…but I just had to share this. It’s suspenseful, in a humorous way. And it’s funny — in a suspenseful way. Or maybe it’s just me.
(Discovered at the Out of Character blog.)
Bowery Bums and Bag Ladies… But Writers, by God
Ah, the writing life. We know it’s a stereotype, (almost?) never true, but the image remains skulking around our collective unconscious:
The disheveled hair. The soulful eyes, staring out the window of an upper-floor barely-furnished apartment in which the heat has been turned off, a “scarf” — fabric torn from the edge of a bedsheet — collaring the neck, the fingers poised above they keys of a typewriter into which one has not yet bothered to insert paper because nothing is coming, dammit, nothing even resembling the first word, let alone sentence, and accomplishing an entire paragraph feels like something only gods can pull off. Meanwhile, the landlord is banging on the door demanding at least token attention to seven months’ back rent; food molders in the lukewarm fridge; and yet the Muse — the Siren — still sings to one from nearby rooftops and trees…
Glamorous, eh? No wonder so many (as it seems) want some of it.
This blog post was inspired by and involves, but is not actually about, the author A.L. Kennedy. On the off-chance she’s new to you, you may want to know something of her before we proceed. Says Wikipedia, she:
…is a Scottish writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is known for a characteristically dark tone, a blending of realism and fantasy, and for her serious approach to her work as well as a passion for the art of yodeling. Alison Kennedy lives in Glasgow with her pet Luwak.
Night Plus Light Makes Right
From the toxel.com design blog:
Light writing is a form of stop motion animation wherein still images captured using the technique known as light painting are put in sequence thereby creating the optical illusion of movement for the viewer.
Two examples:
Impacto Criativo (Creative Impact)
Created by Propague and MidiaEffects with 2 cameras, 1700 clicks, 18 people, 20 nights, 35 flash lights, and 234 batteries.
…and:
Light Paint Piano Player
Created by Ryan Cashman with a small green LED keychain light. The frames were photographed with a Canon Rebel using 20-30 second exposure time.
See them all. (Warning: visiting the toxel.com home page can be hazardous to one’s productivity.)
Too Much Time, Not Enough Seconds
You may have already seen this (un-embeddable) video — title: “everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy” — of comedian Louis CK on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. (Hat tip to moonrat.) If not, do that now and then return here. We’ll wait.
[whistling, staring into space, picking up newspaper and re-reading Dilbert, Doonesbury, Get Fuzzy, and For Better or Worse] […dozing…] [looking up, startled]
Ah, good. You’re back. What’d you think?
Now, with that under your belt, let’s turn to this one from Geek Entertainment TV, “Scandalous Twitter Habits: Part Two”:
Also pretty funny, right? (Be sure to watch Part One, as well.)
But I must say, in the wake of the Louis CK rant I suffered a few moments of psychological dislocation among the giggles and snorts.
If you haven’t already noticed, by the way, America’s Finest News Source has its own Twitter feed. As far as I can tell, this was the first tweet there:
The Onion reluctantly expands its Inter-net presence via Face-book. Damn the lot of you! http://urltea.com/2u7n
10:09 PM Mar 3rd, 2008 from web
(Because even in dizzyingly high-speed times, a sense of history is important.)
And while we’re on the subject, if you’re on Twitter: what was your first Tweet? especially the first one which didn’t mention Twitter, tweets, twittering, etc.? Mine:
Work! Cereal to begin.
You can really tell when somebody’s a writer, huh?
Bibliobibuli
Got a couple of words for you.
The first is the one in this post’s title. This is:
…a word coined by H. L. Mencken which means “people who read too much and so are generally oblivious to the world around them.”
Many of you probably know such people.
And then there’s dord. Yes: dee-oh-are-dee. Dord.
What an odd word, you’re thinking. It certainly doesn’t look like English. Well, it looks kinda like word. Especially if I tell you it’s a noun, meaning “density.”
There’s just one catch: it’s pretty much impossible to use it in a sentence — at least, if you’re not discussing dord AS a word. Why? Because it doesn’t exist.
The Look of a Writer’s Blog: Putting Readers at Ease
[This borders on “for geeks only” territory. But I think it’s worth at least some attention if you aspire to get — and keep — a reading audience for your words on the Web.]
A highly respected site for Web-site designers, typographers, and so on, is called A List Apart. It’s been around for years, freely dispensing advice and information from various experts on how to make pages look good and behave properly.
You may or may not know that a given page looks differently when viewed in one Web browser vs. another (Firefox vs. Internet Explorer vs. Safari vs. Opera vs. whatever); even if you know that, though, you may not know why you perhaps should care… let alone what to do about it. If that bothers you, and if you’re not too intimidated by tech subjects presented gracefully, A List Apart needs to be in your bookmarks list.
