Today’s post is all about other posts – calls to action, meditations on time/space, a profile on a great NYC writer, and a hilarious rant about how writers should be rock stars.
Sometimes the interwebs is just too full of good stuff to pass up.
There has been talk of a Keystone pipeline, a means of transporting some of the crude oil in Canada to the SUV’s of the United States. Recently, there was an auction to sell up some key pieces of land to be used for the transportation and refinement of petroleum. At one of those, Tim DeChristopher, a 27 year old economics student, threw the auction into disarray by bidding on land that he had no intention of paying for. Tar Sands Action, a group formed to halt this process because of it’s negative environmental implications, wrote about DeChristopher’s act of civil disobedience, and a peaceful protest in Washington D.C. to express the enormity of this decision. To his defense, speaking of his actions and what led to them, DeChristopher has said, “At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow.”
NPR recently posted about looking up at the sky (one of my favorite pastimes), and how it brings about the question of time and space.
“As almost everyone knows, when you stare into the depths of space you are also looking back in time. Catch a glimpse of a relatively nearby star and you see it as it existed when, perhaps, Lincoln was president (if it’s 150 light-years away). Stars near the edge of our own galaxy are only seen as they appeared when the last ice age was in full bloom (30,000 light-years away). And those giant pinwheel assemblies of stars called galaxies are glimpsed, as they existed millions, hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the past.
We never see the sky as it is, but only as it was.” The rest of the article will continue to put a wrinkle in your brain.
The New York Observer recently ran a profile on Royal Young, Pomp co-founder and writer extraordinaire. The author spends a good amount of time discussing the trials and tribulations Young went through to get to this point of writing and contributing. Young has been sharing bits and pieces of his memoir-in-progress with publications such as New York Press and contributing regularly to Interview Magazine, pushing to get his voice heard, and his story told in this fast-changing industry. (Seems to be working!)
And Terrible Minds recently posted a blog about how writers can gain some respect by turning into some muthafuckin rockstars! Starting sections of this rant with title’s such as – We Need Some Literary Beefs Up In This Hizzy – the rest of the article talks about imaginative ‘writerly’ drug habits and creative demands made by authors before readings. I wait with baited breath for these to become a ‘thing’.
