Killing An Hour

"Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share."

~Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000)

"Belief and Technique for Modern Prose"

Here are some tips on how to write like Jack Kerouac, courtesy of Mr. Kerouac.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

An Encounter

"My voice had an accent of forced bravery in it and I was ashamed of my paltry stratagem. I had to call the name again before Mahony saw me and hallooed in answer. How my heart beat as he came running across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little."

~James Joyce, Dubliners (1914)

An Epistemological Nightmare

(by Raymond M. Smullyan, 1982)

"Scene 1

Frank is in the office of an eye doctor. The doctor holds up a book and asks "What color is it?" Frank answers, "Red." The doctor says, "Aha, just as I thought! Your whole color mechanism has gone out of kilter. But fortunately your condition is curable, and I will have you in perfect shape in a couple of weeks."

Scene 2

(A few weeks later.) Frank is in a laboratory in the home of an experimental epistemologist. (You will soon find out what that means!) The epistemologist holds up a book and also asks, "What color is this book?" Now, Frank has been earlier dismissed by the eye doctor as "cured." However, he is now of a very analytical and cautious temperament, and will not make any statement that can possibly be refuted. So Frank answers, "It seems red to me."

Epistemologist:
Wrong!

Frank:
I don't think you heard what I said. I merely said that it seems red to me.

Epistemologist:
I heard you, and you were wrong.

Frank:
Let me get this clear; did you mean that I was wrong that this book is red, or that I was wrong that it seems red to me?

Epistemologist:
I obviously couldn't have meant that you were wrong in that it is red, since you did not say that it is red. All you said was that it seems red to you, and it is this statement which is wrong.

Frank:
But you can't say that the statement "It seems red to me" is wrong.

Epistemologist:
If I can't say it, how come I did?

Frank:
I mean you can't mean it.

Epistemologist:
Why not?

Frank:
But surely I know what color the book seems to me!

Epistemologist:
Again you are wrong."

Read the rest here.

Epitaph of a Miss Nott

"Nott born, Nott dead, Nott christened, Nott begot;
So here she lies that was and that was Nott.
Reader behold a wonder rarely wrought,
Which while thou seem'st to read thou readest Nott."

Difference between the English Poets

Here is what someone sees as the differences among the English poets:
"Chaucer describes men and things as they are ; Shakespeare, as they would be under the circumstances supposed ; Spenser, as we would wish them to be ; Milton, as they ought to be ; Byron, as they ought not to be; and Shelley, as they never can be."

Schott and Willing

Schott and Willing did engage
In duel fierce and hot;
Schott shot Willing willingly,
And Willing he shot Schott.

The shot Schott shot made Willing quite
A spectacle to see;
While Willing's willing shot went right
Through Schott's anatomy.

~Anonymous

Brevity

A Mr. McNair once wrote to his nephew the following letter:
Dear Nephew,
;

The nephew replied with this:
Dear Uncle,
:

The uncle meant "See my coal on" (See to it that my coal is shipped), which was expressed by a se-mi-col-on, to which the nephew responded "Coal on" (Coal shipped), expressed by col-on.

Astonish Yourself

The following are from Roger-Pol Droit's book Astonish Yourself! 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life (2003).

