I don’t like poetry*. But I like this piece by Derrick Brown.
*I also don’t like Labradors. But every time I meet one, I must make an exception for each particular golden fuzzy face.
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Writing & Reading
A nice idea for Expedia, a poster campaign playing on the language of luggage labels. I’m tickled to see Whangarei, a small town in New Zealand that my Aunt used to live in, make the cut.
Hats off to Ogilvy for this one. And in case you’re wondering, NCE is Nice, France and IDA is Idaho Falls, USA.
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“Write in recollection and amazement for yourself” – Jack Kerouac
I have never religiously written morning pages, but I always enjoyed coming home after a night out (technically morning), curling up in bed with a big glass of water and ‘spewing’ my thoughts on to the pages of my notebook. Charming, I know. In the morning I’d find paragraphs of unusable material, all hideously misspelled, but it let me sleep easy.
Things are changing though. Nowadays I find myself rising early on the regular, drinking verbena tea – quelle horreur – and jotting down a few lines. I am very lucky to do what I love for a living, but in ten years all I’ll have is a hard drive, if they still even exist, of PDFs, quaint status updates from 2012 and fuzzy images. It’ll be nice to have something solid, just for me, even if it is hardly fit for public consumption.
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“In this photo released by the Florida Keys News Bureau, David Douglas, center, celebrates at Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, Fla., after winning the 2009 “Papa” Hemingway Look-Alike contest late Saturday, July 25, 2009. Douglas, a 55-year-old Cypress, Texas, mechanical contractor, won the competition after eight tries. Douglas is surrounded by previous Hemingway look-alike winners.”
This made me smile and smile. I can think of a few friends who might be in contention in 20 years!
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The favourite snacks of great writers, via the NY Times. My own writing diet is usually coffee until I shake and need a lie down. I wonder what gets Bret Easton Ellis through the day?
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“Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.”
A little tidbit I just learned: Sylvia Plath first published the The Bell Jar under the nom de plume Victoria Lucas.
I’ve just finished reading it
My favourite line from the book:
Then I folded the linen napkin and laid it between my lips and brought my lips down on it precisely. When I put the napkin back on the table a fuzzy pink lip-shape bloomed right in the middle of it like a tiny heart.
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You need to see London at night, particularly the theaters. But not just the night life. London itself looks best in the dark. It’s a pretty safe city, and you can walk in most places after sunset. It has a sedate and ghostly beauty. In the crepuscular kindness, you can see not just how she is, but how she once was, the layers of lives that have been lived here. Somebody with nothing better to do worked out that for every one of us living today, there are 15 ghosts. In most places you don’t notice them, but in London you do. The dead and the fictional ghosts of Sherlock Holmes and Falstaff, Oliver Twist, Wendy and the Lost Boys, all the kindly, garrulous ghosts that accompany you in the night. The river runs like dark silk through the heart of the city, and the bridges dance with light. There are corners of silence in the revelry of the West End and Soho, and in the inky shadows foxes and owls patrol Hyde Park, which is still illuminated by gaslight.
- from My London, and Welcome to It by A.A. Gill. Beautiful writing.
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Coffee does indeed fix most things (or just a chat with Mon, who took the photo). But in times of doubt it’s important to remember that “Comparing yourself to others makes you vulnerable to shame”.
For me, this sentiment gets filed under writing:
We have nobody’s life to live but our own. From any larger perspective, be it evolutionary, religious or spiritual, we are all here for a very short time, less than an eyeblink in the broad scheme of things, whether we die at age one or one hundred. We are all beautiful and essentially flawed human beings. In the words of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross put it, “I’m not okay, you’re not okay and that’s okay.”
From I’m Not Okay, You’re Not Okay, and That’s Okay! by Harriet Lerner, Ph.D.
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This is Ira Glass. You probably know him from NPR’s This American Life.
This is what he said about creativity, production, and good work:
What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.
It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
This is the video the quote comes from, it’s loosely about film production, but really about anything CREATIVE:
(Ira Glass on Storytelling: parts one, two, and four.)
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