isn't it ironic? uhm, no?
Socratic, romantic, nihilistic. Post modern. Honestly. Is there any wonder?
An Oxford professor once put it to me simply: Man invents wheel. Wheel rolls over man. Man dies. That’s irony. Not Alanis Morrisette.
Americans may not understand irony - at least that seems to be the general European consensus - but I’m convinced those who don’t have never made an effort to do so in the first place.
Me, I’m a polemical irony girl myself. Everything else is a shoddy imitation.
“Austen uses irony as a means of being understated. Swift, by contrast, uses irony for polemical purposes, conjuring grotesque images ironically (babies being eaten, mankind enslaved to the morally superior horse) in order to state his case (that the Irish were starving, that humanity was going to the dogs) ever more forcefully.” The Guardian
“Too Many Tweets.”
I reckon.
writing down the bones
Open up your mind to the possibility that 1+1 can equal 48, a Mercedes-Benz, an apple pie, a blue horse. Don’t tell your autobiography with facts, such as “I am in sixth grade. I am a boy. I live in Owatonna. I have a mother and father.” Tell me who you really are: “I am the frost on the window, the cry of a young wolf, the thin blade of grass.”
– Natalie Goldberg
Things I Learned from Seth Godin
What Every Good Marketer Knows:
- Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
- Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
- Products that are remarkable get talked about.
- People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
- You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
- What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.
- People all over the world, and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
- Good marketers tell a story.
- Choose your customers.
- A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.
- Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.
- There are more rich people than ever before, and they demand to be treated differently.
- You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.
I Write Things...
It’s a shadow at the back of the mind. Just on the verge of being. A vague, willowy figure that almost isn’t. It’s where the whole reaper image comes from.
No one’s actually seen it, of course. But we’ve all felt it. Even those of us still alive and in the sunshine.
That heavy cloud that sometimes settles at the base of who and what we are and then flies off, upward and onward, taking our breath away just as sure as it put it there in the first place. Leaving us alone in the shade with a faint indication of what one day will be.
Because that’s what death is. Where the sun don’t shine.
My Fiction
“ If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. The consistency, the monotony, the certainty, all vagaries and passions are covered by this daily reoccurrence. You don’t go to a well once but daily. You don’t skip a child’s breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning. Sleep comes to you each day, and so does the muse. ”
Walter Mosley
Jabberwocky
The evening was a strange one. Darcy danced on her two sore feet to an out of tune fiddle played by the neighbor’s cat. Her brother slid across the floor on his belly making hissing noises and laughing out loud. I got scared and started writing a story about Old Lady Filmore and how she was blind. And smelled of turpentine.
My Fiction
I Write Things...
Men aint meant to bare their souls. For better or for worse or for none of that stuff that comes in between. It’s what we got wives for. To put enough nonsense out in the air, so there aint no room or expectation for nothin else. Nothin from us no how. And I’m fine with that. Generally. I like it. Leaves me alone to get on with things I know need gettin on with.
I been doin that for a while now. Gettin on. Knowin. Makin decisions no real man has a right to make. But I don’t call myself that. Only half that. And I aint claimed or wanted to be anything else - anything more than half a man, half a real man - ever since my leg left me …
My Fiction
“ I recently discovered that Lewis Lapham and I smoke the same brand of cigarettes. I was unspeakably pleased. ”
Flynn