Stop daydreaming and get to work

It's like your teachers said. Fantasy makes your dreams less likely to come true.

Positive fantasies "'make energy seem unnecessary' say Heather Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen. 'By allowing people to consummate a desired future,' the researchers explain, 'positive fantasies trigger the relaxation that would normally accompany actual achievement, rather than marshaling the energy needed to obtain it.'"

But only positive fantasies. If your daydreams feature worrying that you'll never achieve your goals, that's supposed to energize you. According to this research, pessimists should be more successful than optimists, no?

Missing Almost Everything

"Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot."

At NPR.

Then when you add music, movies, etc. All the time not spent doing what we love... It's a thinky piece about how things have to be chosen, how we choose them, how and why things fade -- because of new things, because of all the access we supposedly have to everything, via the internet, Netflix, etc.

It's worth following the link to Ebert's article, or follow it here. Which illustrates for me that things fade also because times and people change. Nobody wants to read all the old books, see all the old movies. I don't have that much interest in all of what Ebert mentions. I do appreciate more than just Howl in Allen Ginsberg's work, and I read Flaubert, Murdoch, Borges, Nabokov, Stendhal. Ebert says his goal is "to enjoy reading." I think that's the point. If you enjoy focusing your reading on a theme, becoming an expert, or if you read what you like, whether you read widely or narrowly, you have to trust yourself and just go. Otherwise, you risk spending too much time thinking about it when you could be reading, going to concerts, movies, etc.

Bookstores to Visit

Really beautiful. Slideshow.

The Montague Bookmill, pictured, is one of the four (of 14) I have been to.

Go the Fuck to Sleep

The "children's" book for tired parents became a bestseller a month before its release, thanks to a pirated PDF (which I read). It's also gotten a "significant" film deal, which I can't say I understand, but, whatever. The text consists of four-line poems ending with a variation of "Go the fuck to sleep." The illustrations are typical of childrens' books. One of publishing's little mysteries, I guess.

Read about it.

Writer's Block by Flaubert

"I don't in the least know how to set to work to write, and I begin by expressing only the hundredth part of my ideas after infinite gropings. ...For entire days I have polished and repolished a paragraph without accomplishing anything. I feel like weeping at times. You ought to pity me!" Gustave Flaubert to George Sand.

The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters, free on Google Books. The letters are beautiful, too.

Interesting that Flaubert compares the novelist to God: "I even think the novelist hasn't the right to express his opinion on any subject whatsoever. Has the good God ever uttered it, his opinion?"

Ding!

The typewriter undergoes a renaissance. I tried to learn to type on an indestructible manual typewriter -- haven't seen one of those old war horses in ages -- tho I did not do much typing on it. The keys would all bunch up as if the machine were frustrated with an inept user and throwing its hands in the air. The first typewriter I loved was a big old IBM correcting Selectric, blue, with interchangeable type balls and changeable pitch. So I totally understand wanting one of these, manual or electric. As well as a tablet PC, a Nook and a cellphone that takes hi-def pix.

A Shed of One's Own

Writers' writing spaces. Including Virginia Woolf's -- who apparently had a shed of her own.

I really like the idea of a writing room built on a turntable to follow the sun.

When Librarians Go Wild

They launch a boycott.

Divorce and Longevity at the WSJ

The best childhood predictor of longevity, it turns out, is a quality best defined as conscientiousness: "the often complex pattern of persistence, prudence, hard work, close involvement with friends and communities" that produces a well-organized person who is "somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree."

The Wall St Journal review of The Longevity Project, in which we are informed that a parental divorce in childhood shortens the child's life -- or did, anyway. This study was from a time when divorce was really a social disaster. Also, there is no way to compare the result of a miserable, non-divorced childhood had the parents not divorced. So, bearing in mind that there are lies, damn lies and statistics, this looks like an interesting book:

"...chipper types were also more likely to die from homicide, suicide or accident. Of course, the authors don't suggest telling happy kids to wipe the grins off their faces..."

So, conscientious, obsessive, prudent kids live longer... or does it just seem longer?

Keeping in Touch

I just renewed my domain name, ZenofWriting.com -- altho this blog is accessible also by zenofwriting.blogspot.com -- while wondering how the readership numbers compare with Facebook friends who actually read my (usually non-blog) posts.

Well, I'm trying to keep in touch. Soon, I'll have to put pages of my novel up on lampposts...oh, wait. Someone has already thought of that.

Brave New Orange Juice

This is a bit depressing:

Most are surprised to hear, for instance, that the big brands [e.g., Tropicana, a Pepsi company and Minute Maid, owned by Coca-Cola], which market their product as “pure” and “simple,” add flavor packs to their juice to make it fresh.

Flavor packs are fabricated from the chemicals that make up orange essence and oil. Flavor and fragrance houses, the same ones that make high end perfumes, break down orange essence and oils into their constituent chemicals and then reassemble the individual chemicals in configurations that resemble nothing found in nature. Ethyl butyrate is one of the chemicals found in high concentrations in the flavor packs added to orange juice sold in North American markets, because flavor engineers have discovered that it imparts a fragrance that Americans like, and associate with a freshly squeezed orange.

Freshly squeezed orange juice tastes fresh naturally, and some supermarkets do sell it. However, “from concentrate” and most “not from concentrate” orange juice undergo processes that strip the flavor from the juice. The largest producers of “not from concentrate” or pasteurized orange juice keep their juice in million-gallon aseptic storage tanks to ensure a year round supply. Aseptic storage involves stripping the juice of oxygen, a process known as “deaeration,” so the juice doesn’t oxidize in the “tank farms” in which the juice sits, sometimes for as long as a year.

Squeezed, by Alissa Hamilton.

I guess we have to squeeze our own oranges, now. Most disturbing is the fact that these facts are hidden from us, that a product that contains "flavor packs" can be sold as pure orange juice. I thought we had laws regarding that... hello?

The Dogs of Fiction

Not just "books about rascally lovable mutts and bad dogs that impart life lessons to simple-minded human masters." A fun look at books by and about dogs.

Which are not my favorite dog books, anyway. This list is not exhaustive, but it's a look at the uses writers have for dogs. Sci fi dogs, best friend dogs, wise dogs, foolish dogs, dogs who capture the imagination.

The Awesome Future of Literature

Some more links in the ongoing gender discussions, from Monkey Puzzle Press.

What would you expect a dog to write about?

His favorite dog food brand? Even Teddy Kennedy's dog was just a dog, altho he was also a humanizing influence. Everyone liked him, even Republicans who were battling Senator Kennedy's initiatives.

Cute article about intern's dog impersonation.