From the editors of Penguin Books and Penguin Classics

myimaginarybrooklyn:

Gilles Deleuze on Cinema - What is the Creative Act? (1987)

This 45 minute talk at a conference in 1987 on the “act of creation” in cinema is perhaps the most intimate capture of Gilles Deleuze on film besides the Abécédaire interview. Gilles Deleuze speaks continuously and fluidly in a raspy but gentle and sincere voice that betrays much reverence for the work of figures such as Bresson and Kurosawa, particularly as concerns what Deleuze claims to be an absolute need of theirs to adapt the works of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky for film. Other figures discussed include Syberberg, Straub and Duras, along with a discussion of Foucault and disciplinary societies. Deleuze concludes with a meditation on what he calls the “mysterious connection between the work of art and the act of resistance.”

Oh, Deleuze, so wonderful.

There’s reading & loving Moby-Dick, and then there’s CREATING A CARD GAME OUT OF LOVE for the words and richness of exploration and adventure and awe and wow, this is just incredible. 

Moby Dick, or, The Card Game is on Kickstarter right now. In their own words: 

In Moby Dick, or, The Card Game players live out the voyage of the legendary Pequod, the whaling ship from Melville’s novel. The name of the game is whaling, but who can say what other mysteries the sea holds? Hunt whales to earn oil and work to assemble a personal crew of sailors; they will be needed as the journey unfolds. Cooperate with your shipmates; the dangers of the sea are less daunting to the sailor with true bosom friends. Oil is the currency of the game and it will prove dear, but what is material worth in the face of the white phantom? When the time comes for the final chase, only one player will earn the right to say “Call me Ishmael”.

Great stuff. And looks beautiful, thanks to art from Havarah Zawoluk.

“I don’t think attention to detail is incompatible with an expansion and deepening of what we apprehend. A good starting point for a life well lived is continual effort to enlarge, as well as to deepen, the boundaries of our imaginations and our knowledge to all the dimensions and details of the real world. Thoreau, who wrote that ‘in wildness is the salvation of the world,’ was a visionary and a radical, but he was not a woolly thinker. It was Thoreau—not the supposedly practical folk around him—who refused to believe that Walden Pond was bottomless and actually took the trouble to measure its depth with a plumb line. As Richard Feynman later said, ‘Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.’” —Caspar Henderson, “Imagining the World: In Search of the Fantastic,” in The Chronicle Review

“I don’t think attention to detail is incompatible with an expansion and deepening of what we apprehend. A good starting point for a life well lived is continual effort to enlarge, as well as to deepen, the boundaries of our imaginations and our knowledge to all the dimensions and details of the real world. Thoreau, who wrote that ‘in wildness is the salvation of the world,’ was a visionary and a radical, but he was not a woolly thinker. It was Thoreau—not the supposedly practical folk around him—who refused to believe that Walden Pond was bottomless and actually took the trouble to measure its depth with a plumb line. As Richard Feynman later said, ‘Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.’”

—Caspar Henderson, “Imagining the World: In Search of the Fantastic,” in The Chronicle Review

“I have often been asked to which batters I have found it hardest to pitch.

It is the general impression among baseball fans that Joseph Faversham Tinker, the shortstop of the Chicago Cubs, is the worst man I have to face in the National League. Few realize that during his first two years in the big show Joe Tinker looked like a cripple at the plate when I was pitching. His ‘groove’ was a slow curve over the outside corner, and I fed him slow curves over that very outside corner with great regularity. Then suddenly, overnight, he became from my point of view the most dangerous batter in the League.”

Christy Mathewson, Pitching in a Pinch

Monday First Sentences | Every Monday, we offer the opening sentences of a Penguin Classic to start the week


wwborders:

An interesting little clip (in Arabic) featuring writer Hassan Blasim and an evocative musical soundtrack. Come read “The Green Zone Rabbit” by Blasim in the April 2013: Iraq, Ten Years Later Issue of Words without Borders. 

Meet Hassan Blasim, whose incredible book of stories, Corpse Exhibition (translated by the wonderful Jonathan Wright), will be coming out as a Penguin Original next April!

(Source: youtube.com)


“Now she’s leaving
Congregation
Left the abbeys
Suffocation

She’s been dreaming
Relocation
From monastic
Regulations”

—Devendra Banhart, “Für Hildegard von Bingen”

Seems like Devendra has been reading some Selected Writings from that visionary “Sybil of the Rhine”: Hildegard of Bingen.