Regardless of your expertise, I want to draw your attention to a recent article by Mandy Brown, “In Defense of Readers.” It will be of interest to anyone placing his or or her words online, in an environment — like a blog — where one hopes or expects to attract readers as well as mere visitors.
What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 2)
[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 — on the song itself as finally recorded by numerous artists — appeared on Tuesday.]
Hoagy Carmichael published “I Get Along Without You Very Well” in 1938. (The copyright date was November 18.) But the song’s history stretched back over 15 years earlier, and the sheet music as published bore two signs of this past:
- The full title of the song included, at the end, “(Except Sometimes)” — a phrase which appears nowhere in the lyrics.
- Following Carmichael’s name as the songwriter appeared the note, “Words inspired by a poem by J.B. (?)”
Why “Except Sometimes”? Who was J.B.? And why that trailing question mark?
Comment Madness
Attention readers: exciting news!
Sorry, folks, the commpetition (snort, cackle) is now closed. The winner is Tessa, of Nuts & Mutton.
And heck, I’m feeling so expansive right now that I’ll even toss the pen I use to sign it into the box.
As you can see from the partial screen capture at the left, Running After My Hat has to date received 999 approved comments (including pingbacks).
For the author of the 1,000th comment, I’m giving away a prize: a signed copy of my next book.
Fire away!
_________________________
TERMS AND CONDITIONS:
- Void where prohibited by law.
- John reserves the right to do things like post-date comments or otherwise shuffle them around if, like, say, a complete stranger on a random drive-through just happens to catch this post and sprays the comment box with text.
- …which isn’t to say he WILL, only that he MAY.
- Family of RAMH crew members not eligible.
- …or, possibly, eligible.
- As any regular reader here knows, my “next book” is at this time merely a possibility.
- It’s the thought that counts.
Humatons, Arise
A disaster which befalls the Internet from time to time is the expiration of Web sites tied not to any particular domain name, but to the sites’ owners.
I’m thinking here of generically-formed URLs, like:
Generally, when you get an email address from an ISP you also get some nominal amount of Web space, like 10MB or so, whose address is something like the above. Inevitably, some users make better use of this facility than others. And it’s those odd little back corners of the Web in jeopardy.
I recently came across such a site, called The Kooks Museum. This is a site built by one Donna Kossy, in support of her 1994 book Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief. What does she mean by “kooks”? As she happily quotes from the introduction to the book:
What distinguishes “kook” from other dismissive and stigmatizing terms? The various words denoting insanity — “crazy,” “psychotic,” “schizophrenic,” etc. — are not, for my purposes, interchangeable with “kook.” An obsessed murderer may be considered psychopathic or crazy, but more often than not these words categorize action, not belief. The obsessed serial killer is not necessarily a kook.
We must also distinguish kooks from quacks, frauds and hoaxers, for kooks are invariably sincere. Their main intent is not to deceive or defraud; to the contrary, they are trying to impart an essential truth. A kook’s thoughts rarely turn to profit; some squander personal fortunes to investigate or spread The Word. A New Age personality who channels a wise entity from the Pleiades is not a kook if his channeled voice is designed to attract funds.
Finally, it is important to differentiate a kook from an eccentric. An eccentric is defined as someone with an unorthodox lifestyle, which may or may not include unorthodox beliefs. Is a hermit a kook? Can we call a scatological fetishist a kook? Not necessarily, especially if they haven’t codified their own preferences as an eternal truth.
Is this not a useful set of definitions? Is The Kooks Museum not a site worthy of a more permanent home?
I say yes to both questions. (God forbid someone clicking on that hyperlink above should someday be greeted with a dread “404 – Not Found” page.)
In the meantime, here are some samples of the, um, authors and their works commemorated there.
I Tought I Taw…
I’ll go out on a limb here: Twitter “tweets” are the Schrödinger’s cats of Internet phenomena. In general, they exist or do not exist as long as you ignore Twitter altogether; when you actively pay attention, though, each tweet instantly crystallizes into a state of aliveness (Whoa, How about that, Ha!, or Hmm…) or death — forgotten at once. (My own experience indicates that tweets, on average, have a half-life of about two-thirds of a second before the inevitable decay into memes, interstitials, youtubes, and other elementary particles.)
So I haven’t enthusiastically leapt aboard the USS Twitter yet. Life’s too ephemeral as it is, y’know? That said, I do like seeing what others get out of (and sometimes put into) it.
For example, there’s Jon, of the newly (to me) discovered Ransom Note Typography blog (subtitle: “Discontinue Use If Rash Develops”). In a late-December post, Jon exhaustively documents his favorite tweets from 2008. After a brief introduction describing his criteria for selection, he lays out his month-by-month catalog of several tweets per month.
Here’s a small sample:
[Read more…]
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