The heat of August is pooling around us, forcing us to swim more than walk though its heaviness. Every day this goes on is a bit more oppressive than the last, each push past the open door into the thickness a new struggle. Someday, soon, there will be a thunderstorm to wring out the atmosphere like a towel. But not yet.
Home » Writing (Page 55)
Category Archives: Writing
The musings of someone who picked it up on the streets.
Harry Potter
Within a few daze of the book coming out, I finished it. I won’t reveal any secrets (like Hermione being a boy – or was that “The Crying Game”?) and I won’t tell how it ends (but Harry and Voldemort plummeting over Reichenbach Falls was riveting). What I will do is outline my biggest complaints about the whole series
Authorial Omnipotence
The most common perspective for novels and other stories is one of authorial omnipotence. It also happens to be a point of view that I strongly dislike.
The basic idea is that in the world the author has created, they know everything. The storyteller is privy to what happens between characters and inside of them, at the scene of the action and away from it. Any way that the story can be advanced is at their fingertips, and the characters have to contend with the author as some kind of a deity.
Conveyance
In a steel and glass cage moving at 80 miles an hour, time passes slowly. But time is the only tangible sensation you can count on.
I have spent too much time in a car lately going from one point to another. What I find most remarkable about the way I relate to these places is that I go precisely from one point to another. In between I am in the car. I am never particularly in one place at any time, but simply in between. Travel is always this way. I am either here or there, or in transit. The conveyance of travel connects time and space through a simple ratio of average speed.
“Make No Small Plans”
“Make no small plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood”
When Daniel Burnham said this, he was an architect who was at the top of an architect’s world. He was in the process of designing the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a neoclassical playground highlighting all the great gifts of the mechanical age and the rebirth of the city ravaged by fire 22 years earlier. It was the right time and place to think big. The bosses of Chicago loved it, and the people were enthralled.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 