"Giving shape to a painful experience is powerful because it helps us to see first, how we got through it; second, how we can share it. The experience doesn’t stay trapped within us, unspoken, curdling — instead, the art of arranging and transforming it reduces the burden. It no longer belongs to only you. The process of assigning the experience a beginning, a middle and an end, of giving it form, is a way of mastering it. Each sentence contains the chaos — our experience becomes what we perceive. And the honesty in these perceptions, whether true or invented, creates a bridge to another person."
— http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/books/review/the-accidental-writer.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y (via prefigurationsofmygeneration)
"Mitt Romney has nothing really coherent or substantive to say about domestic policy, but at least he can sound energetic and confident about it. On foreign policy, the subject of Monday night’s final presidential debate, he had little coherent to say and often sounded completely lost. That’s because he has no original ideas of substance on most world issues, including Syria, Iran and Afghanistan."
—
The New York Times on the final presidential debate (via barackobama)
And Boom goes the dynamite.
(via jesuislegrandefromage)
I would really like to see one of those analytics things to see how many times Romney used some variant of the phrase “Iran is four years closer to the bomb” last night. Because son, that song is awfully old, and awfully wrong.
(via notapiece)
The “small penis rule” is an informal strategy used by authors to evade libel lawsuits. It was described in a New York Times article in 1998:
“…For a fictional portrait to be actionable, it must be so accurate that a reader of the book would have no problem linking the two,” said Mr. Friedman. Thus, he continued, libel lawyers have what is known as “the small penis rule.” One way authors can protect themselves from libel suits is to say that a character has a small penis, Mr. Friedman said. “Now no male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis, that’s me!’ “
The small penis rule was referenced in a 2006 dispute between Michael Crowley and Michael Crichton. Crowley alleged that after he wrote an unflattering review of Crichton’s novel State of Fear, Crichton libeled him by including a character named “Mick Crowley” in the novel Next. In the novel, Mick Crowley is a child rapist, described as being a Washington-based journalist and Yale graduate with a small penis.
Source.
"Listen, there were creative writing teachers long before there were creative writing courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors."
— Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
"I despise death and consider it a humiliation and in any case much overdone and so plan never to do it myself and plan never to have anything at all to with it, for it is so contagious. I have noticed that when you know people who die, you catch it and end up dead, too."
— Those Words That Echo … Echo … Echo Through Life, by Jamaica Kincaid
I can’t wait to see the New York Times A1 tomorrow. Historic events make me cry; historic events recorded valiantly via print journalism make me cry harder.
My liveblogging friends on Tumblr, of course, are of a different brand altogether: thank you for sharing this excitement tonight. One humble ally is beside herself with joy.
