The writing process
-
On elegant sledgehammering.
Here’s a tiny piece of Paul Dunbar’s “An Ante-Bellum Sermon.” You can read the whole poem here , or, if you like listening more than reading, there are a couple renditions up on Youtube. An’ de lan’ shall hyeah his thundah Lak a blas’ from Gab’el’s ho’n. Fu’ de Lawd of hosts is mighty When…
-
Excerpts from some other book: Volume 2.
I carried the king of hearts around with me from when I was twelve until I was thirty. It was in the flip-up portrait part of my wallet, where my driver’s license should have been I guess. I was twelve when my mother took me to the store and I bought that wallet, so there…
-
On losing good words.
“I just lost ‘troglodyte.’” “What?” “It was probably my favorite insult back in high school. I’d, like, you know how people make fun of people for reading the dictionary? I never did that, but I’d read through the thesaurus during English class, and that one was in the list for ‘idiot.’ ” “Sure.” “But, right,…
-
Excerpts from some other book: Volume 1.
My favorite animal is the sutured double camel. Takes only three camels to make, and they can live for almost two weeks. Type of guy who says she’s got jugs like an Amazon when he’s not talking asymmetry but rather sheer size of the gazongas. Sitting in a lecture hall, the course was apparently something…
-
On returning books unread.
I would’ve liked to write a post about Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told,” because it seemed like he had an interesting thesis. From what I gathered reading the first five chapters and the short blurb on the dust jacket, he wanted to write about the contribution of the American slave trade, especially…
-
On the grain size of reality and, eventually, creative work.
I thought Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe was fun – he describes some good thought experiments, such as a suicidal contraption to test an idea that wavefunctions don’t collapse and we instead experience randomness due to a bifurcation of realities with perceptual continuity in only one of them – but I didn’t like that he…
-
On quoting Bolaño.
I don’t know. I wrote an essay about this quote Gumaro drank a lot, but he almost never showed the effects of alcohol. When he got drunk, he would pull his chair over to the window and scrutinize the sky, saying: “My brain needs air.” This meant that he was elsewhere. Then he would start…
Frank Brown Cloud 