I’ve been a practitioner of various forms of meditation — beginning with Transcendental Meditation at 17 which evolved into a Buddhist practice in my 20s, a Jewdhist approach in my 30s and 40s and now back to Buddhist in my 50s — for most of my life and while I never fell for the full-blown [...]

1135: Share your bookself

No, not even David Foster Wallace wrote that fast, but rather a writing challenge to write 600 words that can be read in approximately three minutes. Go!

From The Paris Review, No. 59, Fall 1974 interview with Gore Vidal: Doubtless a misunderstanding. I had assumed that Burr would be unpopular. My view of American history is much too realistic. Happily, Nixon, who made me a popular playwright (the worst man in The Best Man was based on him), again came to the [...]

Previously…

0428: Free Tiny Library

How do you deal with your plethora of books? Right now on my desk I have the following: Across That Bridge by John Lewis; Are You My Mother by Alison Bechdel; Black Over White by Thomas Holt; Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle; Business Model You by Tim Clark; Complete Idiot’s Guide to Calculus by Michael [...]

James Meek writes in The New York Times: Yet the pre-Internet novelists had an advantage over their successors in terms of textual output. Their supplementary writing — the journals and, in particular, the letters — complemented the novels and short stories in a way tweets and posts and even e-mails don’t. The explanation isn’t necessarily [...]

From Suzanne DeGaetano at Mac’s Backs: Hi all, You may have heard that the Justice Department is suing five publishers and Apple for price-fixing on ebooks. Three publishers have settled but Macmillan, Penguin and Apple will go to court. Two years ago Macmillan changed the way they charge vendors for ebooks. Amazon had dropped the [...]

Snap observation: whole-brain teaching scares me. As I watched the teacher in this video I had Jim Joneseque flashes of brainwashing in action. This is the way you teach a pet, not a child. The children in this classroom are demonstrating that they can parrot back information without questioning, they might as well be learning [...]

They took women away when they tested positive., They always came back, but they didn’t seem the same. And most of the time they were visibly pregnant in a few months. Grace had never managed to convince one to talk about what had happened, but that was mostly her fault, not theirs. Once someone was [...]

The amazing Kentucky poet Sherry Chandler and I shared Bourbon on the porch at Wild Acres this past summer and so when I read this line in her post on the poetry of Amy King — I felt a little like a Dickens character thrown into the middle of a Gertrude Stein piece – a [...]

Adapted from Walter Mosley’s For Authors, Fragile Ideas Need Loving Every Day: The dream of the writer, of any artist, is a fickle and amorphous thing. One evening I’m remembering a homeless man, dressed in clothes that smelled like cheese rinds, whom I once stood next to on a street corner in New York. My [...]

David Gans and Doug Kendall write: What conservatives such as Olson and Calabresi have slowly been recognizing is that it is inappropriate to look to the intentions of the Framers of the 14th Amendment to trump the actual text they wrote, the cardinal sin in constitutional interpretation if ever there were one. It is the [...]

Kim 515 speculates: When the hobbits return to the Shire after their journey to Mordor, Gandalf leaves them close to Bree and goes towards Bombadil’s country to have words with him. We do not know what they say. But Gandalf was sent to Middle Earth to contend against Sauron and now he must depart. He [...]

Daniel McDermott writes: And there will be other prisoners: hopeless, frustrated, sadomasochistic men with overgrown armpits and merciless eyes, and they too will assault me, like the policemen, not with phone books, but with tape-handled puncture knives and throbbing erections. And I will be put into isolation for my own safety, and I will be [...]

0758: Mythic hero films

I am a tale weaver and all my literature is spiritual. I read and write to inform my emotional understandings of my perceived reality and, if I am mindful, to glimpse how others perceive their own. That I should desire my perceptions be Reality – that which does not go away when ignored – is [...]

Be without fear. This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave – then use them, maybe even write them. Too much fear and all you’ll get is silence. Al Kennedy Ten rules for writing fiction from The Guardian. Found in my electronic chapbook.

Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won’t need to take notes. Al Kennedy Ten rules for writing fiction from The Guardian. Found in my electronic chapbook.