Where does the time go?
Hey, y’all. Remember me?
I’m back.
What have I been up to? Things. Changed jobs, got a dog, wrote a bunch of stuff. I’m glad to be back among the ‘flock.
How to Become a Writer
“First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age–say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire. It is a pond, a cherry blossom, a wind brushing against sparrow wing leaving for mountain. Count the syllables. Show it to your mom. She is tough and practical. She has a son in Vietnam and a husband who may be having an affair. She believes in wearing brown because it hides spots. She’ll look briefly at your writing, then back up at you with a face blank as a doughnut. She’ll say: ‘How about emptying the dishwasher?’ Look away. Shove the forks in the fork drawer. Acccidentally break one of the freebie gas station glasses. This is the required pain and suffering. This is only for starters.”
(via GracefulFlavor)
Shameless Plug
I would like to take a moment of your time to announce something that I hope, over time, will become something rather successful.
As many of you know I have a personal blog in addition to writing for this here Clusterflock thing. However, I’ve recently started another blog, called Unfiltered, that serves as my employer’s blog. I want it to be everything most company blogs aren’t: interesting, authentic, transparent, fresh, relevant, not boring. My goal is to make it worth reading on a daily basis, even if you aren’t wholly interested in the consulting business, PeopleSoft or SaaS technology.
So, if you’re inclined, stop on by. Tell others about it if you feel the prospective subject matter would be interesting. Grok the RSS if that’s your thing. The kickoff post pretty much lays out what the blog will and will not be.
Thanks. We now return to the regularly-scheduled ideological chaos.
When ‘Writer’ Means ‘Typer’
Idea: how about you get a newspaper and type every single word of it into a book, then try to market the book as avant garde neo-poetry? Kenneth Goldsmith did exactly that with Day, an 840-page book that contains every single word of an NYTimes issue.
He typed an entire issue of the New York Times into an 840-page book called Day. He recently completed a trilogy, The Weather, Traffic and Sports. They are transcriptions of a year of radio weather reports, a 24-hour traffic cycle and the radio broadcast of a Yankees game. Ums, uhs and ads included. If you think that sounds unreadable, you’re right. Goldsmith himself says, “I don’t read them. I get bored.”
Odd way to get your 15 minutes, but hey, at least he got them.
‘Uncreative Writer’ Retypes the ‘New York Times’
(via swissmiss)
Handwriting
From Good Magazine:
Let’s stop brutalizing our kids with years of drills on the proper formation of a cursive capital “S”—handwriting is a historical blip in the long history of writing technologies, and it’s time to consign to the trash heap this artificial way of making letters, along with clay tablets, smoke signals, and other arcane technologies.
While I am sympathetic with the perspective (my handwriting is terrible), but I suspect there are all sorts of uses for its study, exercising manual dexterity comes to mind. I don’t think my inability to draw and my sloppy jottings are unconnected.
the dance
There was something about the woman smoking as she walked toward the building this morning, or maybe it was just the smoke. One glance at her and suddenly I was brought back to high school.
It was just before a school dance and none of us wanted to go, but it was a night out of the house that required little explanation to our parents. At the time it was me and a handful of nefarious teenaged boys, people I would later realize I was the exact opposite of – or, at least, I realized that I wanted to be the exact opposite of – on that night, however, we were thick as thieves.
We started with trespassing, hiding out on the roof of an elementary school, surrounded by thick smoke. Laughing and joking as half the group watched the other half of us struggle with our first hit from the pipe.
Soon, I’m nervous, chewing gum and spraying deodorant as we wait in line at the door of the gymnasium. It had been nearly an hour since we’d left the safety of our hiding place and I still felt as though a cloud of smoke followed us all. The dean is there, checking mouths for gum. I spit mine into the bushes and held my breath as I walked by and handed him our ticket.
Once inside, the lights and music distracted us from our pre-planned escape.
from the vault
If happiness is a warm gun, how should I feel about the cold steel pressed to my temple?
