I was in the mood to listen to the kind of music you’d hear on a lazy weekend day wandering through the type of hipper-than-thou record store that sells the “For Tobacco Use Only” paraphernalia behind the sales counter. So right now I’ve got Jefferson Starship’s BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE in my ears. Mmm, I can smell the packaged incense in the air.
In other news, it looks like I have another serious shot at another potential job opportunity. More to report when there’s more to report!
Other than that, it’s been a rough week. Lot of craziness this week, what with everyone in my day job field worried about 2019-nCoV. Which didn’t leave me with much energy after the 9-to-5 to do much besides read a bit and idly kill things in DESTINY 2.
WRITING PROGRESS
Longest Writing Chain This Week: 1 day. And that was the only day I wrote this week. I suck, I know.
FEEDING MY HEAD
I did go through some of the books on my TBR pile, but I discovered these pieces that I missed the boat on when they first came out…
I’d never heard of the surrealism of photographer Grete Stern, but I plan to look for some.
…Stern produced a photomontage that recreated some aspect of the reader’s dream. These illustrations usually depicted women struggling to free themselves from the oppressive patriarchy of Argentinian society.
I’m always curious about artistic beefs, especially in music and literature. From a NEW YORKER piece on writer Joanna Russ…
Privately, to mutual friends, Russ accused Le Guin of being accommodating to men, of refusing to write as a woman. In some ways, Le Guin conceded the argument—she claimed to write under the influence of her male “animus”—but in other ways she resisted. After all, wasn’t her freedom not to write “as a woman” precisely the point?
Not that I ever could imitate George Saunders, but there are some tips in this piece in THE PARIS REVIEW
…one of the most important aspects of the Saunders aesthetic is something that might be termed “bonelessness.” A boneless story doesn’t begin with an idea for a central conflict, or with an outline, or with any other structural design. A boneless story has no skeleton. That doesn’t mean that there’s no action. To the contrary, Saunders’s stories are packed with incident. But the stories accumulate beat by beat. As a general rule, Saunders doesn’t conceive of plots in advance, but rather tries to write one funny, interesting moment, and then another funny, interesting moment, and so on. A Saunders story grows like a fungus.
THOUGHT OF THE WEEK
On the price of being an early adopter…
#TwitterGotWeird because I was an early enough adopter to snag my username, to the consternation of various people who've tried to bribe or low key threaten me to give it up since 2007. https://t.co/TIQOn7WlPd
— Don Pizarro (@DonP) February 2, 2020
IN THE WILD
If only I could….