February 2012
16 posts
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Geoff Dyer on Literary Failure
“Failure is quite interesting, and it’s something I have a certain amount of experience with. I wasn’t a failure in the way lots of people are failures—I could always get published, that was pretty straightforward. Literary failure is funny because it’s not like you get this massive slap in the face and become a figure of ridicule. It’s more that you do this thing, you write this book, and...
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“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a...”
– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
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“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
—David Foster Wallace (born today in 1962)
Happy 50th, DFW. You are much missed.
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Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens
“In 1812, the year Charles Dickens was born, there were 66 novels published in Britain. People had been writing novels for a century—most critics date the genre to Robinson Crusoe in 1719—but nobody aspired to do it professionally. Many works of fiction appeared anonymously, with attributions like ‘By a Lady.’ The steam-powered printing press was still in its infancy; the...
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The Five Stages of Creativity
Preparation
Incubation
Insight
Evaluation
Elaboration
(via Mihaky Csikszentmihalyi’s “Creativity: Flow & The Psychology of Discovery”)