#Charles Baxter

[razorsadness]

Poetry has never really signed a pact with realism. It has always been slightly wary of empiricism; poetry almost never pretends, as fiction sometimes does, that it is a picture of life. Instead, poetry, just by being poetry, emphasizes its own metaphoric status—that is, poetry is always formally at one remove from life; it is like life, about life, a thickly filtered and mediated version of it, reality with a vision and a consciousness and a voice attached to it, life as seen through the lenses of lyric utterance. Poetry is life when you're singing about it, songs of praise and desolation. By contrast, fiction is spoken, usually, but poetry is sung; it is the singing that tells us that we are over there, and not quite here.

—Charles Baxter, from "On the Plausibility of Dreams" (Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature, Graywolf Press, 2022)

[floral-art-prints]

An English Rose by Charles Baxter (oil on canvas)

[mythologyofblue]

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

Charles Baxter

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Fine Press Black Friday!

Last Wednesday we presented a few understated wood engravings by the noted upper-Midwestern engraver and fine-press printer Gaylord Schanilec from a portfolio of literary broadsides documenting the 1998 Hungry Midnight reading series at The Hungry Mind bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota. For this #Fine Press Friday after Thanksgiving, we present the broadside portfolio documenting the previous year’s Hungry Midnight series featuring the work of Sherman Alexie, John Dufresne, Paul Metcalf, Margaret Atwood, Charles Baxter, and Jonathan Lethem.

Entitled Context is Everything, after a prose piece by Lethem, the portfolio was printed by Schanilec, with his original wood engravings, in an edition of 20 copies (with variously editioned broadsides) at his Stockholm, Wisconsin farmstead studio Midnight Paper Sales in 1997, with each broadside signed by its respective author. 

View other posts on the work of Gaylord Schanilec.

View more Fine Press Friday posts.

View more posts with wood engravings!

[oldsardens]

Charles Baxter (Attributed to) - A moment's reflection

[castyourline]

When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

Charles Baxter

[theblackestofsuns]

A Relative Stranger (1990)

Charles Baxter

W.W. Norton & Company

[pithia]

A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.

Charles Baxter

[such-g00d-luck]

you know it hits hard

[razorsadness]

Remembering, in certain historical epochs, can be a form of resistance. Remembering can even be subversive. It is not conservative so much as conservationist. You hold on to those features of behavior and those figures of speech that have been erased from the centers of commercial, consumptive culture. You become indifferent to the latest fashions. You use words that everyone else has forgotten. You remember how people behaved, and you use it, because you are the walking, living memory of your own time, and you are writing it all down.

—Charles Baxter, from "Things About to Disappear: The Writer as Curator" (Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature, Graywolf Press, 2022)

[skatingthinandice]

Do you envy her, Miss Baxter? I'm not a big believer in envy, Mr. Bates.

DOWNTON ABBEY: A NEW ERA (2022) dir. Simon Curtis

[bonhughbon]

DOWNTON ABBEY + Barbie Posters (2/3)

[thsc-scattered-stars]

Decided to make a sort of title page that'll go on my rules thing! Had a lot of fun with this :3

[giveamadeuschohisownmovie]

* Even though Seth’s trap was inescapable, Seth still believed he could’ve escaped. He only learned it was rigged against him after the fact. The rule I’m following is that I’m excluding people who, during the game, were aware that they had no control over their fate.

* Hoffman’s game was when John blackmailed him into becoming his apprentice. The shotgun chair scene.