Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
My friend Chris says thanks for publicizing his superyacht app for iPhones, and I can take a cut for every app sold. Of course these items are free, so arguably I’m on to not such a good thing.
In fact, I’m already scoring so many zeroes as a writer, if I start racking up even more of the buggers as a purveyor of apps, I don’t know what I’ll do with all the absence of wherewithal piling up everywhere. … Read more
In the interests of conciseness, a fundamental rule of good writing style, and seeing how much Jack likes my turns of phrase, I’ve converted much of my lengthy “Licking doorknobs” post of 19 June — a tribute to investors and financial analysts everywhere — into a haiku:
Dark skies gravid with
Precipitate disaster.
Bears sail arks of gold.
Hey, it’s got 17 syllables. What more do you expect? Maybe Jack or his “nameless scrivener” can tell me if … Read more
“Sky gravid with precipitate disaster.” My, my. Our man Collin certainly has a way with words, hasn’t he? Nevertheless, he’s still starving right along with the rest of us wordsmiths, though not as successfully as some.
But he does understand the kind of lifestyle where the sky is always falling and so what? That’s just the way things are.
We have a buddy, a felllow scrivener, who shall remain nameless, who fled Bangkok’s gravid skies to earn actual money … Read more
Chicken Little epidemic
Our streets appear increasingly aswarm with Chicken Little financial savants.
All around the world, it seems, a hard rain is about to fall. The sky is gravid with precipitate disaster, and quite a few people are reviewing plans to build financial arks, many of these latter-day Noahs figuring they’ll build their boats of gold.
And good luck to them. One advantage of being a starving writer in a state of perennial penury—blessed with a principled resistance to … Read more
Leary here… Darn it, these last few days we’ve gone from spinning in our pre-graves to pre-obits to being pre-dead.
Whatever. Like some wise man once said, not me: Getting old is the only way there is of living a long time. And I want to live a long time. Gosh. The things that go on in this life, you just don’t want to miss what’s gonna happen next.
And here I am, coming to you from some time after … Read more
Hey, and that’s just one island. The basis of the whole world is probably even weirder.
(There’s a PowerPoint selection of more surreal photos by Erik Johansson afloat in cyberspace, but I can’t seem to establish a link here. Ask me, and I’ll e-mail it to you.)… Read more
“The best break anybody ever gets is in bein’ alive in the first place. An’ you don’t unnerstan’ what a perfect deal it is until you realizes that you ain’t gone be stuck with it forever, either.”
–Porkypine (in Walt Kelly’s Pogo)
“You have to cut way down on your bread, Mr. Piprell,” said my doctor, a charming and entirely competent Thai woman whom I’ve been consulting for years. “You should also avoid rice, potatoes and pasta.” There was a … Read more
* PRE-OBITS. P.J. O’Rourke has recently suggested a way to help draw readers back to newspapers.
“No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism,” he suggests. “You can still buy a buggy whip, which is more than can be said for a copy of the Rocky Mountain News, Cincinnati Post, or Seattle Post-Intelligencer.”
What’s needed, he suggests, is a new kind of feature: “What I propose is “Pre-Obituaries”—official notices that certain … Read more
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” (reported by Boswell, in his Life of Johnson)
Attributed to Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the renowned author and lexicographer, that’s one of the most famous writerly aphorisms in the English language.
Others have seen things differently.
Arthur Schopenhauer, for one (1788-1860), had this to say about the matter:
“There are above all two kinds of writer: those who write for the sake of what they have to say and … Read more
Collin’s not the only one comparing professional writers to blacksmiths, these days. Scott Adams, e.g, of “Dilbert” fame, presents his Adams Theory of Content Value: “As our ability to search for media content improves, the economic value of that content will approach zero.”
The fate of the author in the age of digital gizmodery (with apologies to Scott Adams):
Among other things, Adams predicts “that the profession known as ‘author’ will be retired to history in my lifetime, … Read more
