Productivity tips from fairy tales, YouTube vs Hollywood, & too many books?
7 things worth sharing this weekend 5/18/24
I helped take thirty 4th graders to Ellis Island and then we rode the subway back, so now I feel like a New Yorker, but here are 7 things worth sharing this weekend…
The writer Alice Munro passed away earlier this week, and here’s her Paris Review Art of Fiction interview.
Here’s her take on revising a story that she had already published:
“I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again it seems a bit obtrusive. So I’m not too sure about this sort of thing. The answer may be that one should stop this behavior. There should be a point where you say, the way you would with a child, this isn’t mine anymore.
Why YouTube will keep outcompeting Hollywood by Simon Owens
The third — and perhaps greatest — advantage YouTube has over the major content studios is its frictionless discovery. Not only does it have a powerful recommendation engine on both its homepage and apps, but any consumer can easily embed and share YouTube videos across blogs, text messages, email, and social media, and they can be consumed on any web-connected interface…
How to gain more from your reading at Psyche
Reading with insight and toward deeper understanding requires paying close attention, noticing as much as you can about the text from the beginning. Attending to a work carefully will prepare you to reflect on it, engage with it and ask questions. That’s the key – bring to bear your attentive, observant, questioning self on your reading.
Productivity tips from fairy tales at Medium
Peter Pan: Find a girl who will cook and clean for you, giving you all the time you need to recruit children for your strange little business. I couldn’t run my inspirational Keep Your Inner Child Alive Seminars without Wendy and the other girls I’ve kidnapped to act as the emotional and domestic backbone. Behind every successful forever-child is a girl who got tricked into a tree.
Are there too many books? At Literary Hub.
And now for my hottest take in a minute: There are already too many books in the world. As a reader, I’m constantly overwhelmed with new material, and I know I’m not alone. And this is before we factor in how the market is flooded with AI-generated ripoffs for sale on Amazon.
Franz Kafka’s Ambivalent Notes
I’ve linked to this a few times, but this newsletter from Jillian Hess is always so good
Notes on reading/watching/listening
My wife and I re-watched the first episode of Lost again last night! It was my first time re-watching it since it first aired. Though it has so many flaws, this show went from overrated to underrated. Definitely a transitional show in how we consume TV, i.e. binging and expectations of closure, etc
I also watched Iron Claw this week, the movie about the Von Erich wrestling family. What a subculture and so many personal tragedies. I read an interview with the director and they actually had to leave out so many things that were even more tragic. One of the rare occasions where a TV show would have actually been a better format than a movie.
Still reading The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut and I finally dove into Spotify audiobooks to keep going with Leslie Jamison’s Splinters
Last Thing
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” - Einstein
Keep going-
Josh Spilker
It's daunting to realize that three million books were published in the U.S. last year when under 300,000 were published fifteen years ago. And that the average book sells under 1,000 copies. I'm glad I started publishing books well before Amazon became a behemoth, before self-publishing, and before AI.