End of Year 7
So what happened this year? Let’s take a look at last year’s goals. Winners in bold: Finish a study of J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (already well in progress), then a study of M. John...
View ArticleArt and Science Allied
Jean-Léon Gérôme: When one is young and inexperienced one prefers the art of sentiment, and has even the false idea that too much study, too much truth, take away from work its light and its movement....
View ArticleWriting with Taste
John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one’s work may be dying, or have some loved one...
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Monthly Report: June 2015
My writing streak is at 1124 days, and you can see how: I consider anything over 10 minutes a non-zero day. In practice, those 10 minute days are probably indistinguishable from days off — I get a...
View ArticleO Brother Anastomosis
When it comes to “Most Surprisingly Excellent Adaptation of a Canon Work Transplanted to a Completely Different Context”, O, Brother, Where Art Thou‘s supremacy is only challenged by The Lion King. The...
View ArticleDavid Milch, Spiritual Writing
David Milch, from a 2005 New Yorker profile: To gain access to the characters, Milch says, his strategy is to make himself disappear. Citing William James in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” he...
View Articlethe blocks
“It’s tough to change in front of a stranger. But you know what’s toughest? Trying to change in front of the one person who knows you best.” The fading applause of snapping fingers follows him off...
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Monthly Report: July 2015
Uh… 822 minutes isn’t great. I’ve been tracking my time stats for 75 months now, and this July came in 66th; every month beneath it occurred in 2010 or 2011, around the time of my college graduation....
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Monthly Report: August 2015
I still think it’s a good idea to do these monthly reports, though I have less and less to report. The theory was that making some semi-public statement of intent would keep me more accountable to my...
View ArticleDept. of Speculation Review
I consider monster to be a strong compliment, and I use it often. Point guard Russell Westbrook is a monster; so is the actor Michael Shannon. Among writers, Virginia Woolf qualifies, along with many...
View ArticleShoulda Kept My Mouth Shut
Cat and mouse stories have many permutations, and they all work. A Quiet Place is one of the more literal, primal takes on this yarn: the human characters are mice, scurrying away from larger apex...
View ArticleGlass House Half Full Cynicism
If you want to understand people, and many readers do, you have to engage with cynicism. A tough ask: the model is predictive, but its exponents are miserable, and not naturally gifted storytellers....
View ArticleStation Eleven’s Heliocentrism Problem
I was very excited to read Station Eleven. Once I finished it, I could launch into an elaborate study of how a great book can be adapted into a great TV show — but I struggled to finish it. At first I...
View ArticleThe Buffet Fantasy
[The Lord of the Rings movies], as well as their spiritual successor Game of Thrones, proved that there’s a massive audience for immersive fantasy. Of course, many have tried to capture that same...
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