Nicholas Morrow

How is it that I just now listened to this album? I...

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 10:27:49 -0700

How is it that I just now listened to this album? I underestimated JT.

From thisisindexed.com

Thu, 29 May 2014 12:30:16 -0700

From thisisindexed.com

The Long Game Part 2: the missing chapter

Wed, 28 May 2014 21:00:20 -0700

The Long Game Part 2: the missing chapter

The Long Game Part 1: Why Leonardo DaVinci was no genius

Wed, 28 May 2014 20:59:50 -0700

The Long Game Part 1: Why Leonardo DaVinci was no genius

Digging it. A cross between Mumford & Sons and KT Tunstall

Wed, 14 May 2014 07:35:36 -0700

Digging it. A cross between Mumford & Sons and KT Tunstall

What You Love Reza, poorlydrawnlines.com

Wed, 30 Apr 2014 12:20:26 -0700

What You Love
Reza, poorlydrawnlines.com

Ernest Hemingway's Advice to Aspiring Authors

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 10:01:00 -0700

Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. Ernest Hemingway just happens to be one of those who can as well as teach. So much so that Hemingway on Writing was put together highlighting his thoughts and advice on the craft. In one of the more interesting meditations, Hemingway generates a dialogue between him and a fictional character, nicknamed “Mice”, where he relays his advice on becoming an author.

MICE: How can a writer train himself?

Y.C.: Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exactly what it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you the emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling that you had. That’s a five finger exercise.

MICE: All right.

Y.C.: Then get in somebody else’s head for a change. If I bawl you out try to figure what I’m thinking about as well as how you feel about it. If Carlos curses Juan think what both their sides of it are. Don’t just think who is right. As a man things are as they should or shouldn’t be. As a man you know who is right and who is wrong. You have to make decisions and enforce them. As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.

MICE: All right.

Y.C.: Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice. When you’re in town stand outside the theatre and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars. There are a thousand ways to practice. And always think of other people.

David Ogilvy Advice on Life After College

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 10:00:45 -0700

Ask any person in the field of marketing and advertising who the unofficial godfather of the field is and you’ll get the same response: David Ogilvy. A real life Mad Men if there ever was one. In 1984, as his 18 year old nephew was finishing school, he sought out his uncle for advice on whether to go to university or head straight for the work force. Here is the letter (and advice) he sent in response.

Dear Harry,

You ask me whether you should spend the next three years at university, or get a job. I will give you three different answers. Take your pick.

Answer A. You are ambitious. Your sights are set on going to the top, in business or government. Today’s big corporations cannot be managed by uneducated amateurs. In these high-tech times, they need top bananas who have doctorates in chemistry, physics, engineering, geology, etc.

Even the middle managers are at a disadvantage unless they boast a university degree and an MBA. In the United States, 18 percent of the population has a degree, in Britain, only 7 percent. Eight percent of Americans have graduate degrees, compared with 1 percent of Brits. That more than anything else is why American management outperforms British management.

Same thing in government. When I was your age, we had the best civil service in the world. Today, the French civil servants are better than ours because they are educated for the job in the postgraduate Ecole Nationale d'Administration, while ours go straight from Balliol to Whitehall. The French pros outperform the British amateurs.

Anyway, you are too young to decide what you want to do for the rest of your life. If you spend the next few years at university, you will get to know the world - and yourself - before the time comes to choose your career.

Answer B. Stop frittering away your time in academia. Stop subjecting yourself to the tedium of textbooks and classrooms. Stop cramming for exams before you acquire an incurable hatred for reading.

Escape from the sterile influences of dons, who are nothing more than pickled undergraduates.

The lack of a college degree will only be a slight handicap in your career. In Britain, you can still get to the top without a degree. What industry and government need at the top is not technocrats but leaders. The character traits which make people scholars in their youth are not the traits which make them leaders in later life.

You put up with education for 12 boring years. Enough is enough.

Answer C. Don’t judge the value of higher education in terms of careermanship. Judge it for what it is - a priceless opportunity to furnish your mind and enrich the quality of your life. My father was a failure in business, but he read Horace in the loo until he died, poor but happy.

If you enjoy being a scholar, and like the company of scholars, go to a university. Who knows, you may end your days as a Regius Professor. And bear in mind that British universities are still the best in the world - at the undergraduate level. Lucky you. Winning a Nobel Prize is more satisfying than being elected Chairman of some large corporation or becoming a Permanent Undersecretary in Whitehall.

You have a first-class mind. Stretch it. If you have the opportunity to go to a university, don’t pass it up. You would never forgive yourself.

Tons of love,

David

Kurt Vonnegut's Advice: Do Art

Tue, 04 Mar 2014 10:00:38 -0800

A Xavier High School English teacher in New York City had a great idea. Wanting her students to test their persuasive writing skills, she asked each of them to write their favorite author and ask him or her to visit the school. A handful wrote to Kurt Vonnegut and, while he didn’t make an appearance, his thoughtful reply was the only response any received.

