Posts tagged as:

writing

CRAM Magazine

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

CRAM MagazineQuite nifty! My mini-tutorial — Five Tips for Smarter Playlists — has been published in the second issue of the online pdf magazine CRAM. A few weeks ago I received an email from one of their editors requesting permission to republish the essay. I had actually forgotten all about it. Then this morning someone at CRAM sent me an email announcing that the latest issue has been published. My article begins on page six. How cool is that?

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On Baseball

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

I step into the batter’s box, placing my right foot in the hole … scraped inside the back chalk line. I am aware of nothing but [the pitcher] — not the crowd, not the infield in and Lord knows not the blue sky.

This moment is the essence of the game, its molecular core. It is why we love baseball as we love a family member, while the other sports have to manage with our lust, infatuation or uncommitted affection. Either I will win or [the pitcher] will win, and even the most rudimentary fan will immediately know it. No one will have to wait for the game films. And no teammate can help me.

A baseball game will stage about 80 of these batter versus pitcher matchups, all of which appeal to our American sense of democracy — we must take turns at bat — and our thirst for conflict and for quick and clear resolution, the backbone of prime-time television, our real national pastime, as well. Eighty miniversions of CSI.

Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci spent five days as a Toronto Blue Jay during spring training this year. His account of the experience appears in the March 14, 2005 issue of SI.

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Excellent Potential Book Titles

Friday, January 23, 2004

If I ever get a chance to write my memoirs, I think I will name them either: “What to Do If You Are Surrounded by the Entire Bolivian Army and Have No More Bullets” or “Snapshots: Twenty-seven 8 x 10 Color Glossy Photographs with Circles and Arrows and a Paragraph on the Back of Each One Explaining What Each One Was to be Used as Evidence against Us”.

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Funny Stuff in My Inbox — High School Essays

Thursday, June 12, 2003

These are from a joke email circulating that purports to be “ANALOGIES & METAPHORS FOUND IN HIGH SCHOOL ESSAYS”. I highly doubt that these were actually culled from high school essays. The main reason I don’t believe it is because there is no point of reference. There is no notation or source. The second reason I don’t believe it is because, even if there was a source listed, it’s a freaking chain email, for the love of Pete Sampras. I am skeptical - and you should be, too! - about 73.6% of the news I hear on NPR or NBC; you think I’m going to trust a chain email? And the other strong reason I have to be cynical about the origins of this bit o’ electronically-transmitted comedy is because, with the possible exception of a few cousins and my half-sister, I don’t think I know of anyone sub-20 that can write a complete sentence.

He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

Regardless … it’s still quite a funny collection of sentences.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like socks in a dryer without Cling Free.

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Typing Monkeys

Saturday, May 10, 2003

Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.

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To Have and Have Not

Saturday, May 25, 2002

Placing Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not in the 1930s - an essay by David Gagne
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Thomas Hardy

Friday, May 24, 2002

On Thomas Hardy’s “The Self-Unseeing” and “The Haunter”
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Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin

Friday, May 24, 2002

On Jonathan Edwards’ Resolutions and Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanacks

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The First Time I Got Paid For It

Tuesday, April 16, 2002

The First Time I Got Paid For Itby Peter Lefcourt (Editor), Laura J. Shapiro (Editor), William Goldman
I’m about 70% into this collection of essays by Hollywood authors and scriptwriters and I love it. I devoured that much of it in one sitting and then had to put it down because I wanted to savor it a bit more.

The first story - by Alan Alda of M*A*S*H fame - sets the tone for the book. Alda writes about the first time he felt the thrill of creation while working on a script for an episode of the famous Korean War television series. After Alda’s three-page story the editors deliver a barrage of mini-editorials by some of the most famous creative minds in show business. There are essays by well-known talents such as Lawrence Kasdan, Steven Bochco, and Cameron Crowe that will excite any fan of good writing.

I want to make it very clear that the book is *not* an instruction manual, a tutorial, or a “how-to”. There are no chapters detailing how much writers earn in Hollywood, how to “break into the biz”, or to what address you should send your script for “Ally McBeal”. It is simply a collection of stories written by prominent Hollywood writers about their experiences the first time they ever got paid to write. “Simply” is not a word, though, that should be used to describe this book. If you are a writer, or are fascinated by the process of writing - and by that I mean putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and creating a story - you will love to read about these authors’ first times.
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Sir Gawain

Wednesday, April 10, 2002

This is from an English lit. class; it was written on February 10, 1993 …

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

What makes a man a hero? Where lies the line which when crossed changes a mortal man into a legend? Is it at the altar at Canterbury? in the Minotaur’s labyrinth? or is it an age or a time? Does a man become a hero when he transforms from a boy to an adult? or when he stops being a man and becomes a martyr? Where are the heroes of 1993? In whom do the children of this age believe? Like whom do they strive to be? Kennedy, Lennon, and even Superman are dead. World leaders are mockeries of real men, more like Pilates than Thomas Mores. Pop culture’s icons change daily. It is interesting that nearly 600 years ago someone was writing about heroism in a way that can be understood today. The poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tells a tale in which a man is proven to be a hero through the seemingly un-heroic decisions made in the course of numerous tests. Sir Gawain is a hero for the 21st century. He is tried and trapped, he is inundated with opportunities to fail and yet he does not lose. More importantly though, in the end he learns an essential, inescapable fact about himself and human nature.

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How to be a TV Writer

Tuesday, April 2, 2002

Here’s an idea. How about a television show all about nothing? I wonder if that would be popular. Maybe Jerry should have read NBC’s helpful tutorial, “How to be a TV Writer“.

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Meditations on First Philosophy

Thursday, March 28, 2002

But if the mere fact that I can produce from my thought the image of something entails that everything which I clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, is not this a possible basis for another argument to prove the existence of God?

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Blake - Urizen

Tuesday, March 26, 2002

If Blake was not simply stoned out of his mind, then what explanation can there be for this troubling work?

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Keats - This Living Hand

Monday, March 25, 2002

You can’t eye can’t I can’t they can’t she can’t he can’t it can’t why can’t why can’t eye don’t no. Y’no? It’s im-poss-ib-al. If there’s one overwhelming iota that I’ve been shown by some auricle at some distant point in my youth, it’s that things that are written are written and things that aren’t aren’t. It’s not fair to me or anyone else (altho to b honest eye don ot really care about anybody else] to say that one thing in the world of written langu-age means anything. These words : certainly don’t mean anything.

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Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Friday, March 22, 2002

I got the regular stuff about race and color and pride and prejudice and the sound and the fury and the cultural implications … but what about me?”

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