Kurt Vonnegut on Death & Meaning
“I would have given anything to die in a war that meaningful”
Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
Who Have I Blessed More Than You?
I thought some wrongness in my self had made me that alone.
And God said, You are worth more to me
than one hundred sparrows.
And when I read that, I wept.
And God said, Whom have I blessed more than I have blessed you?
And I looked at the mini bar
and the bad abstract hotel art on the wall
and the dark TV set watching like a deacon.
And God said, Survive. And carry my perfume among the perishing.
This comes from a poem called Bible Study. I’m not as ostensibly churchy as I used to be, but you don’t have to be for this one to hit you right between the lungs.
Here’s the rest of the poem Bible Study by Tony Hoagland:
Bible Study
by Tony Hoagland
Who would have imagined that I would have to go
a million miles away from the place where I was born
to find people who would love me?
And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people?
In the dream JoAnne was showing me how much arm to amputate
if your hand gets trapped in the gears of the machine;
if you acted fast, she said, you could save everything above the wrist.
You want to keep a really sharp blade close by, she said.
Now I raise that hand to scratch one of those nasty little
scabs on the back of my head, and we sit outside and watch
the sun go down, inflamed as an appendicitis
over western Illinois — which then subsides and cools into a smooth gray sea.
Who knows, this might be the last good night of summer.
My broken nose is forming an idea of what’s for supper.
Hard to believe that death is just around the corner.
What kind of idiot would think he even had a destiny?
I was on the road for so long by myself,
I took to reading motel Bibles just for company.
Lying on the chintz bedspread before going to sleep,
still feeling the motion of the car inside my body,
I thought some wrongness in my self had made me that alone.
And God said, You are worth more to me
than one hundred sparrows.
And when I read that, I wept.
And God said, Whom have I blessed more than I have blessed you?
And I looked at the mini bar
and the bad abstract hotel art on the wall
and the dark TV set watching like a deacon.
And God said, Survive. And carry my perfume among the perishing.
Paul Graham on Hobbyists
“Are there groups of scruffy but sophisticated users like the early microcomputer “hobbyists” that are currently being ignored by the big players?”
This inspires me.
Motivation Secret: Care About Yourself (Video)
I’m a lazy turd. You can hear me whine about it here. But I’ve stumbled into a way to motivate myself to do the stuff I don’t want to do in life and in business.
- Treat your future self like he/she is a completely different person than you.
- Care for that person.
- Set things up today so he/she has the best possible chance of succeeding tomorrow. (i.e., fold your fucking T shirt!)
William Goldman’s Benediction for Creatives
And to all that [young film school] talent let me say, where the hell have you been and I wish you joy…
… and may you ignore the critics when they attack you, and pay no attention to their praise…
… and may you please remember when your scenes are sludge, that screenplays are structure…
… and may you have peers as willing to improve your project as you must be; treat them kindly, for they will save your ass many times over…
… and may you always remember “it’s only a movie” but never forget there are lots of worse things than movies—like politicians…
… and may you be lucky enough and skilled enough to make some glorious moments for all those people out there sitting in the dark, as earlier craftsmen created such moments for you…
… and finally and most of all, may all your scars be little ones.
Lawrence Wright on What Stuff to do
“I decided a while ago that I would only do things that were really important or really fun.”
This was a really great interview. He came from evangelicalism, expanded outside of it but continued to explore stories of faith from Al Qaeda to ISIS to Scientology. (Wright wrote the book which that great scientology documentary was based on.)
Craig Mazin on the Rules
“You’re gonna make it if you’re special. And if you’re special, generally speaking, rules don’t apply.”
Hayao Miyazaki on His Life’s Work
All that work you’re doing on your company, your reputation, your skills, maybe it all comes to a moment like this.
You’re 72, you just finished a project that took you two and a half years of constant, steady work, you’re on the garden roof of a building your company designed, where you’ve spent the majority of your life for the past 20 years, and you can sense how pointless it is to imagine it all somehow staying together.
“It’s just a name” you say with equal parts broken-heart and indifferent wisdom.
And then you get distracted by a perfect moment of sunlight and leaves.
This was from a documentary on Studio Ghibli called The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. If you’ve loved Miyazaki worlds like Totoro and Spirited Away you’ll love this film.
This scene struck hard. He’s lived the way I find myself dreaming about and here he is at the end and he’s just as full of dissatisfaction, sorrow, creativity and expectation.
I said this to my friend who was stressing over having kids or not: “In the end everybody loses. It’s not like some people win and others lose. Everyone loses. Nobody wins in the end. This being so, what kind of adventure do you want to have? For myself (and I didn’t know this at the time), my son is the best adventure I’ve found. Nothing else in my life is as dangerous or joyful or exhausting, nothing else — no movie, company or creation — elicits the depth of feeling from within me that my sons have.”
The kid stuff is my story. Regardless of where you land on that, the first bit is true: you’re going to lose in the end and you won’t be able to take anything with you. You could build the best goddam company and bring more magic to people than any of your contemporaries… and you’ll still stand somewhere at the end recognizing that whether it persists or falls apart won’t be up to you. And then the wind will brush your hair and face and you’ll get distracted by something beautiful regardless.
This being so, what kind of adventure do you want to have?
Jim Henson’s First Commercials
In 1957, Jim Henson was approached by a Washington, D.C. coffee company to produce commercials for Wilkins Coffee. The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the Muppet commercials had to be lightning-fast — essentially, eight seconds for the commercial pitch and a two-second shot of the product.
From 1957 to 1961, Henson made 179 commercials for Wilkins Coffee […] The ads were so successful and well-liked that they sparked a series of remakes for companies in other local markets throughout the 1960s.
The ads starred the cheerful Wilkins, who liked Wilkins Coffee, and the grumpy Wontkins, who hated it. Wilkins would often do serious harm to Wontkins in the ads — blowing him up, stabbing him with a knife, and smashing him with a club, among many other violent acts. ∞
Once I get past the crazy violence all I can think of is: goddam that’s a lot of variations on a theme!
What if, in the next thing I make, I forced myself to make 100 different versions of the thing? The value of each idea goes down, but the cumulative effect is much different.
More interesting to me is whether or not I could even come up with 100 versions of anything. Seems like a hell of a task.
Nietzsche on Why & How
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Friedrich Nietzsche