More on unconventional tools of creation (was: Re: Motto: live a fast life, die young and be a beautiful corpse)

[Laurence Horn]

The Renoir story rang a distant bell of a writer who professed the same practice (mutatis mutandis), but I couldn't remember whether it tolled for Lawrence, Hemingway, Mailer, Miller, or one of the other DWMs of whom Kate Millett was notoriously unfond.  A bit of digging produced this artifact:

http://atticfox.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/written-with-the-body/
Written WITH the Body
Jeanette Winterson, in her novel Written on the Body, recycles the narrator’s conversation with two different partners.

With Inge, the anarcha-feminist who hates to blow up beautiful things:

She said, ‘Don’t you know that Renoir claimed he painted with his penis?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He did. When he died they found nothing between his balls but an old brush.’
‘You’re making it up.’
Am I? (22)

And again with Catherine, the writer, who feels that writers don’t make great companions:

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Do you know why Henry Miller said “I write with my prick”?’
‘Because he did. When he died they found nothing between his legs but a ball point pen.’
‘You’re making that up,’ she said.
Am I? (60)





LH

 
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