The Story Teller's Apprentice
Notebook
A collection and selection of quotes gleaned from my
reading and internet research.
“She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all words contained in the text, in order of frequency. “that way I can have an already completed reading at hand," Lotaria says, “with an incalculable saving of time. What is the reading of the text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic reoccurrence since, certain insistences of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of frequencies which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggests to my critical study. Naturally, at the highest frequencies the list records countless articles, pronouns, particles, but I don't pay them any attention. I head straight to the words richest in meaning; they can give me a fairly precise notion of the book.”
Calvino, Italo If on a Winter’s NIght a Traveller Vintage Classics 1979 p254
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
Pablo Picasso
“If there's ever a problem, I film it and it's no longer a problem. It's a film.”
Andy Warhol
“Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.”
Marshall McLuhan
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
Carl Jung (quoted by James Hillman The Myth of Analysis Perennial Books, Harper & Row 1992)
“I had the film processed, brought it home and laced the print into my Moviescop editor, which had a screen like a tiny television set. As I wound the film through by hand I saw the Chinese landscape with the boy and the water buffalo standing in it. It did look very good. Then suddenly, by God! ... the boy actually walked across the picture and bowed to the water buffalo, and then, look! ... the buffalo bowed back! I wound the film in reverse and they did it backwards. Then I did it forwards again quite slowly and watched them do it again.
That was all, but I was fizzing with excitement. It didn’t matter what the picture was of. It didn’t matter that Master Ho had stumbled rather than walked ... I had done something momentous. I had opened up another dimension to the still picture. I had given it the extra dimension of time. I had made it come to life.
Seeing Alexander the Mouse being pulled along by and invisible magnet had been interesting and fun, but seeing Master Ho walking across was different, and astonishing, because it had never happened in real time. I had built the happening piecemeal by hand, using tiny building blocks of time, each one twenty-fifth of a second in length - three hundred and forty three of them to be exact - and I had done it by myself, in the spare room, on a home made animation table, using a camera worked with pieces of Meccano and string.”
Postgate, Oliver Seeing Things Sidgwick and Jackson 2000 p208
Hansel and Gretal - Illustration by Jan Pienkowski
“Perhaps this awareness of silhouette, of the profile rather than the detail of things, is connected with the heavily wooded environment, where people are used to looking out of forest gloom into bright clearings, seeing contours against a lighter background. And it does seem to be from the dark woods that this art comes; from Switzerland. south Germany, Poland and all that great swathe o forest that still covers much of Europe.”
“Possibly because I have no children of my own, I work with children quite a lot; I tell children stories, I draw with them and I find that world in some ways very attractive. On the other hand, I don’t have the grind of putting up with them all day long, so they’re sort of luxuries to me. We have fun together.”
Quoted from an interview with Jan Pienkowski Martin, Douglas The Telling Line Julia MavRae Books 1989 P 96 & P 188
“In both comic books and video games, the movement
through panels/thresholds is directly related to time.
Because timing is spatially judged in both comic books and
video games, the movement through the panels and thresholds
equates to movement through time. This time as space exists
in comics and video games as a marked space of the
instance. While a dozen comic panels may illustrate a
single second of time, each panel would still indicate an
instance of time.”
Laurie Taylor Compromised Divisions: Thresholds in Comic Books and Video Games http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_1/taylor/
“Art has always been bound up with technology, and artists have always been among the first to adopt new technologies as they emerge. We monkey around with new technologies in an effort to see what they can do, to make them do things the engineers never intended, to understand what they might mean, to reflect on their effects, to push them beyond their limits, to break them. But some technologies seem to hold considerably more promise for artists than others, The Internet is particularly ripe with the potential to enable new kinds of collaborative production, democratic distribution, and participatory experience.”
Manovich, Lev The Language of New Media The Mit Press 2001 P Xi
Illustration for ‘Bremen Town Musicians’ by Arthur Racham
“I don’t know how much I believe in redemptive stories, even though people want them and strive for them. They’re satisfied with stories of triumph over evil, but then triumph is a dead end. Triumph never sits still. Life goes on. People forget and make mistakes. Heroes are not completely pure, and villains aren’t purely evil. I’m interested in the continuity of conflict, the creation of racist narratives, or nationalist narratives, or whatever narratives people use to construct a group identity and to keep themselves whole—such activity has a darker side to it, since it allows people to lash out at whoever’s not in the group. That’s a contact thread that flummoxes me.”
Walker, Kara from D’Arcy, David The Eye of the Storm Modern Painters (April 2006) p59.
“No, it certainly cannot. What is surrealist about it? I was against surrealism even when I understood something about it, and I am even more against it now that I no longer understand it all.”
