This is why I never clean my office.
While organizing a shelf, L stumbled on a tiny hand knit vest.
Where did this come from? He asked.
I have no idea…
- Him: There are so many shoe repair places in Berkeley. Have you ever noticed that?
- Me: They must be a front for something.
- Him: But what?!
- Me: The cobbler's mob.
- Him: No, that's a Terry Pratchett novel. "In Ankhmorpork all of the cobblers are part of a secret society..." Can't you see it?
(Source: myjetpack)
Lately, I’ve noticed that the people who are quickest to find reasons for you not to follow your dreams are even faster at finding reasons not to follow their own, and the people who are most supportive of risk-takers are the people who know how to take risks themselves.
Illustrated my favourite Neil Gaiman quote for writers. :-) (and thanks to Neil for his permission)
It’s as true now as when I first said it…
“There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
(Source: The Huffington Post)
“Basically, like nine tenths of humanity, I always want to be somewhere else, in the place I have just fled from…The truth is that I am happy only when I am sitting in the car, between the place I have just left and the place I am driving to.”
-Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Evidence: road trips = happiness.
Writers, do you support Occupy Wall Street?
Here is one way to show it.
EDIT:
After reading up on the project, I’m even more excited about this. According to the Observer, Killing the Buddha author, Jeff Sharlet, was irked that writers hadn’t circulated a letter in support of the protests yet, so he decided to do something about it. One of the first supporters was a Salman Rushdie.
They have an all star list, already: Aimee Bender, Neil Gaiman, Marilyn Hacker…
But what I really appreciate about this project is that they’re not limiting it to the 1% of writers everyone jumps up and down for. So often in the literary world it feels like there’s only room for an elite few, but this is so much more open than that.
my new favorite word:
aufmerksamkeitverfolgungbewusstseinschmerz
meaning: the pain felt at the awareness that your attention is being tracked
Q. One of the implications of your show is that consumers should think more critically about the devices they buy. But there may not be a more ethical competitor to turn to. How do you hope your show will change viewers’ choices as consumers?
A. The situation we find ourselves in is not terribly different than it was for the organic food movement in the 1950s, an era when the idea that food should not be treated with pesticide was bizarre because people didn’t even understand why you wouldn’t want your food in a can.
In other words the act of making people think about these issues is a revolutionary act because no one is thinking about them.
-NYT Q&A with Mike Daisey, author of The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs
People are thinking about this—maybe just not enough people or people who are capable of changing the supply chain.
I love his comparison to the organics movement, though. I hope someday there’s as much fastidiousness with this stuff as there is around food, but I think it will be a bit harder to argue because (for the most part) our devices aren’t as close to our bodies as food is.
I’m writing a strange little book.
Right now it’s roughly 250 pages of dreams, journal entries, affidavits, and erasure poetry circling the fictional suicide of a San Francisco entrepreneur just after the tech bust of 2000.
This morning I printed out the first 25 pages to send to my advisor. I’m a fairly diligent writer (Unless you’re my advisor, then I’m a very diligent writer.), which means I spend a lot of time staring at my own words, but it’s amazing what seeing the white space where it’s supposed to be after weeks of working with plain text can do.
I work in Scrivener because 250 page-long chapters would be torture to keep straight in a word processor. What I gain in organization and consistent formatting, I lose in being able to see my book take shape gradually.
Sometimes that’s a bad thing, like when I got to the end of the book the first time and realized that I hadn’t thought about formatting at all when formatting a hybrid is more like formatting a poetry book than a novel.
But sometimes that’s a good thing.
“You’re writing a book,” I said this morning.
“I know,” I said.
(Because as a writer, you have permission to talk to yourself and answer back.)
It was a boost.
(Source: frolickinginsane)
