George Carlin said that Pablo Casals, when asked why at the age of 93 he still practiced for three hours a day, said, “I’m beginning to notice some improvement.” I love that line, whether it’s true or not. And so, after writing for sixty years, I’m hoping to see some improvement myself.

Blogging is perhaps not the best way to practice writing because there’s always some technical detail to distract you. But I have a feeling that we’re approaching a period when the friends and followings we share in the social media can come together to provide readers for well written blog posts. I’ll never know, I suppose, since I’m unlikely to produce one. Still. Here’s the old Listics blog with a few new bells and whistles. This is a test post. Don’t read it.

Let me tell you about Ralphie the neighbour boy when I was six and seven and lived on Antrim Road always dressed in women’s clothing. Huge lobster, perhaps the hugest lobster ever, hung over the fireplace mantle in the playroom. Couldn’t tear my eyes offa it. It figured largely most likely to succeed probably. I feel like I am making this up. I can’t remember if he wore makeup. And another neighbour kid who later lost her arm. And her sister Kathleen … and a huge collection of Catholic memorabilia branding me for life. German last name. They drew on their genitals seems weird but it was true. I abstained. Use your arm while you got it I guess.

I don’t know how this emerged today. Stole it from a good friend and super writer five or six years ago. Stuffed it away so I wouldn’t lose it. Like this memory…

Once in Berkeley in the botanical gardens, I crossed a bridge over Strawberry Creek and there on the bank below me was a young woman with no arms gazing into a pool at a huge cray fish (Procambarus clarkii). I fixated on its claws. The irony, the contrast, was intense. The crustacean had powerful arms, huge pincer claws. The girl, I imagined she was as struck by the unfairness of it as I was, but that’s hubris. I can’t read minds, but I certainly can project.

Today in America it’s “Presidents Day.” We used to celebrate the birthdays of Washington (February 22) and Lincoln (February 12) separately, but Richard Nixon, assuredly deserving of no holiday of his own, combined the two and decreed the third Monday of February to be Presidents Day. Now we’ve diluted our heritage but we’ve added a three day weekend between the Super Bowl and March madness. That can’t be all bad.

Intention is the core of all conscious life. It is our intentions that create karma, our intentions that help others, our intentions that lead us away from the delusions of individuality toward the immutable verities of enlightened awareness. Conscious intention colors and moves everything.
— Hsing Yun

From 2024 until her death in the spring of 2024, Michelle Goodrich used her blog to teach some of us about design. Recently a visitor came here to Listics from the web archive, where Mandarin Meg’s blog lives on.

Michelle enjoyed serendipity. She was amused by coincidence. She liked it when we shared things we found bubbling up around the web, things that seemed somehow synchronous, or things that tickled our sense of deja vu. Here are a few of those things that happen to be stuck in my browser right now, today.

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Meg Pokrass, a new Facebook friend and a flash fiction writer made this…

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Elsewhere, Ashleigh Burrows, a Tucson “elder blogger,” was seriously wounded in the Arizona massacre this weekend. Here is her daughter’s update.
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I’ve been a fan of Paul Ford since the nineties. Paul’s a techie and a fine writer and editor. He’s metro-textual. His most recent piece, “Why Wasn’t I Consulted,” tickles me eight ways from Sunday. It’s worth reading just to get context for his neologism, “the Gutenbourgeois.” Read it here. Learn and laugh!

Somehow related to Paul Ford’s understanding of the web and the persistence of Mandarin Meg’s work, is this New York Times article about a so-called “digital library race.” Oddly, the information is presented in the Business section. Fortunately, not everyone subscribes to the bizarre American ritualistic competitive model. Though the Times laments a “digital library divide,” most of us can simply be grateful for the work that’s being done, take advantage of the collections at Google books or theeuropeanlibrary.org, browse the Library of Congress 16 million item “American Memory” collection, and bear in mind that while old business models for electronic publishing (see JSTOR) hold us back from full participation in this amazing global sharing of the fruits of our cultures, ever more work is available via open access.

Walt Whitman's Cardboard Butterfly from the Library of Congress

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Meanwhile, back in the kitchen… it remains my good intention to mix up my very first batch of English muffins or crumpets today. There’s a first time for everything, but sometimes inertia is hard to overcome and I find myself reading the cookbook instead of cooking. For example, here are some of interesting food bloggers that I’ve been following (instead of baking): Mango and Tomato, One Bite at a Time, Florida Girl in DC.
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And really, there is a lot of other cool stuff on the Interwebz… take for example:

• How Paul Krugman found Politics (The New Yorker)
• The quantified self (a narcissist’s dream come true!)
• ZOMG Science (I’ll never stop linking unless they stop thinking!)
• Quashie (The approachable negro is in!)
• Everything is falling apart (Confirming your worst nightmares)
• Documents that reference Blackwater from Wikileaks current release (no wonder everyone’s in a tizzie)
• …and more, oh so much more…

But for now, play her off keyboard cat!

Elmore Leonard published “Ten Rules of Writing” a few years ago. The book repackaged Leonard’s 2024 New York Times essay, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points, and Especially Hooptedoodle”. Today, on the Word Count blog, Michael Lydon takes issue with Leonard’s rules. While admitting that eight out of the ten rules “are matters of personal taste or make some sloppy sense…” he demonstrates that Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, Anthony Trollope, Leo Tolstoy, Raymond Chandler and (modestly enough) Michael Lydon himself ignore two of Elmore Leonard’s rules to the benefit of readers everywhere. The broken rules?

