Mixed lollies
I imagine it's been a busy weekend at Rakon after the Herald's special report on Saturday. The fact the company supplies the US military with components for smart bombs will not be news to anyone who's been even half awake over the last couple of years, but the volume of internal emails included in the story was pretty impressive - and the contents embarrassing for the company. Watch for the reaction.Anyway, from Mark this week we have Douglas Coupland on living to write:
It's a need. When it goes, it's not so much writer's block, it's more raison d'etre block; I can't much see the point of anything.Plus this on the challenges faced by newspapers online and someone getting their suspicions about Disney confirmed in the cruelest way - trying to buy a drink.
Stephen finds environmental sceptic Michael Shermer recanting under the weight of global warming evidence:
Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental scepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from scepticism to activism.Chris finds Oulipo, a strange school of literature that uses linguistic constraints to create new ways of writing, interesting. Some Oulipo members restrict the number of vowels used; some never use the same word twice. It seems absurdly conceptual, but it can help writers to break through cliched thinking. Here and here (Quicktime), Ian Monk, one of the few who does Oulipo in English, discusses his poems and stories.
Perhaps stranger than Oulipo, Boing Boing finds police in Florida targeting an English student over a horror story. They have demanded he submit his fingerprints and DNA so they can compare his fictional murder with evidence unsolved cases. There’s an update here: an angry lawyer wants to know why they’re policing fiction.
From me Slate does tawdry pulp covers for the classics and this worrying piece on a questionable US terrorism conviction.
Ciao.
posted by Rob O'Neill at 9:05 PM
2 Comments:
"Writers' block" is a load of self-dramatizing nonsense. Ever hear of farmers' block or underwriters' block or cleaners' block?
Best comment on writers' block I ever heard was from Terry Pratchett, who reckoned his early career as a journalist on an English provincial newspaper cured him of any notion such a thing exists.
Claim to have writers' bock, he reckoned, and "unsympathetic people would shout at you until you wrote something".
I must say it sounds a lot like provincial newspapers in New Zealand as well. And writing is easier today, with computers - write something you don't like and you don't have to rip the paper out of the typewriter and start the page again.
That's one point of view, Rob. And it's certainly true that it doesn't work as an excuse in journalism - you're either on deadline, or you're not. Novelists tend to think differently, however. They usually have to impose their own writing schedules and exorcise their own demons; to the extent that, much like actors who won't refer to "The Scottish Play", they call it "Blighter's Rock" so as not to jinx themselves. You're confusing writing and typing, however, Rob, in your assertion that computers have made life easier for writers.
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