Reading

asking myself this as I read about a man named Lish. Gordon Lish. Editor of Raymond Carver. Friend of Don Delillio. I learned about him as a quick aside mentioned here in this YT video on White Noise which sent me googling and found me here at this ’expose’ in the nytimes in 1998 about how Lish edited Carver’s early works quite a lot, it seemed, and perhaps enough to say that he was the guy who wrote them? ...

there’s a difference! Because this blog right now is still an infant, and literally I think only three people have ever even been given the link, I am able to be much more sensitive to the shifting experience of writing it as more people become aware of it. for example: i shared it with Michael Dean last week (Michael if you’re reading this, which you probably are cuz i’ll probably send it to you, hi!). ...

I love collecting prompts and just found a bunch of real weird ones in a book titled Learning for people who prefer not to be taught Some prompts: Just add hot water and stir Internship Lottery Performative Artists’ Talks

While reading it, you start to think and write in the voice of that book. That happened fast with Lily King’s “Heart the Lover." Because then I’m still going to be 99% me or 90%, but that adjustment is so cool. That’s one of the best things books can do, especially when you read it first thing in the morning. I think that’s a big part of why that worked this morning - it was the first thing i read this morning.

Source: Book : SL夢幻 / La Scene de la Locomotive a Vapeur Photo : 廣田　尚敬 / Naotaka Hirota (shared by: this isn’t happiness)

I’m reading this book - a classic in the marketing world, apparently, called Positioning. Here’s a lil bit from the intro: from the book Positioning has changed the way the advertising game is being played today. “We’re the third largest-selling coffee in America,” say the Sanka radio commercials. The third largest? Whatever happened to those good old advertising words like “first” and “best” and “finest”? Well, the good old advertising days are gone forever and so are the words. Today you find comparatives, not superlatives. ...

Soooo this actor and writer Richard Ayoade wrote a book called The Unfinished Harauld Hughes which is about a writer of books and screenplays and other things. And as part of writing that book, Ayoade also wrote and published actual books by his fictional character Harauld Hughes!!! Here’s Wallace Shawn explaining what Ayoade did: _many writers have invented characters who are writers—but do you know any other writer who has not only invented a character who is a writer but who has then gone on to actually write and publish that imaginary writer’s complete works? Richard Ayoade has done that, and if you take out your Kindle and look up Harauld Hughes, Faber will be glad to send you Hughes’s collected plays, poems, prose pieces, and screenplays, all in fact written by Richard Ayoade. ...

Reading more of her this morning and I don’t want to stop. There is a joy in her words, an aliveness, that is contagious. I feel as though she does not want to stop writing, and thus, perhaps, I don’t want to stop reading. The topics vary wildly from why armed forces wear uniforms to the paucity of ‘growth’ as the prevailing metaphor for our entire way of being and doing. No matter the details though, I want to keep reading. ...

I’m reading her book right now, No Time To Spare, and am filled with this familiar feeling of how it feels when you’re reading someone and just feel…seen. Understood, yes, but more than that, like your own way of understanding itself is being reflected back to you. Or, in other words, she’s just smart and I like how her brain moves ideas around, how it thinks and how she shares that thinking with the world. ...