really matters to say, that is, everything that is really interesting in the events of language lies beyond the limits of logic.
To jump to a more interesting part of the reasoning: This means that literature carries (with)in itself – encodes, someone will (wrongly) say – a knowledge (of a generative kind). But why all this? The strongest empirical (from the marketplace) evidence of what I am saying is in the growing trend of publishing houses adding “a novel” to the front cover of fiction books!
