Month: March 2010

The Thursday who was a man

Today was a lot like yesterday, just like yesterday was a lot like the day before. That tends to happen in the middle days of the week, and I suspect tomorrow will be a lot like today, except a little more Fridayish.

This evening, I met my parents at the train station in Hicksville, a couple of towns over, and we went out for dinner at a nice local Indian restaurant. My father had just been to the eye doctor to follow up on the procedure he had last week, which according to the doctor went extremely well. My father’s vision isn’t yet 20/20 in the eye, but he’s made a speedy and almost full recovery, which I think allayed some of the concerns he was having.

I did a little writing on the train, knowing that we might get home late and I might use that as an excuse not to, and I think I may be slowly getting past this stumbling block that’s kept me from moving ahead on this one particular story. (Despite having a pretty clear idea of where it’s headed and what happens next.) I think the trick to overcoming writer’s block is not to believe in writer’s block. On the walk to Penn Station this evening, I listened to Eddie Izzard in conversation with Elvis Mitchell, and Izzard talked about how the only way to overcome panic was simply not let yourself panic. It doesn’t help if you do, so you just have to force yourself not to. Easier said than done, maybe, but I’m not sure there’s a better way to do it.

(It’s a little like Jack says in this clip from the first season of Lost: “Fear’s sort of an odd thing.”)

And I watched the second episode of Saturday Night Live‘s first season, which is almost unrecognizable as Saturday Night Live. It’s a little less over-stuffed than the premiere episode, but mostly because it spends so much of its time being just a live music show. There were a couple of amusing filmed segments, and some surprisingly not-very-funny Muppets, but there weren’t any sketches, unless you count a couple of commercial parodies and “Weekend Update.” It’s like watching alternate universe version of the show, or at least very different than the standard Cliff’s Notes version you get in most SNL retrospectives. I don’t know that I enjoyed the episode, but Art Garfunkel was surprisingly good, so there’s that.

Anyway, that’s about it.

Thursday various

  • Putting every New Yorker on paper.

    Artist Jason Polan has an ambitious goal: to sketch all 8.3 million people in the city. He captures his unsuspecting subjects eating pizza, riding the subway, catching a train.

    Hmm. I wonder if I’m anywhere in his sketchbook. [via]

  • Looking for another reason not to like “textbook sociopath” Ayn Rand? Apparently she was a big admirer of certain serial killers. [via]
  • Roger Ebert: class act. [via]
  • It’s not a “late fee,” it’s just money you owe if you don’t bring back the DVD on time.
  • And finally, a great interview with Ursula K. Le Guin about the Google Book Settlement and why she’s opted out:

    I’m part of the technological age whether I want to be or not, and mostly I enjoy it very much. I’m not protesting technology — how stupid would that be? Writers against Computers, or something? I’m protesting against a corporation being allowed to rewrite the rules of copyright and the laws of my country — and in doing so, to wreck the whole idea of that limitless electronic Public Library.

    I think the Google Library could do a lot of good. I think the way Google is going about it will do a lot of harm. [via]

Live from New York

Today was about as close to yesterday as it could get without being a weird repeating loop in the space-time continuum. I spent it mostly reading through a revised chapter on a counseling book we have in development, and also reading through a few of the stories that keep coming for Kaleidotrope ever I since opened the zine back up to submissions in January. It occurs to me, with just the tiniest hint of accompanying panic, that the next issue has to be out next month, in April, and I should probably get some layout work done as soon as possible. I think it’s going to be a really good issue, but I need to bring it all together before that happens. And, because I’m just a little crazy, I’m still thinking about doing three issues this year, the third one coming sometime in July.

This evening, I watched the very first episode of Saturday Night Live (then NBC’s Saturday Night), since I recently purchased — on the cheap, although those prices don’t seem to be offered anymore — the first two seasons on DVD. I’d seen a lot of it, in retrospectives and the like, but I’d never seen the episode in its entirety. It was…interesting, occasionally even amusing. Andy Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse routine is still kind of inspired. But it was more of a weird relic from a time before the show really got a handle of what it would morph into. (Although, after 35 years on the air, it’s safe to say the show has morphed more than a few times.) Intriguing, if only because that first episode is so over-stuffed — George Carlin, two guest comedians, two musical guests (with two songs apiece), the Muppets, and the expected sketch comedy — but not hysterically funny.

And now, if you don’t mind, it’s time for bed.

Wednesday various

  • I don’t know, there has to be a better way to reform our failing public schools than by firing all the teachers. [via]

  • Is it just me or is having Abe Lincoln say, “I’ve been a slave to vampires for thirty years” sort of in questionable taste? It feels like maybe it’s just me. Still, this is pretty neat as far as book trailers go.

  • I admit it, I got a kick out of Hark! A Vagrant’s Canadian Stereotype Comics.

  • Yes, and this font joke. [via]

  • And finally, I meant to post about this when BBC Audiobooks America did their whole audio book by Twitter thing with Neil Gaiman, way back in October, but I just never got around to it. You can read the whole story here (or you can listen to the audio version here), but even I haven’t done that, and I contributed a line to the darn thing. They’ve apparently since done at least one other such story, with author Meg Cabot, but I’m much more interested in the experiment here than the results. It was fun to participate the day-of, but like Salon’s Laura Miller, I’ve yet to be convinced that the results are particularly readable to outside eyes.

    Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: “When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room.” Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you’ve got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason….At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, “Where do you get your ideas?” but the real question is “How do you make sense of your ideas?” [Samuel R.] Delany believed that good writers read so much that they “internalize” certain “literary models” and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story’s proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.

    Which may just be another way of saying too man cooks — especially untrained cooks — spoil the broth.