Billy Collins on Finding Your Voice

“You ‘find your voice’ when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

It is like a fictional character in that it has a very distinctive voice, a voice that seems to be able to accommodate and express an attitude that you are comfortable staying with but an attitude that is flexible enough to cover a number of situations. The character I invented, if I had to describe him, is probably an updating of a character you find strolling through the pages of English Romantic poetry. He is a daydreamer, obviously unemployed, plenty of time on his hands, spends a lot of time by himself, and has an unhealthy fascination with his thinking process, his own speculations and fantasies. So he is not a really new character. He is kind of a remodeling of this earlier Romantic character, the poet who would find himself daydreaming on a wayside bench somewhere.”

Billy Collins

Great lil’ inner-view into someone responsible for several poems that make me laugh. Like this one.

Another quote I enjoyed:

“I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.”

If I called you a “third-rate so-and-so,” is there any so-and-so out there, any hero or iconoclast you admire, that you’d actually be proud grateful and proud of being compared to them in this way?

I see myself as a bit of a third-rate Merlin Man. Probably a fourth-rate Louis C.K. But i don’t think I’d be proud of being called those… they’re just true.

I think I’d be proud of being described as a third-rate Robin Williams or a third-rate Bob Goff (but that one needs some explaining… some day).

Depression’s Insights & Laughter’s Forgiveness

“I would call this condition clarity, not depression; humor and depression are two different, but not mutually exclusive, responses to it. I know we’re told to regard depression as a disease, its victims no different from people who succumb to cancer or diabetes. But because it’s a disease whose symptoms take the shape of ideas, it can get hard to parse out pathology from worldview. The Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert once told me that ‘there are people who have no delusions; they’re called clinically depressed.’ Depression’s insights aren’t necessarily invalid; they’re just not helpful. Depression uses clarity as an instrument of torture; humor uses it as a setup. Comedy tells us, ‘But wait – that’s not the good part.’ Depression condemns the world, and us, as hateful; laughter is a way of forgiving it, and ourselves, for being so.”

Tim Kreider via Kleon

Slomo on the Most Absurd, Stupid Way to go Through a Life

“I reckon what I’m talking about is my experience in the middle part of life. The large part is a grinding affair, working away, having a family, making the whole thing happen and, at the end of it, most people are pretty worn out. They don’t believe in God, they don’t believe in anything beyond this ephemeral existence that we’re in now, their attitudes are cynical. They’re what we call “assholes.” And I was one of them.

It occurred to me one time when I was driving to work — I had a lot of reports to dictate that day — that I was still shoveling shit. Which had been the way I started my life on the dairy farm. If I look back on it, I’m just thinking, “this is the most absurd, stupid way to go through a life that a person could ever dream up.” But we’re all being pushed on to do this. And then I had the opportunity to stop.”

Slomo

Sensational video. Don’t know how they make it hit so well, but it does. Go. Watch!

Some of the Better Things I’ve Written

A friend is interviewing me for his podcast. He wanted to immerse himself in things I’ve written to prep. I wondered what I’d tell him.

So I looked through the analytics, ran my favorite engagement report, and collected the most engaged with stuff. Here’s that list, with a few other bits and bobs.

Some of the most engaged with posts at IceToTheBrim.com:

My posts at The Sparkline & Fizzle:

The two biggies from Medium.com

Rowan stuff at the Tumblr:

However, my life’s work will probably be the marginalia found in the descriptions here:

You DID say “immerse.”

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