FRANK SANTORO CORRESPONDENCE COURSE for COMIC BOOK MAKERS. NEW COURSE STARTS JANUARY 1st 2013 - Email me capneasyATgmail for application guidelines. I WILL SEND YOU A LINK TO THE LAST COURSE so you can check it out. Ten students per course. 8 week course. 500 bux. Payment plans available. I will work with you. This is the 6th course I have done and I have it down to a science. Great way to study comics for those who can never find the time to make them. Correspondence method works with your schedule. I will show you. You can do it! Applications due by Xmas - unless we all die on Dec 22… http://www.tcj.com/category/columns/riff-raff/page/10/
5 Open Supersecrets About Bloggers
The “five open supersecrets” about bloggers, as Lee Siegel says in Against the Machine (quoted in Benjamin Kunkel’s review at N1BR), are:
- Not everyone has something valuable to say.
- Few people have anything original to say.
- Only a handful of people know how to write well.
- Most people will do almost anything to be liked.
- “Customers” are always right, but “people” aren’t.
I am not sure how these five secrets distinguish bloggers from anyone else, including those who write books. They are worth remembering, though.
The search for meaning is not man’s search. The real question is how to do any good, or as Etty Hillesum put it just days after learning for a certainty that the Germans “are after our total destruction,” the problem is one of “offering what little assistance I can wherever it has pleased God to place me.”
Or, as some wag once said, “in the most carefully constructed experiment under the most carefully controlled conditions, the organism will do whatever it damn well pleases.”
Yoga is not about doing…it is about being. The most important thing to remember is that you have everything you need right in you. Enter every practice without expectation or judgement. Enter every pose as if it were the very first time. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Don’t worry if you are stronger on the right than on the left. Don’t worry if you could do a pose yesterday that you can’t do today. You are exactly where you are meant to be…right here in this moment. Take the first step, and let yoga do the rest.
Everything you need to know about the connections between humans and demi-gods is down there in the subconscious – this is my cut-price Jungian theory. And writing is the sort of process that brings out those connections. With the conscious application of craft, things just pop up. It is like solving a cryptic-crossword clue.
In a recent email newsletter, David Byrne summed it up well:
I also have a funny feeling that, like much of our world that is disappearing onto servers and clouds, eBooks will become ephemeral. I have a sneaking feeling that like lost languages and manuscripts, most digital information will be lost to random glitches and changing formats. Much of our world will become unretrievable—like the wooden houses, music, and knowledge of our ancient predecessors. I have a few physical books that are 100 years old. Will we be able to read our eBooks in 100 years? Really?
We know the past from literature only the way astronomers know distant galaxies: not directly, but by correcting for what we know to be distortions.
Restored Radios exhibit
Durham is growing its own crop of local businesses -- not just local artists and boutique eateries, but also a love of handmade crafts and the pleasure of both making and admiring objects that, as William Morris might say, are both useful and beautiful. The Horse & Buggy Press, a local letterpress, has some wonderful pictures for its Restored Radios exhibit, displaying American radios from the 1930s-50s restored by Asheboro resident Bob Gordon, age 81.
I know these radios were probably mass-manufactured, but damn -- just look at them and marvel at their decoration, their style, their solidity.
Forty years after Alvin Toffler popularised the term “information overload”, we might as well admit this: our efforts to fight it have failed. Unless you’re willing to be radical – to give up the internet completely, say – the recommended cures don’t work.
Resolve to check your email twice daily, and you’ll find many more messages waiting when you do. Go on an “information diet”, and it’s likely to end like any other diet: you’ll succumb and consume the bad stuff, with extra guilt.
So maybe we need to reframe things. The real problem isn’t too much information: it’s the feeling of being out of control. Why not focus, then, on finding ways to feel more in control – even if that’s based, in part, on self-deception?
You can’t change anything by fighting or resisting it. You change something by making it obsolete through superior methods.
Buckminster Fuller
Unpacking my library - FT.com
James Wood: “I deface nearly all my books, with both annotations in ink, and lots of dog-earing. I also write to-do lists in the endpapers, or telephone numbers, or names of people I must email. These latter often prove more interesting than any of my literary comments: years later, I stare at them, trying to work out who these people were.”
Unpacking my library - FT.com
From Postsecret blog
Plus, the more I talk to animators the better I realize that each movie is like a whole new software product, and that the tools are designed to function for a specific shop floor and a specific kind of craftsman. A Ferrari factory has the staff, materials, and skills to make anything…except a Lamborghini.
When my grandmother—whose reading was limited to the Bible and Guideposts, and whose life was circumscribed by the tiny yard around her tiny house in tiny Colorado City, Texas—died 20 years ago, I was pierced, not simply by grief and the loss of her presence, but by a sense that some very particular and hard-won kind of consciousness had gone out of the world. Hers was the kind of consciousness that is not consciousness as intellectuals define it, but is passive rather than active. It allows the world to stream through you rather than you always reaching out to take hold of it. It is the consciousness of the work of art and not necessarily of the artist who made it. People, occasionally, can be such works, creation streaming through them like the inspiration that, in truth, all of creation is.
You don’t get to be a good screenwriter unless you do 20, 30 drafts: fact. I know this because I have written many drafts and given them to Richard Curtis, only for him to gently take me for a cup of tea and say: “Now, Lenworth, let’s have a look at exactly how crap this is.”
David Mitchell on the phrase ‘going forward’
If you’re going to invent the car, then you’ve got to invent the traffic jam.
