Your humble narrator is a regular reader of the blog The Art of Manliness. I disagree with about one third of what is presented, an indifferent to another third, & quite enjoy the remaining third. The following is by Jack London, writing about writing, with minor & easily discernible editorial commentary from the Art of Manliness folks:
Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a “stint,” [London wrote 1,000 words nearly every day of his adult life] and see that you do that “stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.
Today I wrote my thousand words, & then some. We are in far too preliminary a stage of TRIANGLE to be doing any serious writing, but I composed & transmitted to K. Steeze an e-mail of not one thousand words, but close to double that, approximately one thousand eighty hundred fifty words. By such incremental steps, not all at once but a little bit day by day, I can thwart my indefatigable subconscious desire to thwart myself & become the writer I yearn to be, the writer I know I can be.
Grow or die.
The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
They Might Be Giants, "She's an Angel" (live) from Severe Tire Damage (T.L.A.M.)
Commentary: What's the first thing a angel says, almost invariably, when it appears in Scripture? "Be not afraid." What can we induce—not deduce—from this? Angels are possessed of a terrible majesty, possessed of such awesome power that it threatens to strip our simple, sin-ridden minds of reason & reduce us to our primal instinct to flee in abject terror lest the messengers of the Lord provide authoritative reassurance but quick. None of which has much to do with "She's an Angel," but there's at least an tangential connection.
"I found out she's an angel,
I don't think she knows I know,
I'm worried that something might happen to me
If anyone ever finds out.
"Why—why did they send her over anyone else?
How should I react?
These things happen to other people,
They don't happen at all!
"When you're following an angel
Does it mean you have to throw your body off a building?
Somewhere they're meeting on a pinhead,
Calling you an angel, calling you the nicest thing…"
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