the art of writing is discovering what you believe
I have grumbled more than once in these pages about genres as something that comes between readers and books they might like: my argument is that genres are more useful for marketers and bookstore staff than readers (or writers).
It didn’t fit any categories, and thus would suffer the worst fate of all for a book project: bookstores wouldn’t know what section to put it in. There is no surer death-knell for a book project than that.
<update> further discussion of this idea is here.
For some reason the Moleskine notebook crossed my mind a few minutes ago and I wondered how hard they are to make?
Make Your Own Moleskine-Like-Notebook:
Your very own Moleskine (pronounced mol-a-skeen-a, /mÉ”ləˈskinÉ™/) -like-notebook/journal/sketchbook. The one we’ll be making is 3.5 x 5.5 x .5 inches. I use this size because it fits nicely into my back or front pants pocket. Strangely enough it is also the same size as the Moleskine notebook. For the pages we’ll be using 20# bond paper (the same paper you use in your copier and inkjet printer). As you might have noticed in the dimensions, the notebook is a half-inch thick. This gives you 192 single pages of writing/sketching/painting fun.
Time-consuming, if it takes 2 days, but perhaps more satisfying. And I expect you would almost feel compelled to use it if it was the product of your own labor rather than just another $10 purchase.
I think this is the only way I could use one, if I were persuaded to try. Might be interesting to make them for kids before a big adventure . . .
These are what I have used for years, but they are quite bulky at 7×10 inches. And not a lot cheaper, not at all when you consider how many fewer pages they have.
Have I been wrong in thinking Moleskines were an expensive frippery?
driftwood or a Message From Beyond?
taken with experimental sieve/lensless camera. Kenmore Air seaplane base.
One of my colleagues at f295 sent out one of his cameras for some of us to try. She came to me first, then on to Oregon, then Missouri, Wisconsin and New York. Depending on how she behaves, perhaps her route will be extended.
if you’re a Mac user you have to check out the three apps they have: Mori, WriteRoom and Clockwork. They are they most simple Mac apps I’ve come across in ages and yet each one had me making that noise in the title because they are all something I can use.
These do look nice: simple and uncluttered, to the point applications.
This iTunes playlist has some pretty good stuff on it, despite the name.
This, for example. Or this. This was the first song I was ever taught to play. Oh, now this is a more representative Air Guitar track. I may have to look through this and see what other odds and ends I can find.
(and no, I don’t get any credit if you order these. can’t be bothered to wrestle with their affiliate mumbo-jumbo. Live it up . . . )
Now playing: Over Under Sideways Down by Jeff Beck from the album “Beckology (Disc 1)” | Get it
Advice of the Day for Monday, August 14, 2006:
Keep a thing for seven years, and you will find a use for it.
From The Old Farmer’s Almanac.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Second Life Rocks (Literally):
Bands like Duran Duran and rapper Talib Kweli are starting to play concerts in Second Life. Are rock stars destined to become jerky, stiff-limbed avatars?
Are they selling tickets to these? Interesting if a band were playing in Second Life and in the more mundane real world and could sell tickets to both?
The proprietor of Orcinus has a guest host in and she dug up an old piece of her own as conversation starter:
It’s occured to me that we might have actually been a lot farther ahead now as a nation if the South had won the Civil War. They could have gone their own way, and let the modern world pass them by…at least, for a while. Very likely, within a generation or two, they would have decided for themselves that liberal democracy might be a good idea after all, and made that transition on their own time, in their own way. By now, they probably would have been just another friendly North American country, like Canada.
But losing the war short-circuited their economic and cultural development. Rather than join the modern world, they became like an abused child who never matures beyond the developmental stage at which the abuse occured. They got stuck in their own victimization and anger, and stayed there. The ever-present opportunity to blame them damn Yankees for everything allowed them to avoid taking any responsibility for their own social progress (or lack thereof). If they were on their own as a country, there would be nobody left to blame, no “tradition” to mourn, no cherished shreds of lost glory to fetishize. Their fate would have been truly their own.
Instead, the bitterness of defeat festered, then metastasized. It got channeled into Jim Crow, fundamentalism, hyperpatriotism, and a crazy dark take-no-prisoners militancy. These are distinctively Southern cultural traits, though they’ve put out some long tendrils that now sprout up wherever rural Americans are in distress. Those people may be Bush’s base, but their very existence is the result of a serious and long-standing pathology in our body politic. In winning the Civil War, we doomed ourselves to an eternal Culture War — which is simply the Civil War still being fought by other means.
Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we should just jettison the South, and give it the freedom to become the country it so desperately thinks it wants to be. Leave the borders open for, say, 20 years, so that those who want to leave the South can move to the US, and those who share the ideals of the new Confederacy can freely emigrate there. If they want to reinstate Jim Crow, install the death penalty for women who seek abortions, and give civil rights only to propertied white born-again men, I think they should have that right….as well as the right to bear the full brunt of the consequences those choices will inevitably bring.
History suggests that the descent into Third World status would be sharp and fast. And this time, they’d have no one to blame but themselves. The resulting disaster would, finally, discredit their worldview as utterly and completely as the fall of the Berlin Wall spelled the end of Communism. At some point, they’d eventually decide that some of those liberal values aren’t so bad after all (especially if they bring the investors back) — and that it’s finally time to join the 20th Century.
That’s my current fantasy, anyway. Let them finally go through the transformation to a modern state on their own. The alternative — which we appear to heading for — is for them to take over the whole country, drag us all back to the place they got stuck (about 1880 or so), and force the rest of us to go through the last century all over again with them, so they can finally learn the hard historical lessons the North and West already figured out the first time around.
I wonder. Would the CSA ever have been prepared to relinquish sovereignty and rejoin the Union? By 1900, would both countries have simply evolved to be neighborly but not close?
As usual when this comes, I have to recommend the Nine Nations of North America as a way of looking at this. There are some natural divisions within the country as it is, based on geography and demography/ethnicity. The south is no more monolithic that the nation as a whole. Florida is not a southern state, as anyone who has lived there knows, no more anymore than Texas is. Garreau’s book offers a more granular breakdown and I think it still holds up pretty well, 25 years on.
Submissions are being accepted for the 2007 pinhole camera.
some nice stuff here: take a look if you’re interested.