• 8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
• 9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

I think I understand Lydon’s point. These rules are made to be broken. A few simple props, like a harpoon, or a parrot and an eye patch can make all the difference between Ahab and Long John Silver. Throw in a crocodile, a clock, and–well… a hook and you have a different sailor altogether. So I get it. We really do need a little detail about people, places and things. Except for that, Elmore Leonard’s rulz are dope. For example, number one,

Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

A few months ago Leonard’s rules served to introduce a lengthy feature in the Guardian, a compilation of lots of writers’ rules for writing. Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Annie Proulx are among the dozens of contributors. The aggregation of advice is overwhelming. Some rules ring true (“Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.” — Zadie Smith); some are silly (“Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.” — Roddy Doyle); and some are simply self-serving and tedious (“Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works wonders: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.” — Michael Morpurgo).

Ultimately, we can each only write we know. But what we know changes moment by moment. We can learn as we go along, researching scant minutes before putting crayon to paper. Or we can make stuff up. The penalties for making stuff up vary by genre, of course; so too do the rewards. But, whether we have a deep and certain knowledge informing our scribbles or we simply wing it, it’s nice to have rules. We could do worse than leaving out most of the adverbs and almost all of the hooptedoodle.

• Hack the Planet, wait for the announcement that only a small tactical nuke will close earth’s gushing wound a mile below the sea in the Gulf of Mexico. There will be a bright side to all that oil spreading out over the surface of the Atlantic between now and September when they get around to dropping a nuke down the pipe. Bright side is: flattened surface yields increased reflectivity equals lowered Albedo equals slowed global warming.
• Aspiring writer questions value of English degree, this one is in the running for the monthly “No shit, Sherlock!” award.
• Not for Profit, a brief interview with Martha Nussbaum, answering the question of what Hindu extremists have in common with Texas school boards.
• The Net Worth of American Presidents, a nice historical review. I recommend you follow the cycle of boom and bust and ask just how much speculation we as a society should permit the greed-balls on Wall Street.
• PRchitecture… a neologism Kat Herding thought she had invented until she googled it.
• Putting the Future Back in the Room, by Alex Steffen. I was shocked to learn that Al and Tipper, after celebrating the fortieth anniversaries of their marriage and of earth day, have decided to call it quits. What that has to do with Steffen’s essay, I don’t know. Al and tipper is a look back to 1970. Steffen suggests we focus on 2024.
• ElasticVapor and Enomaly, Reuven Cohen’s blog and business web sites. Cohen is a leader in the world of cloud computing, a technology that has matured over the last six or eight years and is finally ready for prime time here in the USA, now that we’ve begun to catch up with much of the rest of the world in affordable broadband connectivity.
• Sticks and stones may break our bones so we brought guns.
• Why converse with your customers when you can spam the living daylights out of them?
• More than a recipe for potato leek soup. (May be dangerous to open this one if freedom of speech is compromised in your country).

Finally, a few pointers to what’s next… Web 3.0. Can I say “Web 3.0″ or has O’Reilly already registered it as a trademark?

• web 3.0 by kate ray
• Visual Thesaurus, by Thinkmap.
• Semanticweb.org

Sarah Gilbert (“mama, military wife, writer, cooker of inconvenient food, photographer of life, finance geek, keeper of chickens, beginning farmer”) posted a poem called oil leak: a sonnet.

The final couplet:

‘Twas me, and you, our thirst, indelicate
gulping, our leak, our spill, our oil-stained foot.

It’s Memorial Day. Sarah’s husband recently deployed to the SouthWest Asia perma-war zone. She writes in short bursts of 140 characters or less here, and in longer form in many places.

Do I want to convince others about the truth as I see it, influence others to share my perspective? Lately it feels like I’m the only one with a malleable perspective and everyone else knows precisely what’s true (for them). Who, as the lady asked, is zooming whom?

Am I here to entertain, to inform, to persuade? Doesn’t matter. Mostly it’s about the writing itself.

I have another blog that I’ve neglected as I’ve neglected this one lately. It’s a blog predicated on the proposition that all people are equal, but equality is imperfectly distributed. Distinctions of class based on disparities of wealth and opportunity, intelligence and energy, differences underscored by an unequal distribution among us of both entitlement and the raw hunger for power have created conditions whereby some of us enjoy a chilled glass of filtered sparkling water fresh from a sterile bottle, while others get by with chlorinated tap water, if we’re lucky. Whether–pinkies extended–we sip Perrier from fine crystal or, like dogs, unselfconsciously slake our thirst from the toilet bowl of life may be an accident of birth. And still, I firmly believe that with some serious hard work, discipline, courage, and of course with constant struggle, here in America anyone can achieve a place at the porcelain bowl.

No dogs were harmed in the crafting of this post.

A freelance writer, Cathy also blogs at the Huffington Post which this week is promoting “a week of eating in.” I met her this afternoon at a book signing at Rainbow Bookstore. Confession: in addition to buying an autographed copy of Cathy’s book, I also picked up Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, An Eater’s Manifesto and Who Rules America, Power Politics and Social Change by G. William Domhoff. The latter will of course provide food for thought.