The people behind the Malcolm Gladwell illustrated collection set talk about the process of coming up with ideas on a Design Matters episode.
*My birthday is on May 18.
via Curiosity Counts
The people behind the Malcolm Gladwell illustrated collection set talk about the process of coming up with ideas on a Design Matters episode.
*My birthday is on May 18.
via Curiosity Counts
How I Test Ideas (Or: Discerning Good From Great) — Shawn Blanc
Shawn Blanc on how he goes through the process of testing an idea.
I suspect many of you can relate to the dilemma of having more ideas than time. Which means that, in addition to endurance, we also need discernment to know what ideas are worth pursuing and what ideas we should let go of.
Lana & Me: Our Dark, Abusive, Co-Dependent Relationship on the Content Farm | HIPSTER RUNOFF
Hipster Runoff on Lana Del Ray, music writing and criticism, the indie music writing blogosphere, content farms, Gawker, and tons existentialist buzzwaves.
Cultural criticism on the internet is dying because we finally realized that the voices behind blogs, twitter feeds, and authentic writing outlets are as fat, bored, uninspired, and jealous as the fat, bored, uninspired, and jealous voices that we thought we had escaped from.
I am not a writer. I am not a blogger. I am a content farmer. These words mean more to the Google robot than they do 2 u. There is nothing exciting about writing, tweeting, or sharing opinions. I do not want to inspire any one to follow me into this dark prison, surrounded by a pile of memes, while I must sort thru them and spin them as ‘meaningful’, ‘interesting’, or whatever else will generate a pageview.
Must read.
A long sentence is worth the read – latimes.com
Author Pico Iyer argues that we need the long sentence to pull us away from the fast stream, always now world of the web.
Yet nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the “gaps,” as Annie Dillard calls them — that don’t show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker.
WRITING IS THE GREATEST INVENTION | More Intelligent Life
I agree whole heartedly.
The greatest invention of all must surely be writing. It is not just one of the foundations of civilisation: it underpins the steady accumulation of intellectual achievement. By capturing ideas in physical form, it allows them to travel across space and time without distortion, and thus slip the bonds of human memory and oral transmission, not to mention the whims of tyrants and the vicissitudes of history.
(Via Kottke)
Writing is like driving a car. There’s the driver and then there’s the car. The driver is the voice inside your head that can’t shut up. The car is your fingers. Or it can be your hand if you’re old school. Like a car, you need to move your fingers to warm them up. Every car that’s older than at least five years old doesn’t run as well until it warms up. You gotta give the engine some time. When the car is ready, then the driver can take charge. But the driver needs a seatbelt. You have to protect yourself. The seatbelt, in this writing analogy, is a needed constraint. It’s the editing and the more careful use of words. It keeps things in check. It’s when the driver really becomes a driver and is ready for Nascar.
Heather Armstrong, Queen of the Mommy Bloggers – NYTimes.com
Heather Armstrong, author of the blog Dooce, gets profiled on NYT Magazine. I’ve never been a follower of the blog, but my impression about Dooce is that it’s more than a “mommy blog”. As Kottke observed, it comes from a time when blogs where more personal narratives of mundane events. The women mentioned in the article just happened to tell their stories so well, so funny, and so consistently that have made them stand out in this niche-fied blog world.
(Via Kottke)
A two year old article on David Foster Wallace. I just loved this part:
Wallace grew up in a small town in Illinois, and was an elite junior tennis player, a rare combination of sporting and academic prowess. His was an omnivorous brain, able to ingest complex mathematics, logic and philosophy, and forests full of dope. He majored in philosophy and English at Amherst College and studied creative writing at the University of Arizona. He went on to publish two novels, three collections of fiction and two of non-fiction, and works on rap music and mathematics. He taught writing to college students, ultimately at Pomona, California. His mania for language persisted, to the extent that he would write I hate you on the paper of a student who, say, mistook ‘further’ for ‘farther’.
And this one:
Those who knew him as the tobacco-chewing Dave Wallace, rather than the enigmatic genius David Foster Wallace (the triple-barrelled name was a publisher’s suggestion to distinguish him from another David Wallace), count themselves blessed to have known a loveable and down-to-earth man, and also privileged to have been let in close, because Wallace was so uncomfortable among strangers that his shyness was its own defensive barrier. In one of his stories he writes of becoming so tortured by not wanting to offend people with any of the standard options for ending a conversation that he would end up blurting out, “I need you to go away and leave me alone now.”
That fucking guy.
Ghost, Blogging – Fimoculous.com
Rex Sorgatz’s blog Fimoculous was hijacked by an anonymous blogger last Xmas. Rex explains the weird and thrilling episode.
