dougist.com

AIG Extracted From The Government, or What A Recovery Should Look Like

Doug — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 16:03:04 +0000

Bob Benmosche wins where so many have failed.

Reminders while I’m up at Skidmore

Doug — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 20:34:19 +0000

Rick Moody: I have taught on and off for a long time (since 1991). Rarely full time. That is, I have never made my income primarily from teaching. I have always survived mainly from writing. I would like to try to continue to do the same. When I have taught a lot, I have often become a little burnt out from it. Partly because I do try to give and to be available to the students in a way that I felt I often was NOT when I was a writing student.

Rick Moody on The Sweet Spot

Doug — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:14:09 +0000

Your reading along with Rick Moody’s essay on Brian Eno over at The Rumpus, and you come to this concluding paragraph… I was somewhere on the road, not so long ago, don’t remember where, and again completely beyond sleep, and sitting in a tub in a hotel I never would have been able to afford, [...]

Win/Luck Compilation of 2011

Doug — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 22:55:01 +0000

Via Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast (and everywhere else on the web) the awesome winners and lucksters of the year. Happy New Year every one!

Irreplaceable

Doug — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:35:07 +0000

I learned a decade or so ago that no one is irreplaceable, regardless of their talents, native abilities, passions, certainly not in something as prosaic as a business organization, or as it turns out, in a political system, not even in the art world. But this morning that day-in and day-out truth seems so hard to bear. There is such a haze of loss I'm fighting over the news of the death of Steve Jobs. Separating yourself from the idea of ‘the irreplaceable’ is not to say...

Philip Schultz on PBS Newshour

Doug — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:34:22 +0000

“Philip Schultz is a poet, fiction writer and educator. He has been teaching creative writing for nearly 30 years. In 1987, he founded the Writers Studio in New York. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “Failure.” This clip aired on the Friday, September 16, 2011 show did not air on the 9/16 [...]

Folders in the FSIM

Doug — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 23:13:56 +0000

After my last post a comment came in from Simon that deserved more than a casual reply. It's about folding int he FSIM. I took some screen shots of my system and answered a few question.

Lion Finder Columns and the FSIM

Doug — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 14:59:01 +0000

Perhaps this was a function before Lion, one that I missed by not being curious enough to drag windows around, resize them, see what they would do, but as you can see in the screen shot below good old OS X Lion Finder makes for an excellent File System Infobase Manager browsing tool. I’ve always [...]

MyTextFile

Doug — Thu, 19 May 2011 17:54:10 +0000

I learned of MyTextFile from the TakingNote web site. The design metaphor for this web app comes from the old days when geek-like people collected and managed their writings in one large ASCI file. MyTextFile is one large ASCI file in the sky. There are advantages to the single text file structure: Full search is [...]

Making a Reading Notebook From a Private Web Site

Doug — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 15:40:00 +0000

Sometimes we just get away from ourselves. I wrote up the post below, built the web site discussed, actually got the whole thing up and functioning nicely. That was before I saw that InstaPaper already had an excellent clipping function built in, out of the box, already there and waiting for me, and that it would do the exact same thing as the system I designed. So let the attached be a memorial to all those poorly thought out development projects, the ones best deliberated more deeply before begun, the one's best killed when they are young, at the initiation stage, before we do the palm-to-the-forehead-slap of realization, the cruel knowledge arriving of just how much time we just wasted...

Modifying the InfoBase for the iPad

Doug — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 22:13:48 +0000

A comment on another post asked, “how’s it going with PlanText?” And the short answer is, not so well. Not that the application is not wonderful. I find PlainText to be the best of the iPad/iPhone note taking and writing applications available. It’s better than Elements (which I find aesthetically unattractive) iAWriter (which I find [...]

Bob Benmosche’s Cancer

Doug — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:54:10 +0000

On hearing of Bob’s illness, I picture him yelling at Death, and I see Death stalking away, defeated. And I remember Virgil… Mors aurem vellens, “Vivite” ait, “venio.”

FCS, Choirmaster at Grace Died on Tuesday.

Doug — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:09:37 +0000

I received an email last night saying that Frank Cedric Smith, choirmaster at Grace Church from 1960 to 1992 died on Tuesday at his home in Cape Cod. It’s given me pause, the email, more so than most of these types of messages. We all stop for a moment at an obituary listing. An obligatory reflection on mortality surfaces, always a bit selfishly because the thought ends up circling back around to our own situation; then we push those “me” thoughts away, and with forced reflection a memory stirs, we move back in time. Frank Smith made me Head Chorister at Grace in 1975. (My name is up on the wall in the church lest I forget)

My Org-Fu System

Doug — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:38:46 +0000

I’ve updated the notations I use for note taking during meetings and conversation. Others have named these systems Org-Fu, or Meeting Ninja systems, and they can get elaborate -- I assume to overcome the static nature of physical notebooks. Mine is simple and vestigial, the remainder of my days when I used paper notebooks, a lot, and went to meetings, a lot.

Exercise as a Writerly Thing

Doug — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:14:05 +0000

It is unsustainable, the forever writing. Fanny in chair, write till you drop – advice we were all given in our first year of literary apprenticeship. You must maintain your body or there will be no art. I’ve learned that the hard way. The fingers are tingling, the back stings hot under my scapula, there’s [...]

Tagging in FSIM

Doug — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:09:49 +0000

Theres’ a nice chat going on the Scrivener boards about File System Information Managers. I wrote a long reply to a post and thought I’d share parts here. Metadata and tagging A lot of my work flow is text based (it was once rtfd, then rtf, and if you go way back, doc and whatever [...]

Getting Ready for PlainText

Doug — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 16:49:48 +0000

I’ve moved almost all my notes out of my SimpleText folder. A few seasons ago I put them all in there when Hog Bay launched its free syncing service to support WriteRoom and TaskPaper for the iPhone and iPad. I did it because I thought I’d be notating and editing all sorts of items in the newly freed, on the go, mobile existence of the “i” revolution — no need for a heavy laptop for me. I was wrong.

New York State Writers Institute – The Summer Workshops

Doug — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:09:46 +0000

I’m baaack. It was fabulous. I was in Rick Moody’s masters section — life changing. I’ll write more as I process it all.

TaskPaper, Scrivener, and Note Taking on the iPad

Doug — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:01:55 +0000

TaskPaper, Scrivener, and Note Taking on the iPad We’ve been having a great conversation over on the Literature & Latte forums about TaskPaper, Scrivener, and note taking on the iPad. I’ve clipped

The Center Cannot Hold – Flarf in the WSJ

Doug — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:24:18 +0000

Sharon Mesmer, Flarf, The Wall Street Journal, Page One. There really isn’t any more that I can say….Poetry makes the big time. Click through for the evidence.