The stone face watcheth (Taken with Instagram at Seattle Center)
LIke the sculptor, who can never fashion a hair or a thread in marble, the writer finds himself pulled up at many points by the nature of his material. Words, like marble, have their own chilling form of rigidity. Inspire and prompt as it may, in practice the beloved material is always imposing up on its lover some limitation or other, and there is no sentence in which a writer burning to charge his utterance with its utmost fill of significance does feel that some words, at least, are mere structural necessities, not signal rockets but only the dead-weight sticks that must attend them. The harder a writer tries to add beauty to clearness, the more surely does he feel himself to be held off from perfection by attributes of language which he did not make and cannot do away with; words otherwise come near to expressing fully his personal sense of some enchanting thing may be found to hiss with sibilant letters, or scrunch and jolt with grinding lumps of harsh consonants, or dribble off into weak trickles of unaccounted syllables. At every turn he is faced with a demand for compromise; either the sensuous rightness of rhythm may have to forgo a part of its dues, or the more austere beauty of precision and coherence must be marred. At moments the true wedded lover almost craves for a larger liberty — Oh for some yet undiscovered mode of notation! Why should not mind be able to pass on to mind its thrilled sense of a storm or a flower without having to knead up the air and fire of the delighted spirit with the earth of a current vocabulary?
C. E. Montague, A Writer’s Notes on his Trade, from the essay ‘Words, Words, Words’, 1930
The anthropologist Keith Hart once told me a story about his brother, who in the ‘50s was a British soldier stationed in Hong Kong. Soldiers used to pay their bar tabs by writing checks on accounts back in England. Local merchants would often simply endorse them over to each other and pass them around as currency: once, he saw one of his own checks, written six months before, on the counter of a local vendor covered with about forty different tiny inscriptions in Chinese.
Highlighted by Martin McClellan in Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber
Anais Nin’s dedication in ‘The Novel of the Future’ (Taken with instagram)
Good morning. Tom Gauld is posting his comics on Tumblr!
If only the next people who decided to have a war would stay home and make a movie instead, it would be just as expensive and beyond human control, but by the time you got sick of it, you could go home.
Eve Babitz, LA Woman, 1982
Band Here We Go Magic found John Waters hitchhiking. Picks him up.
(via Hitchhiking Director John Waters Picked Up In Ohio By Indie Rock Band: DCist)
In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.
John Scalzi explains to ignorant white guys all about being a white guy and what it means in this world. Nicely done. Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is – Whatever
Thanks to our awesome Twitter community (who love to retweet), we surpassed the 4 million mark on @breakingnews this morning.
Thanks everyone!
