Skip to content

Monthly Archives: July 2010

The water between then and now

I’ve picked up some contracting work to help us through the lean times and I’m learning JQuery. Until this point I’ve never used Javascript or JQuery at all, which will become important later. The JQuery ‘hello world’ equivalent is basically this: $(document).ready(function() { alert(‘Suck it.’); }); If you stick that in a file, stick the [...]

Notes on dialogue

Janet Fitch writes about writing dialogue: Dialogue is only for conflict. It’s like a racehorse, it can’t just carry any old thing, the pots and pans and old tires. You can’t heap all your expository business on it, the meet and greet, all that yack. It’s just for the conflict between one character and another. [...]

Maximizing your Shane-ness

I spend a significant amount of time being the crazy dude who came to someone else’s classroom to talk about how poetry is amazing. Right now, I’m the commencement speaker. I promise, in three hours, I’ll be the guy who looks uncomfortable in a tie on the downtown 4 train. The way it feels to [...]

The utility of booze

“I don’t really know that liquor will cure all the ills in our society. But two or three slugs often cure our curious inability to know each other. Unless we know people well, we sit around with our words and our minds starched, afraid of being ourselves for fear of wrinkling them.” —Budd Schulberg, What [...]

C.S. Lewis on the merits of old books

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like [...]