May 2013
18 posts
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The soul in Moby Dick
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose...
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“You must consider whether your nature is better suited for busy activity or for leisurely study and contemplation, and must turn as your character directs. Talent responds badly to coercion; where nature is reluctant, labor is vain.” —Seneca
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“Burying one’s self is not saving one’s self. The worst fate of all is to be stricken from the roster of the living before you die.” —Seneca
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To the parents of every college grad
“Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
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“People need a little loving and, God, sometimes it’s sad all the shit they have to go through to find some.” —Richard Brautigan
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on Plum Trees
“In a living place with a plum tree, you have the plums dropping from the trees onto the paving stones, the plums rotting, swept away by water or eaten by birds. The path under it is a pleasant place for people to wander, to think, arm in arm.
“How different this is from the developer’s commercial ‘paradise.’ The clean paving stones; the perfectly manicured place,...
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On living in the present
“Everyone accelerates life’s pace, and is sick with anticipation of the future and loathing of the present. But the person who puts all of his time to his own uses, who plans every day as if it were his last, is neither impatient for the morrow nor afraid of it.” —Seneca
“You have all the time in the world because the only time is NOW.” —Alan Watts
I’m sorting out my files. Just found the autobiographical sketch I wrote when I applied to UC Irvine’s MFA program. I ended it by saying that my good friend was also applying to the program and that they should take her because “she’s a dedicated writer who has a vision that is unique and perhaps unparalleled.”
#doingitright
I hope someday to make something as good as this Haydn symphony I’m listening to.
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“I cry: I would rather be an onion. Then it’d be okay. It’d be expected of me to be as I am.”
Hi. It’s cold and raining. May? I suppose. I edited two stories today—I should edit another. More, more! Did I ever tell you I once saw Roger Ebert use a urinal? Okay, that information was a little unnecessary. My friend Kevin came to town last weekend, and after a few beers I waved my arms at the trees and their branches in my backyard. “Like that. I want to write stories like...
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Ken Baumann's secret life in books →
Actor and publisher Ken Baumann is profiled in the LA Times today. He talks about his writing (New York Tyrant, one of my favorite presses, published his first book this month), his publishing company Sator Press, and perhaps most interestingly, his parents:
“He graduated from his charter high school at 15 and has never taken a college class.
“‘I had really terrible, beautiful...
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April 2013
34 posts
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“Pride is the enemy of love.”
—Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth
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The Problem With How We Treat Bipolar Disorder →
I just tried to share this on facebook, but it wouldn’t let me post it. They must be onto me. Well, dear tumblrers, you get to read this.
“The human mind can be a frightening place. The effects of mental disorders are underreported and oftentimes misunderstood. “Why don’t you just get over it?” etc. But it’s chemistry in the brain not free will. It’s...
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“I’m not that nice—I just murdered a tree.”
Me in gchat with Safy.
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I delete everything I post to facebook within a few minutes of posting it. What’s up with that site?
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I think I cracked the nut of my story collection. It was right in front of me the whole time. More later. Maybe.
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When I was a child, an astronomy magazine for children published a letter of mine. This was a great thrill, of course, and I wish I still had a copy. They had asked if we discovered life on other planets, if we could take over those planets. I said, “No,” the whole question seemed ridiculous. I believe I said, “If someone pitched tents in your back yard would you like it if they...
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Asymptote, the journal I was an editor for from when they began to late last year, was mentioned on the New Yorker’s book blog today. Congrats to them!
(PS Check out Jonas Khemiri’s letter to the Swedish Minister of Justice about trading skins after harsh ID laws were passed and the police began to target people of color, translated to English for the first time in the new issue.)
The work, the real work, is in deletion, but who has enough time to figure out what to delete?
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“Not so long ago, it was acceptable to be an amateur poet or essayist. Nowadays if one does not make some money (however pitifully little) out of writing, it’s considered to be a waste of time. It’s taken as downright shameful for a man past twenty to indulge in versification unless he receives a check to show for it. And unless one has great talent, it is indeed useless to write...
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“If the only point to writing were to transmit information, then it would deserve to become obsolete. But the point of writing is to create information, not simply to pass it along.”
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
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Cities in which I’ve met tumblrers, roughly in order: Singapore, Chicago, Iowa City, Minneapolis, Cambridge, Providence.
Eek. My beard’s gone. I can feel the winter-spring air on my face. I had a mustache for two seconds. I said: I have a mustache—let me solve your problems. Then I swiftly erased it.
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Bertrand Russell on Happiness
“Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.”
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Notes on a Junot Diaz Talk, reblogged from Kevin
molarsmolars:
Almost two years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz spoke at Montgomery County Community College, where one of my younger brothers goes to school. I went and listened and made notes afterward. He was pretty incredible. Here are the notes I made (everything below is paraphrased from his talk):
Art shows us our best selves and helps us connect to others. We get to...
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“Be ornery, be as sand, not oil in the thirsty machinery
of the world!”
—Günter Eich, translated by Michael Hofmann
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It’s 10:15 PM. I filed my taxes. My back hurts. I’m reading a book called FLOW. I went to Minneapolis for one day. It snowed there, and tears fell like rain. I finished listening to the audiobook for QUIET, that book about introversion. I recommend it to all introverts—to all of the quiet people. At times I wanted to gather them all up under my big wings and shelter them, but I...
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small good things
“Suppose I am telling someone how to improve a corner of their garden. My advice would be something modest and practical: Do one small good thing; then do another small good thing; then do another good thing.”
—Christopher Alexander, The Process of Creating Life
“‘You’ll probably need to eat something,’ the baker said. ‘I hope you’ll eat some...
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“What luxury for us though, who can sip margaritas, cook meat, inspect sunsets,...”
– My friend Kevin on decks, lemonade stands, and the relation of mailmen and dogs, online at the fantastic Gigantic mag.
There are birds on the lawn, eating the insects in the dirt. There’s a rabbit on the lawn, also eating, but eating the green leaves of the lawn itself. It’s rather serene.
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I’ve noticed sometimes writers at readings will read things that are incomprehensible as spoken word. Sometimes they inflect their sentences like poets because their words are so far removed from what they would actually say. This writing always breaks Padgett Powell’s rule, “Write as if you were telling your story to someone in a bar” or my (new) version of the rule, “Write how you would like to...
I’m in bed. Hi. Hello. I bounced around today as a haze. Hello. I had coffee, but, you see, the coffee I grabbed was the wrong coffee. It wasn’t mine. It was hazelnut decaf.
A hazelnut-poor, wired person is out there now, roaming the streets, unable to sleep. I too am unable to sleep but it’s because of another coffee and because the world is a hard place.
Is that why...
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Iowa City Lit Crawl
Tonight there will be readings spread throughout many of Iowa City’s bars and shops. I don’t know who all is reading (there will be 3-10 readers at each stop) except Amelia Gray is reading at 5pm at the Dublin Underground and I think at 7pm at the Foxhead.
The full schedule of Lit Crawl stops is here: http://litcrawl.org/iowa-city/events/
Tomorrow at The Mill there will be a book fair with...
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Email to Ana:
I have a thing for Christopher Alexander, the architect… yet when I read a passage like the one of his below, there’s loads of cynicism (A tiny voice that keeps saying, “Humans are destructive, Period.”) that wants to fight against this, or fight against seeing value (“life”) in this… but in the end, I am human, and if one is to be human,...
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Safy-Hallan writing in The Feminist Wire →
My friend Safy has a piece up on The Feminist Wire about East African women (including Iman), white standards of beauty, and the rapper (and Degrassi: The Next Generation actor) Drake. It’s a great piece—go look!
