From the category archives:

Favorites

Write What You Want To, Then What You Have To

Favorites
The Poetry of WB Yeats

As a writer, I’m still getting my sea legs under me. But I have the luxury of blogging which means that I don’t have the displeasure of having to deal with an editor telling me what to write. To be sure, I lament this fact sometimes, especially when I don’t feel particularly strongly about writing anything at all. I am not the kind of person who cannot do what I am supposed to do, and be OK with it. No. When I don’t write, I suffer. No matter how much else I might have going on at the time, I was put here to write. When I don’t write, I tear myself apart.

Read the full article →

What It Feels Like To Be a Creator

Arts and Culture
August Strindberg The Creditors

I had a nagging feeling tugging at me last night as I attended a performance of August Strindberg’s 1888 play, “The Creditors.” I almost feel bad admitting that I wasn’t entirely present for the performance. Instead, I was led astray by a single thought that popped into my head shortly after the play started. That thought was simply that I cannot simply enjoy art for art’s sake any longer.

Read the full article →

The 21st Century Needs to Retire Some Things

Favorites
Retire the NYSE Bell Ringing

This antiquated exercise in self-aggrandizement just doesn’t fit into our world anymore, a world where half of Wall Street was bailed out by the Federal Government (willingly or not) and where the nation is still grappling with a nasty recession. Even as glimmers of an economic recovery begin to perk through the muck and mire of this terrible and long-lasting recession, it hardly feels like a recovery now does it? Must be one of those “jobless recoveries” that the media is always going on about.

Read the full article →

A Million New Novelists

Arts and Culture
Blogging Novelists

We are on the verge of seeing a creative explosion in our culture. There is one reason for this: the advent and adoption of self-publishing. In particular, I am speaking of the future outlook for the novel. Although self-publishing effects all artistic forms, photography, video, audio, visual art; the art form that is most immediately affected by self-publishing is creative writing. By a wide margin, most blogs are dedicated to the written word in one form or another.

Read the full article →

Is Social Media a Social Movement?

Arts and Culture
Social Media Meritocracy

We will once again build walls. But they’ll be made of glass this time, not concrete. And we’ll be able to see the inner workings of things. If a book gets published and hits bestseller status. We’ll know why. And it won’t be because of slick packaging. Because everyone can have slick packaging. More so than ever, its what inside that counts.

Read the full article →

War Is Funny! Armando Ianucci’s “In The Loop”

Favorites
Armando Ianucci's In The Loop

What do you do when your your empire, once the world’s most grand experiment in imperialism, has degenerated into ruin? What do you do when you’ve begun playing second fiddle in foreign affairs to a nation that used to be a remote colonial outpost of yours? What do you when you are so ashamed of your role as prime agitator in the biggest foreign policy blunder of the last generation that you can barely stand to look at yourself in the mirror?

You make perhaps the greatest political comedy movie of all time.

Read the full article →

My First Run of the Year

Favorites
Central Park Jogging

You wouldn’t know this from looking at me, all 185 pounds of squat, barrel chestedness, but I happen to be a runner. What is a runner? A runner is someone who runs. Who despite everything else happening in their life, thinks of running as something they are initmately connected to. Some people will never be runners. Some will run every day of their life until [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

[ZAC] on Twitter[ZAC] on Facebook[your] RSS Feed[your] Email