meeting in the aisle

Weekend reader - links I loved

Have you seen the 50 viral images the web shared in 2010 yet?

How to teach creative thinking seems like a good skill to learn (PSFK)

Always wondered how successful people started? Opening Lines takes a look the beginning of the people we all now know.

This cover letter from Hunter S. Thompson should have been required reading for my twenty year-old self. (via The Rumpus)

A brave and beautiful blog post about a traumatic pregnancy experience by Jessica Valenti, in which she explains why she is in the midst of a “new normal”

Emergencies may better be seen as occasions for fresh starts and rethinking. Because they take life and make death vivid for those who survive emergencies, they properly prompt people to appraise lives that are nearly cut short. - Tom Sorrel, NYT

With all this war, it is easy to forget the complexity of Afghanistan, but these images of the other side of Afghanistan help (NPR).

Freakonomics wants me to ask, do I buy because I bleed? Which puts a whole new spin on the Dorothy Porter poetry I bought with money earmarked for food.

Which brings me to Dorothy Porter’s advice to aspiring writers:

When planning my next book I decided I would please myself entirely – and that is the advice I give to any aspiring writers this afternoon – please yourself. I wanted ingredients that stank to high heaven of badness. I wanted graphic sex. I wanted explicit perversion. I wanted putrid language. I wanted stenching murder. I wanted to pour out my heart.

Well said.

btw - R U OK?

[image: sunflower, for the beautiful soul in my life who the sun is hiding from right now]

If I could read five books this week - I would read these

I started the day with a tough decision. Ambling along Nicholson St on the tram, gently rocking the way those fancy new trams do on route 96, I could feel my stop approaching, looming over my shoulder, laughing at the two pages of my book I had left to read.

I had to decide - do I skim read the last two pages of Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, and find out who killed the girl, or do I wait?

Now that I only have two pages left to read, do I buy a new book?

• I could buy Jonathan Franzen’s headline-grabbing book Freedom, and immerse myself in fallen heroes and fuck-ups.
• Or maybe this poetry verse thing would carry me well into the weekend (and the Overload Poetry Festival next week) - Dorothy Porter is nothing if not intriguing.
• Have I mentioned Jared Diamond’s Collapse yet? It sits, unopened, on my bedside table. A guilt trip I am yet to take.
• There is a man called Tao Lin, too, who writes about characters with loaded names like Dakota Fanning and Hayley Joel Osmond in a book causing waves: Richard Yates
• And I am yet to read The Idiot, despite my Dostoevsky devotion…

p.s. The last two pages lie in waiting, in shadows, under darkness, in the bottom of my bag. I think of Tim Winton’s book Breathe and I wonder at the independence of ideas and I feel sad for young girls who fall for…