Hello, World

startupquote:

If you don’t fail at least 90 percent of the time, you’re not aiming high enough.

- Alan Kay

“Writing about Hollywood is like being a reporter at Disneyland. At first, you can’t believe that you get to spend every day in The Happiest Place on Earth. Everyone wants to ask you about your work. You’re surrounded by princesses, and the sky sparkles with pixie dust. But as the years go on, you learn about the oily machinery that manufactures all that enchantment. You see what Cinderella’s really like when that glass slipper comes off. And then one day you notice that the magic is gone, and all you’re left with is a small, small world.” -

Former NEWSWEEK film writer Sean Smith, on his decision to quit journalism and join the Peace Corps. (Ouch.)

Me: There’s a poem in here somewhere, damnit. On your marks… 

“But I don’t know that it would be possible to write any poem—a highly experimental poem, a sonnet sequence, a poem in the narrative unmetered verse to which American readers are most accustomed—without consciously employing principles of technique! A poem is made up of words, in some usually syntactically meaningful order, interesting in their denotations and connotations and equally interesting in their sonorities and their interplay. A jazz pianist (or a clarinetist – that is what jazz-buff Carruth was!) improvising is employing principles of technique that had to be learned before improvisation was possible, and so is the poet, even in the rare situation of sitting down to write a poem that “arrives” more or less intact: this is a reward that follows long practice.” - How a Poem Happens: Marilyn Hacker

The Making of TIONG BAHRU (by Chay Yan Productions)

Clearing out the inbox - got an invite from a former contact at the British Council to a screening of this next Monday. Tickles my “community documentary” bone, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they managed to come up with… 

“Every time we postpone some necessary event—whether we put off doing the dishes till morning or defer an operation or some difficult labor or study—we do so with the implication that present time is more important than future time (for if we wished the future to be as free and comfortable as we wish the present to be, we would perform the necessary actions as soon as they prove themselves necessary). There is nothing wrong with this, as long as we know what we are doing, and as long as the present indeed holds some opportunity more important than the task we delay. But very often our decision to delay is less a free choice than a semiconscious mechanism—a conspiracy between our reasoning awareness and our native dislike of pain. The result of this conspiracy is a disconcerting contradiction of will; for when we delay something, we simultaneously admit its necessity and refuse to do it. Seen more extensively, habitual delays can clutter our lives, leave us in the annoying position of always having to do yesterday’s chores. Disrespect for the future is a subtly poisonous disrespect for the self, and forces us, paradoxically, to live in the past.” -

Time and the Art of Living / from a working library

You know how, sometimes, it seems you find things exactly when you need to find them?