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Gene-Mapping Your Work
Everybody, writers included, likes a list. (As soon as someone starts a sentence with the words, “There are N kinds of [people, whatever] in this world…,” he’s started to construct a list — even if N is only 2.) It’s one of the signs that among other things we are, humans are mathematical creatures. Even [...]
Department of Neighborhood Security (2)
Last month, I reported on a new initiative which our local neighborhood was undertaking — a neighborhood crime watch. The Missus and I learned of this initiative, as I said, via a letter from our street’s block captain: “As your block captain, I will be asking for you to provide phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, [...]
Hard Questions
From whiskey river: The rest I have told you already The rest I have told you already. A few years of fluency, and then the long silence, like the silence in the valley before the mountains send back your own voice changed to the voice of nature. This silence is my companion now. I ask: [...]
How Do You Figure?
Crazy week upcoming (as if the last one wasn’t crazy enough)… More details on that later, but for now I’ll just say that I’ll have blog posts stacked up in the pipeline and ready to go, starting a week from today [double emphasis added 2008-08-29] and continuing for the next four days. (I know how [...]
Creating in the Margins
After yesterday’s post about and the tendency of things to break down along edges, I was reminded this morning about the other side of the matter: the tendency of interesting and indeed surprising things, good things, to happen between two adjacent experiences. A few weeks ago, I set myself a general writing objective (to write [...]
Cramming Technologies into an Elevator
My brother the architect once explained to me the key to building things successfully. By building he meant not just framing, erecting walls and roofs and so on, but everything: flooring, painting, pouring foundations, and so on. All of it, he said, had one critical element: edges. How an architect or builder or home handyman [...]
Will Cuppy
The most recent category for the links here, all the way at the bottom of the right-hand menu, is labeled “The Pantheon.” These aren’t authors who’ve necessarily influenced my style (although no doubt many of them have); they aren’t all authors who’ve meant a lot to me for my whole life (although some of them [...]
Printability!
A while back, I said I’d be trying to fix things so that printouts of Running After My Hat posts would look more like “real” articles or stories as opposed to Web-based content: omitting the left and right margins, increasing text font sizes, and so on. Just in time for the ginormous “Fay, Part 2” [...]
They Call the Wind… Fay? (2)
[Continued from yesterday's brief "We're still here!" post. All images accompanying this post come from the online "Readers' Gallery" of photos posted at our local newspaper's site.] Dear Family – I know some of you have been keeping a watchful eye (“eye”: ha ha ha) on The Weather Channel for news of the damages suffered [...]
They Call the Wind… Fay?
So far, just a lot of wind (up to about 45mph, nothing to toss vehicles) and rain. Looking forward to posting something for real later today… In the meantime, we’re headed to the animal hospital to pick up the (formerly) ailing Sophie. (“Sophie?” you ask. Hint: Sophie is not, strictly speaking, human.)
