The Bleed 03: Launch at BALTIC book market

Magazine launch. 5 December – 6 December 2014

The Bleed (03)

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway

The new issue of The Bleed magazine will be launched at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art this week.

The independent magazine’s latest issue will be available for the first time at the two-day BALTIC Artists’ Book Market, which takes place at BALTIC in Newcastle-Gateshead on 5-6 December . Copies of The Bleed 03 will be free to visitors to the event with original artwork and signed copies of previous issues also on display. In 2011, BALTIC became the first UK venue outside of London to host the Turner Prize. It will be The Bleed’s first appearance at the prestigious gallery.

The Bleed 03, written by Daniel Thomson and designed by Jonny Speak, features photography by Helen Taylor and artwork by Tom Boyle, Abi Buchan, Meaghan Ralph, Karen Yumi Lusted and Helen Gorill, who has exhibited internationally and was included in the New York Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art archive. Previous issues have included work by artists such as Lauren Jane Forster, Mike Barnes and Nick Willis. The debut issue featured a cover by Eisner Award-winning comic creator Bryan Talbot.

“There is a great quote by Kurt Vonnegut, ‘we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be’ which I discovered after I had finished writing issue 03”, says writer Daniel Thomson. “At its heart, this is what the new story is about. A struggling actor is hired to impersonate his friend and starts to become someone else. As he loses himself, his entire world becomes a fiction.”

Since its launch three years ago, The Bleed has established a reputation for its ambitious, high-concept issues, which bring together diverse content, from prose and poetry to photography and illustration, into a single narrative to push the boundaries of how stories can be told.

The Bleed is an independent magazine based in Newcastle upon Tyne, with contributors from across the UK as well as from New York and Japan. It is open to any artist, working in any medium, from anywhere in the world and is dedicated to showcasing new, original talent. Follow The Bleed magazine on Twitter @thebleedmag and its editor Daniel Thomson @thebleededitor.

Read more at: www.thebleedmag.tumblr.com

To get a free copy of The Bleed 03 come to BALTIC Artists’ Book Market on 5-6 December . For more about BALTIC+ go to: http://balticplus.uk/

Inside The Paris Review: NYC Offices

Two photographers take a look around the iconic literary journal

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Paul Barbera

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

Photograph: Sara Kerens

From Lena Dystant (Selectism):

Part of the “Where They Create” project, photographer Paul Barbera goes inside the offices of legendary literary journal, The Paris Review. 208 issues on from its first in 1953, the magazine was orginally produced by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton, Americans in Paris, the opening statement reading "The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines…" Featuring interviews and work from the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner, Ezra Pound, V. S. Naipaul, Joan Didion and Truman Capote, the magazine continues to introduce the work of new writers and reevaluate established names. More in our gallery, for the full set of images head here and read an interview with current editor Lorin Stein here. [Read More]

From Claudine Ko (Refinery 29):

In New York City's esteemed literary world, there are parties, and then there are The Paris Review parties. Indeed, as long as the quarterly journal has garnered respect for discovering new writing talent — Jack Kerouac, Adrienne Rich, and David Foster Wallace, to name a few — it's also been known for its all-night, booze-flowing soirées where society and the counterculture drink from the same bottle of whiskey.

“It’s always been two things at once,” says editor Lorin Stein. “On the one hand, it’s a hyper-sophisticated, modernist, avant-garde magazine. On the other hand, it’s sort of a destination party.” And over the decades, the 60-year-old publication has continually attracted an eclectic crowd, from Jackie O, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer, to more recently, Zadie Smith, Malcolm Gladwell, and the editors of Vice. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Will Self interviewed in The Paris Review
• Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Other Side of the Face
• Homes of German Philosophers
• Don DeLillo on researching Libra
• Toni Morrison's Writing Routine

On Rising Early and Artistic Success

Mason Currey shares details of artists' lives on Slate

From Mason Currey (Slate), author of the excellent Daily Rituals:

A friend of Frank Lloyd Wright’s once observed that for as long as she had known him, the architect seemed to spend the day doing everything but actually working on his building designs. He held meetings, took phone calls, answered letters, supervised students—but was rarely seen at the drafting table. The friend wanted to know: When did Wright conceive the ideas and make the sketches for his buildings? “Between 4 and 7 o’clock in the morning,” Wright told her. “I go to sleep promptly when I go to bed. Then I wake up around 4 and can’t sleep. But my mind’s clear, so I get up and work for three or four hours. Then I go to bed for another nap.”

Wright was hardly unusual in this habit. In researching Daily Rituals, I came across story after story of creative artists who did their most important work—and sometimes their only work—just as the sun was rising. (Of the 161 figures in the book, about a third got up at 7 a.m. or earlier.) If I were going to extrapolate one lesson from the book, it would be this: Get up early and go straight to work, making a cup of coffee if you like but not doing much else before sitting down, and take advantage of that time before the myriad demands of daily life have a chance to take hold.

