In his book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey explores Philip Roth. Roth is full of insight. His comments on writing, taken from Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker, stuck with me. “Writing isn’t hard work, it’s a nightmare,” Roth said in 1987. “Coal mining is hard work. This is a nightmare. … There’s [...]
Books
You might be surprised at what A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble’s former CEO, can teach you about conversations. This excerpt is from his book (kindle edition). In any conversation, organizational or otherwise, people tend to overuse one particular rhetorical tool at the expense of all the others. People’s default mode of communication tends to be [...]
In his book, Daily Rituals, Mason Currey explores William James’s thoughts on Habit. “Recollect,” (James) wrote, “that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action — and consequently accumulate grain on grain of wilful choice like a very miser — never forgetting how one link dropped undoes [...]
In his book, Daily Rituals, Mason Currey dug into Hemmingway’s 1958 Paris Review interview: When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and [...]
Is Dante still relevant in our new world? As if to prove this point, the most recent season of Mad Men kicked off with John Ciardi’s 1954 translation of Inferno: Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. Last month poet [...]
As a follow up to the Michael Pollan food as culture post (on his new book Cooked), a reader passed along a link to this video on Pollan’s 2006 classic The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The Omnivore’s Dilemma was deservedly called one of the most important food politics books of all [...]
We’re cooking less and buying more prepared meals. Since the mid-sixties, the amount of time spent preparing meals has fallen by half. While the global trend is the same, Americans lead the way. They spend less time cooking than any other country. One thing we do more of, however, is talk about cooking. Celebrity chefs [...]
Brainpickings put me onto this timeless wisdom from famous eccentric James T. Mangan’s 1936 book You Can Do Anything! 14 Ways to Acquire Knowledge: PRACTICE Consider the knowledge you already have — the things you really know you can do. They are the things you have done over and over; practiced them so often that [...]
