admitting you’re a musician
On October 12th
One cannot help but be moved by the courage of this message.
Page: 2
Posts about Creativity
Suicide & David Foster Wallace
On September 18th 1 Comment
I am still troubled and sad about the passing of David Foster Wallace — and I’m in touch with many others who share this feeling. It seems apropos to say a word or two about suicide.
It’s hard to keep away from the question of what the suicide’s real state of mind was — a question we can’t answer. A suicide leaves such a toxic stew of pain, guilt and anger among the survivors that one interpretation is that this is an act of terrific hostility and selfishness - a gift that keeps on giving, a massive stink-bomb of an exit. This is a hard thing to think about a person we love and esteem, and it’s not the only possibility. I do not think this of Mr. Wallace. Everyone says he was a thoroughly decent fellow, and there is some wishful thinking on my part. I do not want to be angry at him for doing this to his family, his wife, his students, and to all of us. Read more »
death by excruciating self-awareness
On September 14th 1 Comment
The world is a diminished place since last Friday, when David Foster Wallace killed himself. I am shocked and saddened, but should not be surprised. His fiction and essays are from a mind that finds self-awareness nearly unbearable. His public appearances showed that his literary voice was no contrivance — the paralysis of a hall-of-mirrors of a mind reflecting endlessly on itself seemed to be the painful condition of his life, even if it could make for wildly entertaining reading.
I don’t like the g-word because it invokes a magic status that takes us regular people off the hook for our mediocrities … but if he wasn’t a genius then there’s no such thing. I also have many reasons to believe that he was a mensch, a genuinely decent fellow and a gifted teacher. He had attained the sweet life for a literary writer: a MacArthur fellowship and an endowed chair at a college with earnest, bright students, a newly minted marriage, the fast track into comfortable grey eminence at age 46. All of us who love his work had hope, in the face of all the evidence, that he could become happy. Read more »
yay daydreaming
On September 2nd
On the first day of school, here’s a little something for all of my teachers who needled me to stop daydreaming. (I wanted to say “so say something interesting, then” but it might not have gone well.)
the cult of Y Combinator? I think not.
On August 8th 1 Comment
Y Combinator is a Venture Capital group led by Paul Graham. It’s named after a mathematical function that I can’t come close to understanding. Something to do with recursion, I gather, probably an inside joke for LISP programmers. They provide seed money for tech startups — small amounts that allows them to do the initial work that will attract larger funding.
More importantly, they ask their sponsored groups move to Cambridge or the Bay Area for an intense 3-month sprint (they don’t like calling it a boot camp) where they receive lots of mentoring and work like their very lives depend on it. Read more »
