Shiraz Janjua

You are going to do this. There is no stopping you. You’ve made your decision, and nothing will stand in your way, God willing. There is no fear. This is a fait accompli. All doubt is merely stage fright, the fear of imperfection. The only way to achieve perfection is through imperfection. You chip that im- prefix away, day by day. There is no delay in the chipping. The word perfection is already there, waiting. If you don’t chip at it, you are stuck with imperfection. That is unacceptable. You see your goal. You aren’t just writing a book; you are creating literature; you are creating a work of art. There is no compromise. There is no PlayStation3. There is only determined, indomitable pursuit of the goal you have set for yourself, which you will achieve. There is no question. You will write a stunningly beautiful work of literature. You will. Day by day. Don’t fear the mountain when all you have to do each day is walk a few steps. The mountain will cooperate if you simply climb one step at a time. So walk. Everyone knows you are a fantastic writer. They will say it can’t be done, that it shouldn’t be done, that people don’t read. But they don’t know what you know. They are the naysayers, the fearful—or they are those who have seen and know it can be done, and see that you will be one of those to do it. All you have to do is walk. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t perfect the first time. You won’t give up. You will make it stronger with each passing day until it is indestructible. You will not be afraid. You may not have all the answers but you will ask all the questions and you will find a way over, under, around or through. You may not know the answers, but not turning away despite not knowing is what makes you a man, an artist, a writer. You show up anyway, saying that you don’t have the answer, and working through that unknowing until you’ve put down words on the page. If they are the wrong ones, you will know, either sooner or later, and you will write the right ones. But first you need to cast out the wrong ones so what you have left, after searching within yourself, will be the right ones. Do not be afraid, and do not give up, ever. Remember who you were, who you are, and know who you will be. Decide that. Pray.

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

–Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable“

What we’re approaching here is what was once “content” being stripped of its nutritious value and being processed into “content product”. See where I’m going with this? I could see, over time, readers realizing how many empty calories, in the form of news “snippets” or meaningless photos, we’ve been consuming on the web and there being a counter movement. I’ve seen the term “slow blogging” show up a few times around the web recently in different contexts, and it definitely comes to mind now. I could see a parallel on the web to what we’ve seen in the food industry, where the early adopters seek out whole, local, organic… content. From the source. On the site it was designed for, from the person who wrote it. Or at least prepared in a way that shows respect to the ingredient.

–Laura Brunow Miner, founder of Pictory (via Space Miner).

I consider myself one of those who made this realization about empty calories this year, and the “info-fast” during this past Ramadan was the perfect moment to put that realization into action.

A collection of things I discovered and enjoyed this past year, whether or not they were released this year. Selections are in alphabetical order. What’s on your list? Read the rest of this entry »

Architecture, as a discipline, can itself be used to tell stories. In fact, some of the most interesting student work today comes complete with elaborate plots and story lines, supplied for no other reason than to explain why a particular building should exist or require designing. These stories very often exceed today’s mass-market fiction in imaginative strength—to such a degree that I might suggest, only half-jokingly, that the reason fiction sells so badly in the United States today is because all of the people with real ideas have moved on to study architecture or urban design. American fiction has been left languishing in the hands of people at summer workshops in Iowa, obsessed with the morality of suburban fatherhood.

–Geoff Manaugh, from The BLDGBLOG Book.

Anthropologist Wade Davis of National Geographic in an absolutely mind-blowing TED talk from 2003. I’m floored. I caught a bit of this guy today on the radio while driving back from the garage and wanted to find out more. He’s giving this year’s Massey Lecture. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan Lethem talks about his new book Chronic City with the LA Times (book excerpt in The New Yorker from a few months’ back). I didn’t read the whole interview, which is about a book I’ve not yet read but may later, but I did read and enjoy this paragraph: Read the rest of this entry »

Back in my university says, as I’ve mentioned before, I bristled against the self-importance of artsy film students who made boring (and therefore ignored) works of self-indulgent art. I was happy to make things that entertained because although moving an audience is a difficult thing, an unmoved audience is an audience that you don’t own, that doesn’t respect you, that forgets you as artist. Read the rest of this entry »

“The most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work, do a huge volume of work, put yourself on a deadline, so that every week or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story, you know what I mean, whatever it’s going to be. [...] It takes a while, it’s going to take you a while, it’s normal to take a while, and you just have to fight your way through that, OK? You will be fierce, you will be a warrior, and you will make things that aren’t as good as you know in your heart you want them to be. And you just make one after another.” (Via lifehacker)

The Alain de Botton book I’m reading, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, isn’t quite what I was hoping for, at least two-thirds of the way in. I was hoping for more insight into the lives and minds of people as they work and make their way through society. Mostly, though, we get an overview of the various sectors of industry with a kind of manufactured wonder for them. Still, he’ll occasionally drop in some gems like this one; he follows an accountant to her office after her morning transit commute. Read the rest of this entry »