April 2012
54 posts
Zadie Smith - On Writing
1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
3 Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
4 Avoid your...
March 2012
41 posts
WatchWatch this video. I was referred to it by a pal Flex from a group called Ill Skillz. Ill Skillz is made up of Uno and Flex, they’re dope.
What’s also dope is that activism is alive and kicking. Basically, what started off as a creative way to use some money awarded to me for work related ventures has turned into a young experimental advocacy project. We got to talking with Ill Skillz...
Unexpected Picnics = Unexpected Joy
After a disastrous experience with a horrible room mate, my gal pal Leigh had a celebratory picnic because she found a new, better one called Kerry! I did not know all of this because I gatecrashed the whole affair. Naturally though, I had an amaaaazing time (1. because Leigh is just splendid and 2. because gatecrashers generally have the best time) It was a day of wondrous gossip, trees, our...
Women, Education & Pterodactyls
Education is the most important thing for women to pursue aggressively as they continue their fight to be recognised for what they are: dynamic, vital, biologically heroic people. Men and women are the two wings of humanity’s bird, or perhaps pterodactyl. (I offer the pterodactyl as a metaphor because humankind is often terrifying, as demonstrated by this discussion’s necessity.) If...
So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do.
— Dead Poets Society, 1989
“How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person?” — Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
This feeling is pretty much the bane of my existence.
“Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.
Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over...