Andrei Tarkovsky, in reference to his film ‘The Mirror’ http://industrycentral.net/director_interviews/AT01.HTM
Once upon a time, in a land far away, a beautiful, independent, self-assured princess happened upon a frog as she sat, contemplating ecological issueson the shores of an unpolluted pond in a verdant meadow near her castle. The frog hopped into the princess' lap and said: " Elegant Lady,I was once a handsome prince, until an evil witch cast a spell upon me. One kiss from you, however,and I will turn back into the dapper, young prince that I am and then, my sweet, we can marry and set up housekeeping in your castle with my mother, where you can prepare my meals, clean my clothes, bear my children, and forever feel grateful and happy doing so. " That night, as the princess dined sumptuously on lightly sauteed frog legs seasoned in a white wine and onion cream sauce, she chuckled and thought to herself: I don't think so.
anonymous updated fairy story
“She explained to me that a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and record the list of all words contained in the text, in order of frequency. “that way I can have an already completed reading at hand," Lotaria says, “with an incalculable saving of time. What is the reading of the text, in fact, except the recording of certain thematic reoccurrence since, certain insistences of forms and meanings? An electronic reading supplies me with a list of frequencies which I have only to glance at to form an idea of the problems the book suggests to my critical study. Naturally, at the highest frequencies the list records countless articles, pronouns, particles, but I don't pay them any attention. I head straight to the words richest in meaning; they can give me a fairly precise notion of the book.”
Calvino, Italo If on a Winter’s NIght a Traveller Vintage Classics 1979 p254
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
Pablo Picasso
“If there's ever a problem, I film it and it's no longer a problem. It's a film.”
Andy Warhol
“Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.”
Marshall McLuhan
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
Carl Jung (quoted by James Hillman The Myth of Analysis Perennial Books, Harper & Row 1992)
“I had the film processed, brought it home and laced the print into my Moviescop editor, which had a screen like a tiny television set. As I wound the film through by hand I saw the Chinese landscape with the boy and the water buffalo standing in it. It did look very good. Then suddenly, by God! ... the boy actually walked across the picture and bowed to the water buffalo, and then, look! ... the buffalo bowed back! I wound the film in reverse and they did it backwards. Then I did it forwards again quite slowly and watched them do it again.
That was all, but I was fizzing with excitement. It didn’t matter what the picture was of. It didn’t matter that Master Ho had stumbled rather than walked ... I had done something momentous. I had opened up another dimension to the still picture. I had given it the extra dimension of time. I had made it come to life.
Seeing Alexander the Mouse being pulled along by and invisible magnet had been interesting and fun, but seeing Master Ho walking across was different, and astonishing, because it had never happened in real time. I had built the happening piecemeal by hand, using tiny building blocks of time, each one twenty-fifth of a second in length - three hundred and forty three of them to be exact - and I had done it by myself, in the spare room, on a home made animation table, using a camera worked with pieces of Meccano and string.”
Postgate, Oliver Seeing Things Sidgwick and Jackson 2000 p208
“Perhaps this awareness of silhouette, of the profile rather than the detail of things, is connected with the heavily wooded environment, where people are used to looking out of forest gloom into bright clearings, seeing contours against a lighter background. And it does seem to be from the dark woods that this art comes; from Switzerland. south Germany, Poland and all that great swathe o forest that still covers much of Europe.”
“Possibly because I have no children of my own, I work with children quite a lot; I tell children stories, I draw with them and I find that world in some ways very attractive. On the other hand, I don’t have the grind of putting up with them all day long, so they’re sort of luxuries to me. We have fun together.”
Quoted from an interview with Jan Pienkowski Martin, Douglas The Telling Line Julia MavRae Books 1989 P 96 & P 188
Laurie Taylor Compromised Divisions: Thresholds in Comic Books and Video Games http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_1/taylor/
“Art has always been bound up with technology, and artists have always been among the first to adopt new technologies as they emerge. We monkey around with new technologies in an effort to see what they can do, to make them do things the engineers never intended, to understand what they might mean, to reflect on their effects, to push them beyond their limits, to break them. But some technologies seem to hold considerably more promise for artists than others, The Internet is particularly ripe with the potential to enable new kinds of collaborative production, democratic distribution, and participatory experience.”
Manovich, Lev The Language of New Media The Mit Press 2001 P Xi
Illustration for ‘Bremen Town Musicians’ by Arthur Racham
“I don’t know how much I believe in redemptive stories, even though people want them and strive for them. They’re satisfied with stories of triumph over evil, but then triumph is a dead end. Triumph never sits still. Life goes on. People forget and make mistakes. Heroes are not completely pure, and villains aren’t purely evil. I’m interested in the continuity of conflict, the creation of racist narratives, or nationalist narratives, or whatever narratives people use to construct a group identity and to keep themselves whole—such activity has a darker side to it, since it allows people to lash out at whoever’s not in the group. That’s a contact thread that flummoxes me.”
Walker, Kara from D’Arcy, David The Eye of the Storm Modern Painters (April 2006) p59.
“No, it certainly cannot. What is surrealist about it? I was against surrealism even when I understood something about it, and I am even more against it now that I no longer understand it all.”
Andrei Tarkovsky, in reference to his film ‘The Mirror’ http://industrycentral.net/director_interviews/AT01.HTM
Once upon a time, in a land far away, a beautiful, independent, self-assured princess happened upon a frog as she sat, contemplating ecological issueson the shores of an unpolluted pond in a verdant meadow near her castle. The frog hopped into the princess' lap and said: " Elegant Lady,I was once a handsome prince, until an evil witch cast a spell upon me. One kiss from you, however,and I will turn back into the dapper, young prince that I am and then, my sweet, we can marry and set up housekeeping in your castle with my mother, where you can prepare my meals, clean my clothes, bear my children, and forever feel grateful and happy doing so. " That night, as the princess dined sumptuously on lightly sauteed frog legs seasoned in a white wine and onion cream sauce, she chuckled and thought to herself: I don't think so.
anonymous updated fairy story