Love, lists, and what I ate.: Archive

I skipped the office pool this week… dun dun duuuun.

Mar 30, 2011

Mar 29, 20111,359 notes

Mar 29, 201192 notes

“What does a sesame seed grow into? I don’t know - we never give it a chance!” —MITCH HEDBERG (via inothernews) I’m embarassed that I never had this thought. Because of this, I looked up sesame plants. Here.

Mar 29, 2011150 notes

#sesame #mitch hedberg #food #huh

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Mar 29, 201131 notes

#baltimore #the charles #Elizabeth Taylor

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Mar 29, 20114,626 notes

#book arts #book ring

Ten Rules for "Serious" Writers by B.R. Myers

wordpainting:

The rules are as follows:

1. Be Writerly: If your writing is too natural, then there is no way it is scholarly.

2. Sprawl: Content doesn’t matter, it’s all about size. Critics are impressed by big books, so brevity should be dismissed.

3. Equivocate: If it doesn’t make sense, there can always be a good excuse. Truth can always be distorted as long as it makes the writer sound good. For example, the plot isn’t important because the lack of plot is what’s important.

4. Mystify: If people think that your writing is smarter than their writing, then they will respect your writing. If you sound smart (and definitely if you are published) then you must possess a brilliant mind.

5. Keep Sentences Long: If the sentence is not long and boring, then it is definitely not literature.

6. Repeat yourself: Repetition of words is important. If you don’t mention your subject enough times, then the reader may not know what you are talking about. You may also use synonyms to show that you know how to use a thesaurus, and thus, must be an intelligent writer.

7. Pile on the Imagery: Your writerly credentials will bloom to greatness if your ability to tie together multiple similes and metaphors like the wooden pieces of a Lincoln log set, never disintegrate from the fiery visage of the sun. The more literary devices that you can throw together, the better the writing.

8. Archaize: If thine style of writing reflects an age long gone, and a world unfamiliar to the modern reader, than thou art indeed a master of the quill and the ink. This is very similar to rule number four, except you must write as if you are stuck in the past, rather than stuck in a dictionary.

9. Bore: The word boring may as well be a synonym to the word scholarly. Along the lines of rule number one, you cannot write naturally, or make your words interesting. It is simply not scholarly. People are not supposed to be able to understand your writing, they are only supposed to realize that your writing is brilliant, because it just might be the cure for insomnia.

10. Play the part: Remember to be as you write, scholarly, literate, practically a god. You must understand that when you seem smart, when you seem to believe in yourself, others will do the same, because, how could someone that is so smart and so pompous be wrong?

[These rules are from the appendix of B.R. Myers’s book titled A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose]

these are great rules for writers.

#11 is never have any money ever, drink whiskey because it’s what the great writers drank, and be depressed.

…I added those in because I’m more of a cultural writer, not so much a practicing one. (see what I did there?)

Mar 29, 2011104 notes

#writing #cultural writer #rules for writers #br myers

Mar 29, 201110 notes

Mar 29, 2011197,051 notes

“

This is a great idea, because everybody’s knows that abortions are a classic impulse buy — one of those things you toss into the cart at checkout, like Us Weekly or Sugar Babies! …That’s why I am giving a well-deserved tip of my hat to South Dakota. Now let’s be clear, folks: this abortion law (requiring a three-day waiting period to get an abortion) is not limiting a woman’s rights. As South Dakota Dennis Daugaard said, ‘I hope that women who are considering abortion will use this three-day period to make good choices.’ See? He’s clearly pro-choice, in that he sometimes uses the word ‘choice.’

Now personally, I think any procedure a doctor performs should have a three-day waiting period — unless that procedure is to save the life of a handgun, because in South Dakota, there is no waiting period for guns of any kind! South Dakota backs a woman’s right to choose — as long as it’s between a .45 and a semi-automatic.

” —STEPHEN COLBERT, on South Dakota’s Neanderthal laws restricting abortion, on The Colbert Report (via inothernews)

Mar 29, 20111,979 notes

Mar 29, 201119 notes

Love, lists, and what I ate.

April 2011

March 2011