Four Books for Aspiring Writers

These are Mental Floss's suggestions.

Doris Lessing's "Fiery" Nobel Speech

We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

Read the whole thing here.

Fight Club Lessons for Writers

Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, decided to just watch YouTube to find the art and poetry of streetfights. In his Slate article, Rotella even gave us lessons he got from watching websites of these fights. He gave us the basic lesson (Skip the preliminaries, strike first, and keep it coming) which makes Brad Pitt really a poseur. I mean, no more braggadocio in real fights. So goodbye to Filipino fight films, for that matter. I know this because I've seen this. One guy would start heaving for to his "300" scream and "Kappow" he's down before he can draw out his breath from his diaphragm.
There is very little you can draw from actual streetfighting with writing, or maybe there is. One, no more preparation for the big finish if you started bad. Maybe this is the lesson for writing leads. If your lead is bad, be sure to be knocked out by the reader.
Rotella's first lesson (If you're going to pick a fight, or consent to such an invitation, know what you're getting into and be prepared for a fast start and a quick finish). Most fights are a blur, even to the pugilists. One, you are either very drunk to be in a fight or blinded by rage. You can either be very dangerous at this state of mind or very stupid. Similarly, if you're very drunk and you are writing the editorial, forget it. You are picking a fight you would regret the next morning when it is published. It's either you picked the wrong guy (there are fight videos here where the picker get picked on very brutally) or you get into a fast fight and your body is in slo-o-ow motion. You die a slo-o-ow death. I hope, figuratively.
Second lesson: If people are standing around smiling mysteriously and pointing cell phones at you for no apparent reason, you should get ready to duck. Remember as a writer, you are also a target. Know these mysterious smiles. Beware of the sucker punch. Don't write as if there's no tomorrow because you will get it.
Third lesson from Rotella is: There's a thin line between doofus and genius, and people often fight with one foot planted on each side of it. Norman Mailer is one writer who liked to brawl. And he acknowledged that he was putting his feet in Nobel stage and doofusland when he did. Unless you have the arsenal of Mailer's books, don't follow suit.
Rotella's last lesson is more of the commentary side. It's the blow-by-blow from the people watching. No color commentaries. Just "he just beat you, man" and other obvious observations. Why? Because of the spontaneity of the fights, you just can't believe it. They're fighting in front of you. There's blood and then woof! it's over.
Poems should aspire for that, sometimes. Fight in front of the unknowing readers and make them think, Oh, it's a fight, while you are being read. Then it's over and the readers would think, What was that? And the poem will re-play like a YouTube in their minds.
Inspired by such, I decided to click on one of the websites Rotella recommended and randomly clip on one fo the videos:

After watching this, I was thinking, where's the genius? This is all doofus extravaganza. And the things they are doing to their family jewels are so awesome. Nice way to start the day.

The Zen of Blogging Trends and Writing

I say we meditate on this graph which I got from swissmiss:

According to Google Trends, blog as a trend has been slowing down, while blogging never really had much velocity. What it means to me is people who established their blogs has established their blogs. Many stopped because they were bored or maybe they have nothing to write about or maybe they have said what they have to say. maybe they realized that they can not make money from blogging and so moved on to other things. Those who remained are those who have stories to tell and have a strong need to connect to other people. These are the writers who don't care if they are read as long as they can write. That means us. We are the flat red line. This is not the flat line which means that the World Wide Web is dead. This is the horizon of infinite possibilities.
Then we meditate on this next graph:
Chris Harrison of Carnegie Mellon University created this Internet map. It shows the Internet usage for a period of time. It looks like a spider web on a leaf. The densest, of course, is the Europe - North America link. Philippines is hardly visible and so are China and Japan. Harrison goes on to say that this doesn't show that there are fewer Internet users in these areas. It's just that they're sharing lines.
"It is important to note that this only reflects density of connections, and not usage - hundreds of people may utilize a single connection in an internet cafe, often the only form of connectivity people have access to in developing nations," Harrison wrote.
What does this mean? If this is an actual web, the bug would fly on what he thought would be the safest and weakest part of the web. Little would it know that this is also the strongest. Millions of web-users in Asia and Africa holding on to single strands, seemingly invisible.

Kanthoughts

Carmelita Garcia, blogging from China, provided us about another possible etymology of "kanthought."

"There was a cartoon that appeared on one of the very first issues of Jingle Magazine (yes, I’m that ancient) which featured this nugget of wisdom: ‘Canned Thoughts are better than Banned Thoughts," she wrote.

So, our kanthought has a slightly Martial Law ring to it. Hmmmm