A Perhaps Weekly Pandemic Periodical, #15

The roses bloom. The sunflower seedlings thicken. The tomatoes start to set their first fruit. It's raining today for the first time in, oh, I'd say, three weeks. Everyone says it's an unusual spring. Prognostications of drought find their way into our ears. Rumblings of a rough fire season ahead. Mostly, so far, we just need to make sure to water the lawn. 

Re-Post! Artificial Intelligence and its (not so) Godlike power in THE VALLEN

I am a fan of Believer magazine and in the most recent edition (which I received in the mailbox earlier this week), I came across an article by Meghan O'Gieblyn and wow! did it put the hook in me. I mean she was talking all about the worship of artificial intelligence and the Book of Job and the burden of choice and what kind of god God was back in the fourteenth century versus now, and so on.

The kind of stuff that just enthralls the fuck outta me. (Needless to say I stayed up to finish the article, titled Good Shepherds.)

What SHOULD my story do?

My story...my story...my story...Dammit! What should my story be doing? Trying to accomplish? Is it one thing or many?

Hmm...

Whether thy masterpiece of a novel, or thy life's story, or thy "Story" on Facebook that exhibits annoying notifications across my (not thy) feed, when we speak of our story—just what the hell are we talking about? What should we be saying? What are we trying to accomplish via telling our story?

Let's get to the bottom of this...

A Word on Too Many Words

Reading over the Goodread comments on Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, I somewhat ruined this book for myself. Well, even if shortlisted for the Man Booker award, the first 50 or so pages just rung my attention completely dry—so—it wasn’t just the Goodread comments with spoiler alerts, informing me about the unsatisfactory ending and prompting me to lay this book down before wasting anymore of my time reading another word (I admit I especially searched for those comments to substantiate my own suspicions…), it was all the so many words themselves…

Hearing Voices: Authors and the Imagination



Yevgenia Nayberg

Here is an article on Virginia Woolf which inspired me to think about the imaginary voices we all hear, whether we're an author, or some other creative-type, or none of the above.


When I say imaginary voices, here're some examples (from the article) of what I mean:

[Imaginary voices] might include a bereaved person comforted by the voice of the departed; a mountain climber who intuits a felt presence; a child talking to imaginary friends; an athlete whose attentional focus tunes in to self-talk; the inner voice of a coach or trainer.