1. Call yourself
2. Empty a word of its meaning
3. Look in vain for "I"
4. Make the world last twenty minutes
5. See the stars below you
6. See a landscape as a stretched canvas
7. Lose something and not know what
8. Recall where you were this morning
9. Hurt yourself briefly
10. Feel eternal
11. Telephone at random
12. Rediscover your room after a journey
13. Drink while urinating
14. Make a wall between your hands
15. Walk in the dark
16. Dream of all the places in the world
17. Peel an apple in your head
18. Visualize a pile of human organs
19. Imagine yourself high up
20. Imagine your imminent death
21. Try to measure existence
22. Count to a thousand
23. Dread the arrival of the bus
24. Run in a graveyard
25. Play the fool
26. Watch a woman at her window
27. Invent lives for yourself
28. Look at people from a moving car
29. Follow the movement of ants
30. Eat a nameless substance
31. Watch dust in the sun
32. Resist tiredness
33. Overeat
34. Play the animal
35. Contemplate a dead bird
36. Come across a childhood toy
37. Wait while doing nothing
38. Try not to think
39. Go to the hairdresser
40. Shower with your eyes closed
41. Sleep on your front in the sun
42. Go to the circus
43. Try on clothes
44. Calligraphize
45. Light a fire in the hearth
46. Be aware of yourself speaking
47. Weep at the cinema
48. Meet up with friends after several years
49. Browse at the bookseller's
50. Become music
51. Pull out a hair
52. Walk in an imaginary forest
53. Demonstrate on your own
54. Stay in the hammock
55. Invent headlines
56. Listen to short-wave radio
57. Turn off the sound on the TV
58. Redisover a childhood scene that seemed larger
59. Get used to eating something you don't like
60. Fast for a while
61. Rant for ten minutes
62. Drive through a forest
63. Give without thinking about it
64. Look for a blue food
65. Become a saint or sinner
66. Recover lost memories
67. Watch someone sleeping
68. Work on a holiday
69. Consider humanity to be an error
70. Inhabit the planet of small gestures
71. Disconnect the phone
72. Smile at a stranger
73. Enter the space of a painting
74. Leave the cinema in daytime
75. Plunge into cold water
76. Seek out immutable landscapes
77. Listen to a recording of your voice
78. Tell a stranger she is beautiful
79. Believe in the existence of a smell
80. Wake up without knowing where
81. Descend an interminable staircase
82. Swallow your emotion
83. Fix the ephemeral
84. Decorate a room
85. Laugh at an idea
86. Vanish at a pavement cafe
87. Row on a lake in your room
88. Prowl at night
89. Become attached to an object
90. Sing the praises of Santa Claus
91. Play with a child
92. Encounter pure chance
93. Recite the telephone directory on your knees
94. Think about what other people are doing
95. Practice make-believe everywhere
96. Kill people in your head
97. Take the subway without going anywhere
98. Remove your watch
99. Put up with a chatterbox
100. Clean up after the party
101. Find the infinitesimal caress

Try doing one a day.

"As I've Matured..."

As I've Matured...
I've learned that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is stalk them and hope they panic and give in.
I've learned that one good turn gets most of the blankets.
I've learned that no matter how much I care, some people are just jackasses.
I've learned that it takes years to build up trust, and it only takes suspicion, not proof, to destroy it.
I've learned that whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
I've learned that you shouldn't compare yourself to others - they are more screwed up than you think.
I've learned that depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
I've learned that it is not what you wear; it is how you take it off.
I've learned that you can keep vomiting long after you think you're finished.
I've learned to not sweat the petty things, and not pet the sweaty things.
I've learned that ex's are like fungus, and keep coming back.
I've learned age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
I've learned that I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy it.
I've learned that we are responsible for what we do, unless we are celebrities.
I've learned that artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
I've learned that 99% of the time when something isn't working in your house, one of your kids did it.
I've learned that there is a fine line between genius and insanity.
I've learned that the people you care most about in life are taken from you too soon and all the less important ones just never go away. And the real pains in the ass are permanent.

~Anonymous

"A Pun-gent Chapter"

The bakers, being ambitious to extend their do-mains, declared that a revolution was needed, and, though not exactly bred up to arms, soon reduced their crusty masters to terms. The tailors called a council of the board to see what measures could be taken, and, looking upon the bakers as the flower of chivalry, decided to follow suit; the consequence of which was, that a cereous insurrection was lighted up among the candle-makers, which, however wick-ed it might appear in the eyes of some persons, developed traits of character not unworthy of ancient Greece.

~Theodore Hook, describing a general strike in Paris

Creative Writing 101

Kurt Vonnegut gives the following eight rules of creative writing in the preface to his book Bagombo Snuff Box (1999):

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

He further adds, "The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that."