nerve + wire

struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind via Aviva Hope Rutkin

[shoesandsocks]

[When Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

Interview by David Brancaccio, NOW (PBS) (7 October 2005). Kurt Vonnegut - Wikiquote

I hope this is accurate.

(via merlin)

[bbcpopup]

The New Yorks, Londons and Tokyos of the Internet have been formed. And they’re called Reddit, Facebook and Instagram. So as a news organisation, why would you not create a bureau in these metropolises?

Matt philosophising after two cups of coffee. (via bbcpopup)

[nerveandwire]

CamMi Phan

[nerveandwire]

[nerveandwire]

All This Time

I've been living the wrong life.

I stepped out to bring in the milk 15 years ago and now I see I'm in the wrong house. Who is this man with the plaster dust on his hands? What are these children doing in the kitchen? The boy is skinny, smells of goat, mixes Cheerios and Alpen in his cereal bowl. The girl reminds me of a jug my mother had, the china so fine, the milk shone a blueish light through it. Where are my bright skirts, my heavy silver rings, the red in my hair? Shazea Quraishi (2007)

[maxkirin]

Bad books on writing tell you to ‘WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW’, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

Joe Haldeman (via maxkirin)

Just choked on my fucking drink

(via thingsididntknowwereerotic)

[nerveandwire]

The parturition of a writer, I think, unlike that of a painter, does not display any interesting alliances to his masters. In the growth of a writer one finds nothing like the early Jackson Pollock copies of the Sistine Chapel paintings with their interesting cross-references to Thomas Hart Benton. A writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork. He appears much alone and determined to instruct himself. Naïve, provincial in my case, sometimes drunk, sometimes obtuse, almost always clumsy, even a selected display of one’s early work will be a naked history of one’s struggle to receive an education in economics and love.

John Cheever

[nerveandwire]

Keep doing what you're doing and stick to poetry and starve.

Matt Weiner's advice from his high school English teacher

[nerveandwire]

Maybe happiness is this: not wanting to be elsewhere, doing something else, being someone else.

Isaac Asimov

[nerveandwire]

Then again, the Internet is a new kind of barometer for keeping track of exactly how old you feel: how many things you don’t get, how many mini-Internet worlds you can’t find the door to; exactly how many crickets in the world you can no longer hear chirping. Unlike in generations past, when (I imagine) you just kept doing what you and your same-aged friends did, and aged into obscurity in comfort on a cloud of your own tastes and generational inclinations, until you died either thinking you all were still the coolest or not caring anymore about being cool, these days the Internet exists in part to introduce you to all these things you didn’t know about, but in part to remind you how much there is out there that you’ll never know about. The Internet is basically like being at a house party and trying to find the bathroom and opening up a door to a room where a bunch of kids are playing a game or doing a drug or having an orgy (metaphorically) or something and you get all flustered and say, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry!” and they all look at you like, “You pervert,” and you quickly slam the door shut. Everywhere you go on the Internet there are rooms you don’t understand, people playing games you don’t know the rules to, teenagers doing drugs you’ve never heard of and can’t even pronounce. And you just walk through the halls of this house party, aging in fast forward, until you open the one last door at the end of the hallway and it’s Death. Ha, ha.

Dealing with Your Own Cultural Irrelevance (at Age 28), Edith Zimmerman, NYT 11/10/11

[nerveandwire]

You might come here Sunday on a whim. Say your life broke down. The last good kiss you had was years ago. You walk these streets laid out by the insane, past hotels that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives. Only churches are kept up. The jail turned 70 this year. The only prisoner is always in, not knowing what he’s done. The principal supporting business now is rage. Hatred of the various grays the mountain sends, hatred of the mill, The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls who leave each year for Butte. One good restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out. The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines, a dance floor built on springs— all memory resolves itself in gaze, in panoramic green you know the cattle eat or two stacks high above the town, two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse for fifty years that won’t fall finally down. Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat so accurate, the church bell simply seems a pure announcement: ring and no one comes? Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium and scorn sufficient to support a town, not just Philipsburg, but towns of towering blondes, good jazz and booze the world will never let you have until the town you came from dies inside? Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty when the jail was built, still laughs although his lips collapse. Someday soon, he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up. You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself. The car that brought you here still runs. The money you buy lunch with, no matter where it’s mined, is silver and the girl who serves your food is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg, Richard Hugo

[nerveandwire]

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

[nerveandwire]

Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

[nerveandwire]

Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth. Opportunity doesn’t do anything for creativity. Yeah it makes it easier, and you can get home sooner, but it doesn’t make you a more creative person. That’s the disease we have to fight in any creative field: ease of use.

Jack White

[mansplainedmarxist-blog]

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Steven J. Gould born on this day in 1941. Gould was an American Marxist paleontologist, writer, theorist of “punctuated equilibrium” evolution

(via mansplainedmarxist)

Damn, that’s some truthful science shade right there.

(via kenobi-wan-obi)

[nerveandwire]

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink. I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

[danharmon]

If you’re a writer, you already know it’s as fair as it is pretentious to describe writing as a challenge. If you’re a writer. If you have an honest job, here’s an attempt to explain: Remember that moment on your first day of work, when someone asked you to change the tanks, tie down the patient or feed the squirrel, and you realized, “oh, shit, I don’t know how to do that part yet?" That low-stakes fight or flight panic that stiffened your neck and tightened your stomach, because you had to figure something out so you could stop feeling like a useless asshole and get back to work? When you’re breaking a story, that moment is 12 hours long. When you’re not figuring out how to screw around, your job is to press your head against a transparent wall, staring at something you want on the other side. The worst part is, the wall is your own stupid limitation. It’s where your brain ends. It’s the boundary between what you know - which is currently useless, or else you’d be done - and the only thing useful, which is what you don’t know.

Dan Harmon Poops: Waiting to be Knocked Out  (via jaybushman)