(By the way, I know most people don’t live with a 32-day January, but I like to super-size my January, thus reducing the preposterity that is the bob-tailed month of February.)
1. An exercise I’ve used with my creative writing students, the 6-word story, is often credited to Hemingway, apparently wrongly.
2. Andrei Codrescu’s comment on NPR’s “All Things Considered” this week:
You probably haven’t heard me in a while because I haven’t heard myself in a while. You’ve heard the sage advice to keep your thoughts to yourself. But I decided to go a step farther and tell my thoughts to keep themselves to themselves, so that not even I – the host of these unknown thoughts – would have an inkling as to what they are. It’s a wonderful discipline. It’s like the silence of a silent monk, times two.
I don’t miss my thoughts. Whatever they are thinking in there, hidden from my awareness, don’t harm me and no one else – far as I can tell.
3. Danny Defoe’s 18th C. media awareness.
4. An AVClub piece critical of intentional mediocrity in mass-market movies.
5. Stanley Fish makes a point about critical distance.
6. On sleep and memory.
7. In defense of the lecture.
8. Memorizing poems has value, this post reminds us.
9. E-book sales not so hot anymore; paper books may survive after all the hype that said they wouldn’t.
10. A Thomas Gray poem, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
11. On the portrayal of nerds in popular culture.
MonkeyMoonMachine 