Announcing: AVM and Story P.

The Tangential: The Zen of Blogging →

Oddly enough, I was logging in this morning to quit following The Tangential, but then there was this post, which is quite good. So I’ll follow them for a little while longer.

thetangential:

My preschool teacher’s report to my parents was, “Jason is very good at sorting.” It’s true: I like to sort things. Sorting means judging, and judging is fun.

But being a champion sorter is not without its angsty moments. When I was in grad school, I wrote an unpublished novel about a…

"The larger question is this: Do we try to balance budget deficits just by cutting antipoverty initiatives, college scholarships and other investments in young people and our future? Or do we also seek tax increases from those best able to afford them?" →

(Source: claytoncubitt)

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 →

claytoncubitt:

“The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two. They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.”

If this prediction were to prove true (which I doubt), what would take the corporation’s place?

I make words soar sore.

Writers and Readers Must Fight Against Publishing Industry →

claytoncubitt:

“Because the only way we can get on with our business is if we finally bury publishing’s corpse and rechannel the energy we’ve spent propping it to build something new. Something that serves the needs not of editors, or marketers, or publishers, or shareholders, or the culture industry, but of writers and readers, who together are recto and verso of the literary community, which is to say, the only thing that matters.” -Dale Peck

The Pimps of Joytime

Becky at the Buckhead Pizza Company in Atlanta recommends a funk band called The Pimps of Joytime. I don’t know if they’re any good but they have the most awesomest name ever.

"So along with this desire to get an education, I had this very strong desire to write; it was a desire so strong that, with the encouragement I was given in college, and the insight aquired, I kept on writing long after “good sense” and the “cold facts” - the “realities” of my life told me, time and again, that I ought to quit, stop the dreaming, quietly go ahead and do something else."

Raymond Carver’s preface to On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner (via sammeh)

Crowd Power (or, Real Life MacGuffins)

Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. That applies to spontaneous events and planned ones alike.

Consider rush hour traffic. People in a hurry to get home will slow down and look at the mildest of fender benders. Sure, someone has to do it first, but once a couple of cars slow down and look, others will too because if these other people are looking, it must be interesting. Right?

Planned events can be that way too. Consider two examples:

Dark Lord Day: Thousands travel from all around to wait hours in line for this sought-after beer.

Opening of In-N-Out Burger in Frisco, Texas: Hundreds travel from all around to wait hours in line for these sought-after burgers.

It’s human nature. People don’t want to miss out. They want to be (or at least feel) part of something. And they like the pursuit of THE HIGHLY SOUGHT AFTER THING because pursuing THE HIGHLY SOUGHT AFTER THING makes them feel part of something and gives them, for just a little while, something that far too many of us feel we lack on a day-to-day basis: Purpose.

They seek these things because, yes, they are good. (If they weren’t, there would never be any momentum in the first place.) But THE THING is still a thing. There are alternatives that, many will argue, are just as good and don’t require waiting in line. But the journey’s the thing, regardless of what’s waiting for them at the end.

Hitchcock, in his films, used the MacGuffin. “The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are (at least initially) willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is.”

Is Dark Lord beer really that good? Is an In-N-Out burger really all that? Maybe. Or maybe they’re the MacGuffins in our lives.

I wouldn’t know. I haven’t had either. Maybe next time, I’ll get in line to see for myself.

Or maybe I’ll reserve my waiting-in-line powers for the next Hitchcock festival instead.

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mismanagedskies:

According to this, I am not drinking enough beer at work. #copywriting