I stumbled across this while looking for a book for my cousin’s new baby. I was so intrigued by the whole idea. On each left page there was words written in braille and then again in white text. It was the description of colors, according to how a blind child would experience. On the right there were raised etchings of what each page was describing. It’s so beautiful.
One page in particular that really caught my attention was the one describing the color red. It talked about how red is how it feels to bite into a ripe strawberry, or the stinging on your knee after you fall down. Blue was the feeling of sunshine on your face.
It’s just so astounding that someone managed this, as the idea of how to describe a color to someone who has no reference has always fascinated and baffled me.
“Tweet, tweet, tweet!” chirped the kindergartners in Jennifer Aaron’s class last week, as they settled onto the multicolored carpet and began to consider what they would like to send out into the Twitter universe that day.
Three days a week, as the school day draws to a close, the children in Ms. Aaron’s class sit down to compose a message about what they have been doing all day. They then send it out to their parents and relatives through Twitter, the stamping grounds of celebrities and politicians, where few kindergartners have been known to venture.
my 2nd graders love using word substitutions from vocab lists more than anything. everything that happens to them is “delighful” or “overjoyous” now.
“live my lief” by steve roggenbuck
3:53 am ALL THE WRONG PEOPLE
it doesn’t matter who i trust it’s always wrong when i eventually let my guard down no matter how strong i find i’m the only one singing along and you have my heart and now it is stepped on
same old song i know how it goes second guess my every action hate me where it shows first we go fast and here’s where it slows i am always dismissing what everyone knows
church and steeple church and steeple open the doors and find you’re all the wrong people
most recent issue of tilde journal just came in the mail, so perfect. buy yours here.
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don’t do it. if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. if you’re doing it because you want women in your bed, don’t do it. if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again, don’t do it. if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it, don’t do it. if you’re trying to write like somebody else, forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all, you’re not ready.
don’t be like so many writers, don’t be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don’t be dull and boring and pretentious, don’t be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don’t add to that. don’t do it. unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it.
when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
-charles bukowski
typo from the english paper i’m revising
“methaphors”
“I am twenty-six and in my fourth year in the Army. I’ve been overseas seventeen months so far. Landed on Utah Beach on D-Day with the Fiurth Division and was with the 12 th Infantry of the Fourth until the end of the war here. The Air Corps background for “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise” comes naturally because I used to be in the Air Corps. Am also a graduate of Valley Forge Military Academy. After the war I plan to enlist in a good, established chorus line. This is the life.
I’ve been writing short stories since I was fifteen. I have trouble writing simply and naturally. My mind is stocked with some black neckties, and though I’m throwing them out as fast as I can find them, there will always be a few left over. I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret. I’ll watch for that book.”
1. to use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.
2. we believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.
3. absolute freedom in the choice of subject.
4. to present an image. we are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. it is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.
5. to produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.
6. finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.
these principles are not new; they have fallen into desuetude. they are the essentials of all great poetry, indeed of all great literature.
-ezra pound
Belief & Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials
by Jack Kerouac
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 4. Be in love with yr life 5. Something that you feel will find its own form 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time 15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 19. Accept loss forever 20. Believe in the holy contour of life 21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it 26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 29. You’re a Genius all the time 30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
1.Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3.Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5.Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O’Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.