November 5, 2006

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut

Norman Mailer's Advice on What True Growth Means

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 10:00:54 -0800

A modern day renaissance man, Norman Mailer had his hands in numerous pots. A novelist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor, journalist, and political candidate made for man that is adept at offering up advice on what it truly means to grow as a person throughout their life.

He is most often remember with the ranks of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe as an innovator of creative nonfiction. Writing in the style of a fiction but based on factual-journalism.

Printed in 1959, Advertisements for Myself is a collection essays, short stories, meditations, and interviews seen in publications ranging from The Village Voice to Esquire.

In one entitled “First Advertisements for Myself”, Mailer reflects on the true meaning of growth in the great “rat race”.

I had the luck to have a large talent and to use some of it, and if I know how very much more I could have done if new luck had come my way, well — that is not my story, but everyone’s story, every last one of us could have done more, a creation or two more than we have done, and while it is our own fault, it is not all our own fault, and so I still feel rage at the cowardice of our time which has ground down all of us into the mediocre compromises of what had been once our light-filled passion to stand erect and be original.

…

It may be time to say that the Republic is in real peril, and we are the cowards who must defend courage, sex, consciousness, the beauty of the body, the search for love, and the capture of what may be, after all, an heroic destiny. But to say these words is to show how sad we are, for those of us who believe the most have spent our years writing of fear, impotence, stupidity, ugliness, self-love, and apathy, and yet it has been our act of faith, our attempt to see — to see and to see hard, to smell, even to touch, yes to capture that nerve of Being which may include all of us, that Reality whose existence may depend on the honest life of our work, the honor of ourselves which permits us to say no better than we have seen.

Disney's Advice on Life

Tue, 18 Feb 2014 10:00:43 -0800

The Magic Kingdom. A place where dreams come true. The happiest place on earth. Disney and Disneyland have become synonymous with everything dreams and happiness.

Their movies have been an inspiration for millions of kids for the past 77 years. Since the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, Disney has imparted some of its magical wisdom tucked into each and every one:If you keep on believing, the dreams that you wish will come true. – Cinderella

Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten. – Lilo and Stitch
Always let your conscience be your guide. – Pinocchio
Remember you’re the one who can fill the world with sunshine. – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
The past can hurt, but the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it. – The Lion King
They say if you dream a thing more than once, it’s sure to come true. – Sleeping Beauty

John Updike on Making Money and the Most Important Things for the Aspiring Writer

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 10:01:26 -0800

You aren’t counted among the greatest American authors without having a few strong opinions. In 2004, Pulitzer Prize winning author John Updike gave an interview for the Academy of Achievement, soon after winning the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In it he hits on numerous topics, which are covered more thoroughly in his 1996 memoir Self-Conciousness. Below is one of the standout highlights on writing and earning a living.

Try to develop actual work habits and, even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say, or more a day to write. Very good things have been written on an hour a day… .So take it seriously, set a quota, try to think of communicating with some ideal reader somewhere… .

Don’t be contentious to call yourself a writer and then bitch about the crass publishing world that won’t run your stuff. We’re still a capitalist country and writing, as some would agree, is a capitalist enterprise… It’s not a total sin to try to make a living and court an audience.

Read what excites you… and even if you don’t imitate it, you will learn from it… .

Don’t try to get rich… . If you want to get rich, you should go into investment banking or be a certain kind of lawyer. On the other hand, I like to think that in a country this large and a language even larger, that there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

Chris Hadfield on Success and The Meaning of Life

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 10:00:43 -0800

Canadian astronaut and YouTube sensation Chris Hadfield knows a thing or two about living a life that is “out of this world.” Hadfield was the first Canadian to walk in space, is a former fighter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force and served as commander of the International Space Station.

Shortly after the release of his book, An Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth, Chris sat down with British-Canadian broadcaster Peter Mansbridge to discuss topics ranging from life on the space station to advice for Olympic athletes. In the midst, he dropped these little nuggets of wisdom about living a successful life:

If you view crossing the finish line as the measure of your life, you’re setting yourself up for a personal disaster. … Commanding a spaceship or doing a spacewalk is a very rare, singular moment-in-time event in the continuum of life. You need to honor the highs and the peaks in the moments — you need to prepare your life for them — but recognize the fact that the preparation for those moments is your life and, in fact, that’s the richness of your life. … The challenge that we set for each other, and the way that we shape ourselves to rise to that challenge, is life.

…’

I’ve had a tremendous privilege of perspective that almost nobody has had. When you talk about the meaning of life, we tend to think about it as life on Earth. To be away from the planet for a long time and to be able to see it constantly out the window allows you a reflection on it that is really hard to get just in regular day-to-day. So I think if there is any sort of meaning of life, it’s got to be very personal. How does the life that you lead affect your own conclusions about what’s important to you?

John Lennon, the famous singer, songwriter, musician, cultural...

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 10:00:49 -0800

John Lennon, the famous singer, songwriter, musician, cultural icon, and founding member of the Beatles, offers up his advice on leading the life you want.

This is an excerpt from a 1980 interview in Playboy that took place a few months before he was shot and killed. The entire interview can be seen here.

A big thanks to Zen Pencils for creating this great work.