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"A friend asked yesterday if this blog is addressed to anyone in particular? I said yes– it’s a love letter to someone I haven’t met yet."
CarrollBlog 7.3
Just because you're smart doesn't mean you're right
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The more you talk about yourself, the less people listen
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If you ever start thinking a little too highly of yourself, write for five minutes with your wrong hand. It's a nice instant-humbler.
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Never *ever* try to catch a sharp object when you drop it.
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Don't try finding shelter from the rain by walking close by a building. That's where all the big drops fall.
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You can divide most writers into those with messy desks or those with creepily clean ones
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Try and do as much handwriting as you can. It reminds you of who you really are. If your handwriting is lousy, write slowly. Legibility with your hand is like thinking before you speak.
CarrollBlog 7.2
At the neighborhood butcher they have a new feature-- free postcards of meat. On one wall near the front counter is a large selection of postcards with photos of different cuts-- steak, roast, chops, etcetera. All of them shot against stark white backgrounds so you get the real oomph of the delicious looking heartiness of the...meat. You can have as many of them as you like. Standing on line waiting my turn, I think who the hell would send someone a postcard with a picture of meat on it? "Having a great hamburger. Wish you were here."
CarrollBlog 7.1
A woman is walking down the street talking loudly to herself, gesturing dramatically, shaking her head. I'm sitting at an outdoor restaurant watching. My first thought-- uh oh-- here comes a nut. Then I see a man walking a few feet behind her. He's looking at the back of her head very intently. I wonder "what's *he* doing, staring at her like that?" Suddenly she plunks herself down at a table near me. The man sits down across from her and she goes on talking-- to him. I realized that in seconds I've thought three entirely different things about these people, two of them dead wrong She's a nut. He's a stalker. Oh it's okay-- they're a *couple*.
CarrollBlog 6.30
The Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road
by Muriel Spark
One sad shoe that someone has probably flung
out of a car or truck. Why only one?
This happens on an average one year
in four. But always throughout my
life, my travels, I see it like
a memorandum. Something I have
forgotten to remember,
that there are always
mysteries in life. That shoes
do not always go in pairs, any more
than we do. That one fits;
the other, not. That children can
thoughtlessly and in a merry fashion
chuck out someone's shoe, split up
someone's life.
But usually that shoe that I
see is a man's, old, worn, the sole
parted from the upper.
Then why did the owner keep the other,
keep it to himself? Was he
afraid (as I so often am with
inanimate objects) to hurt it's feelings?
That one shoe in the road invokes
my awe and my sad pity.
CarrollBlog 6.29
The Effort
by Billy Collins
Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"
as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.
Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed
with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.
Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,
not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows--the drizzle and the
morning frost.
So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students—a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards—
to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.
CarrollBlog 6.28
I was listening to a lecture by Ken Wilbur about consciousness. He mentioned something I had never thought about. Yet as soon as I heard it, my mind jumped on its horse and rode off in all sorts of interesting directions. Wilbur said one of the profound differences between mankind centuries ago and today was that in the past because a person was born, raised and usually died in one community and rarely left, their exposure to religious/spiritual ideas was limited to what was taught or believed only in that community. In modern times, particularly now with the ubiquity, width and breadth of the internet, a child in a remote community in, say, Mali, can learn in an instant about Buddhism, Christian Science, or Zoroastrianism. Sure, in the past missionaries from the various religions were sent out to the four corners of the earth to try and convert the heathen. But they were only individuals here and there. Now all that's needed is a computer and a modem and huge numbers of people can have their most fundamental beliefs challenged or changed-- in an instant. I have always been fascinated by the idea of what we might be or have been if we were simply exposed to it. We would have been firm Catholics if we'd learned about that belief when we were most receptive to religious teaching. Or a great chess player if someone had only taught us how to play as children. How about a world class baker if we hadn't had a Mom who hated to cook and anything to do with the kitchen. Wilbur extends that idea way way out--- to God. Never in a million years would I (says the person in Mali, for example) have thought God or religion could be conceived in ways that contrast so hugely with my own. But now that I have learned about some of them, my world view and life could change profoundly.
CarrollBlog 6.26
On my Twitter account (jscarroll) I get lots of feedback from people who either do or don't like my comments and the links I post there. Most of their remarks are either nice or entirely reasonable, but there's one guy in particular who has begun to fascinate me. For no apparent reason he sends almost daily YouTube clips of stuff that is absolutely irrelevant to me, my work, what I have posted, whatever. Things like clips from old Russian movies of the 1950's, a performance by a Hungarian violinist, a grainy documentary about the Cinecitta movie studio in Italy.etc. At first I thought the guy was just nuts and quickly erased whatever he sent after a cursory look and a mental "Uh oh, here he goes again" when I saw what he decided to send today. But then his selections became so odd, like a 1970's Swedish advertisement for chewing gum (and a boring one to boot), that I started looking more closely at them, trying to figure out why he might have thought this was something he should send me.
In Egyptian times, high priests used something called haruspication, which was the reading of the guts of dead animals to predict the future. Sort of like today's teacup readers, but back then the priests believed there was a cosmic order to *everything* and if we were just smart enough to figure out that order, we'd have no trouble seeing what was coming next in life. I'm no high priest but I thought about haruspication today when yet another weird link came in from my special "fan." I thought if I can just figure out why he sent this, maybe, just maybe, the answer to it all would be just a breath-- or another strange YouTube clip-- away.
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"If I start out by thinking about the plot, things don't go well. Small points, such as my impression of what is likely to occur, do come to mind, but I let the rest of the story take its own course. I don't want to spend as long as two years writing a story whose plot I already know."
Haruki Murakami