Indeed, many artists are early risers because they have little other choice; working early in the morning is a tried and true method of fitting creative work into busy schedules. The 19th-century novelist Frances Trollope is a good example. She did not begin writing until the age of 53, and then only because she desperately needed money to support her six children and ailing husband. In order to squeeze the necessary writing time out of the day while still acting as the primary caregiver to her family, Trollope sat down at her desk each day at 4 a.m. and completed her writing in time to serve breakfast. Her son Anthony Trollope later adopted a similar schedule, getting up at 5:30 a.m. and writing for two hours before going to his job at the post office. (Later in this series, I’ll be looking closely at artists who also held down full-time day jobs.)

Fast forward to the fall of 1962 and you have Sylvia Plath following a similar schedule. At the time, she was using sedatives to get to sleep, and when they wore off at about 5 a.m. she would get up and write until her children awoke. Working like this for two months, she produced nearly all the poems of Ariel, the posthumously published collection that established her as a major new voice in poetry. [Read More]

Find Daily Rituals on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Famous Writers’ Sleeping Habits
• Odd Type Writers
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• David Lynch on Having a Setup
• A Day in the Life of Arthur Schopenhauer

Pen, pencil or typewriter?

Flavorwire on writers' preferences

From Flavorwire:

It’s no secret that writers can be quite particular about their writing tools. Some might call it an obsession or fetish, but the pens, pencils, notebooks, and other implements that authors have used to create their most famous works endlessly fascinates us. After reading an ode to the beloved Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 pencil, adored for its smooth, firm graphite, we had to find out more about the tools of the literary elite. Take notes, and save your pennies to purchase these writing instruments for yourself. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• TypeWriters
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers
• Diurnal vs. Nocturnal Writers: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky
• Odd Type Writers

Bret Easton Ellis talks to Matthew Specktor

An interview for Salon.com

Bret Easton Ellis (left) and Matthew Specktor (right)

From Salon.com:

Matthew Specktor and Bret Easton Ellis have known one another for 20 years. Neither of them can remember how they met. “I think it was at the Bowery Bar in New York,” Specktor says. “But that could just be a mathematical probability.”

Approximate generational peers, Ellis grew up in Sherman Oaks, Specktor in Santa Monica. These were two different versions of the same city. On a recent Friday night they sat down at the Polo Lounge, a Beverly Hills landmark that seemed as good a place as any for the two writers to drink martinis (Hendricks gin, with cucumbers) and talk about Los Angeles, writing, Twitter and Specktor’s new book, “American Dream Machine.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Bret Easton Ellis talks to NUVO Magazine
• Schrader and Ellis to collaborate on The Canyons (2013)
• Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama
• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

Black Clock 15: Public Reading

Black Clock 15 celebrates at the Mandrake Bar in Los Angeles

To celebrate the fifteenth issue of Black Clock, a journal published by the California Institute of the Arts’ (CalArts) MFA Writing Program, a public reading has been organised at the Mandrake Bar in Los Angeles. Contributors who will be reading include: Anthony Miller, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jonathan Lethem, Claire Phillips, Geoff Nicholson and Matthew Specktor and acclaimed novelist - and Black Clock Editor - Steve Erickson. The event will be held on 29 April from 2pm. [Read More]

About Black Clock

Edited by Steve Erickson, Black Clock has become one of America’s leading literary journals since its inception in 2004. Singular, idiosyncratic and a little mysterious, it has featured such established authors as Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Miranda July, Joanna Scott, Samuel R. Delany, Aimee Bender, Susan Straight, William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace along with a growing roster of striking literary debuts. Work appearing in Black Clock has been anthologized in best-of-the-year collections and nominated for O. Henry and Pushcart prizes, and two excerpted novels have gone on to win the National Book Award. [Read More]

Writers' Bedrooms

Bedrooms of famous writers, past and present

William Faulkner's bedroom

Apartment Therapy has posted photographs of the bedrooms of famous writers, including William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs, Virginia Woolf, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, Sylvia Plath, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson and Victor Hugo (link via Jennifer Dawn Whitney) [See More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers' Rooms: Virginia Woolf
• Writers' Rooms: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Writers' Rooms: Siri Hustvedt
• Daily Routines of Writers and Philosophers

Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama

American novelist interviewed on the Charlie Rose show in 1999

Bret Easton Ellis. Photograph: Source

A conversation with author Bret Easton Ellis about his book Glamorama, which explores the subjects of fashion and terror. He also discusses his development and influences as a young writer and the significance of his family in his life. [Watch the interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

Literary Friendships

Biographical connections between writers, poets and philosophers

Accredited Online Colleges has compiled a list of '11 Literary Friendships we can learn from', including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson [Read More]

Ernest Hemingway in Paris

A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

Charlotte Newman reviews a restored edition of Ernest Hemingway's Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast [Read More]