drmstream[writing]

I read a book the other day that is very pop­u­lar with peo­ple who are look­ing for answers to uni­ver­sal ques­tions. The writ­ing was con­cise and clear, and the imagery was acces­si­ble, despite strik­ing me as overly sim­ple. Most strik­ing was the style. Every chap­ter was short, every para­graph was short, every sen­tence was short. The […]

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.  ~George Robert Giss­ing The first time I read Flan­nery O’Connor I had to pause, go back and read para­graphs again, because the vivid­ness of her world had […]

A human being is part of a whole…[but] he expe­ri­ences him­self, his thoughts and feel­ings as some­thing sep­a­rate from the rest…This delu­sion is a kind of prison for us, restrict­ing us to our per­sonal desires and to affec­tion for a few per­sons near­est to us. Our task must be to free our­selves from this prison […]

In fact you develop your own unique voice by immers­ing your­self in the work of oth­ers. Intro­spec­tion is unbe­liev­ably over­rated. Projects and plans come from con­ver­sa­tions with other thinkers, not through con­tem­pla­tion of your own spe­cial snowflake­dom. Some­one really smart writes some­thing. Your read­ing and note tak­ing is your response.Yes: read­ing is a way of […]

Dur­ing my life­time the pop­u­la­tion of the world has dou­bled, a phe­nom­e­non that cap­ti­vates me with its myr­iad impli­ca­tions. Mix in the length­en­ing of lifes­pans and we are faced with an entirely new propo­si­tion on how to live a life. Do the tra­di­tions, habits and cul­tural mores that have been handed down over gen­er­a­tions have relevance […]

Yes­ter­day I flew from the east coast to Los Ange­les and watched two movies that were uncanny in the sim­i­lar­ity of their view of the human con­di­tion. The moral syn­chronic­ity was more star­tling for the cul­tural chasm between the two films: the uber-Wasp cor­po­rate real­ity of the Reit­man broth­ers’ Up in the Air and the […]

Fre­quent and sub­stan­tial con­ver­sa­tions with oth­ers cre­ates a sense of well-being, accord­ing to a psy­chol­ogy study reported in Sci­ence Daily this morn­ing. Greater well-being was related to spend­ing less time alone and more time talk­ing to oth­ers: The hap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talk­ing than the unhap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants. In […]

You are read­ing this on a device pow­ered by a micro-processor, ren­dered by photo-electric diodes, built from bits and bytes. You are pro­cess­ing the sig­ni­fier of each let­ter in its encoded mean­ing through each word, and cumu­la­tively, through the com­bi­na­tion of words that appear on the screen. The con­tract between you and I is that […]

via youtube.com A great taste of what NY felt like 100 years ago, with a lit­tle com­edy thrown in. The energy and the bus­tle of today has a long his­tory. from Dan McCarthy’s Stream

via youtube.com This city was a thriv­ing port at the end of the Bronze Age, occu­pied 5000 years ago. A team of arche­ol­o­gists sur­vey­ing it real­ized, as they cat­a­loged the arti­facts, that the town was older than they had imag­ined. It has been sub­merged for cen­turies, rest­ing peace­fully in shal­low waters on what once was […]