Art is one of the ways people communicate with one another. Every work of art brings the viewer to into a special kind of relationship, both with whoever has created or is creating the art and also with everyone else who—together with him, or before or afterwards—is subject to that
artistic impression.
—Leo Tolstoy
It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power
to an inborn talent.
In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome, requiring an effort.
—Henri Matisse
Art is so varied that to reduce it to any single purpose, be it even the salvation of mankind, is an abomination before the Lord.
—Nikolai Gumilev
Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work,
is what makes all the difference in art.
—Dante Gabriel Rosetti
Art is art.
Everything else is everything else.
—Ad Reinhardt
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance…
and I know of no substitute whatever
for the force and beauty of its process.
—Henry James
It's not what you look at that matters,
it's what you see.
—Henry David Thoreau
The Markson/Lowry Project
Purloined Letters Unsealed
The Markson/Lowry Project dissipates the myth of unapproachable difficulty that has too long clung to some of our best books.
Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress. The legacy of James Joyce.
Few works are so seldom read and yet so revered and ecstatically beloved by those who know them. In this, as in so much else, they genuinely belong to the tradition of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. David Markson himself wrote of Malcolm Lowry's UtV: "I mean to make of the word [the word "Joycean"] a generic term ...For all the differences in their ultimate aesthetic orientation, there remains between Lowry and Joyce an undeniable affinity of method."
The Markson/Lowry project takes you on a dizzying ride, deep into a family line of works that are among the crowning achievements of literary art in the English language.
The Markson/Lowry Project centers upon an annual happening that features:
- Public readings at which well-known writers, literary experts, and celebrities, along with friends and relatives of the writers themselves, read favorite passages and bring out their hidden meanings.
- A conference dedicated to unveiling how writings in the Joycean tradition work, to the continuing evolution of Joycean method today, and to the individual writers and books that have kept the flame alive.
- An annual publication gathering new and archival materials, including the papers of the conference, interviews and reminiscences, and a variety of audio-video materials, including the public readings, on disc.
