User:Seekbeauty

Wikipedia

Editing on Wikipedia since 1 August 2010, with contributions to over 100 unique articles, largely on fiction, film, and war.

Occupation

• Writer, editor, and professor on argument, survivor stories, literature, and cinema.

Education

• A scholar of wars and rumors of war, I earned a PhD in 2017 meditating on literary representations of the 9/11 attacks, and the invasions that ensued.

Expertise and publication areas

• Al-Qaeda ( القاعدة‎‎ ), Trauma, PTSD, Psychoanalysis, Terrorism in 21st Century Fiction, Survivors’ Stories, & The Gothic in Film and Literature.

Quotations from actors, composers, conductors, directors, creative writers, painters, and philosophers that shape my views on what is notable in life, art, violence and the unknown

“Even in the most sophisticated person, it is the primitive eye that watches the film.” --Jack Nicholson

“The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude.” --Voltaire

“As a musician I tell you that were you to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.” --Georges Bizet

“I love close-ups. The closer a camera comes, the more eager I am to show a completely naked face.” --Liv Ullmann

“Goya goads his pilgrims across dark chasms. What leaps to the eye is a demoniac black that pours in deepest despair over the palette, midst torrents of gray and white and ochre.” --Mordecai Ardon

“Art is research into the unknown, adding a little to the fund built up by earlier generations.” --Olle Baertling

“There are some artists who want to tell all, but I feel it is shrewd to tell little.” --Mark Rothko

“The source of my painting is in the unconscious. I have no fears about making changes or destroying the images, because the painting has a life of its own.” --Jackson Pollock

“Only a fool imitates. It is better to do bad work of one’s own.” --Georges Bizet

“Why is life different when the singing stops?” --James Reeves

“Just listen with the vastness of the world in mind. You can’t fail to get the message.” --Pierre Boulez

“Every story is completed by the reader.” --Grace Paley

“The artist is the confidante of nature.” --August Rodin

“Think with what difficulty a medium tries to establish contact with a spiritual force. There is the ritual of the séance, the darkened room. The theatre works on a similar principle.” --Charles Marowitz

“It’s frightening to feel that you always have to sing better than yourself.” --Martina Arroyo

“Look at the trauma that can occur when there’s a child from whom secrets are kept, vital information that has traumatized the parent. Dead space forms in the child’s mind where that suppressed information ought to go. The dead space is referred to as the crypt, the phenomenon is referred to as haunting, and that which is withheld, the secret, the family secret—is called the phantom. So it’s an entirely gothic terminology ...” --Patrick McGrath

“I believe that if a single generation of adults raised a single generation of kids with compassion, intelligence, and love, the world would be a perfect place.” --Guillermo del Toro