Crucial Minutiae

Here’s a nifty little tool I’ve been trying out to improve my writing hours: Freedom. It’s an application (sorry, Apple only) that disables your ability to connect to the internet for a set period of time, up to 8 hours. The only way to get around it is to reboot your computer, which is enough of a disincentive to you’ll probably stick to not being able to browse.

It seems best to start out slowly, especially if you’re used to checking email every 20 minutes or so. I’ll weigh back in and let you know how it goes in the comments. (via The Rumpus)

Photographer Jonas Bendiksen’s exhibition, The Places We Live, is on view at New York’s ICP until this Saturday, but the website is worth viewing if you don’t live near NYC or can’t make it. Bendiksen’s camera documents 16 homes in four different slums throughout the world: Caracas, Venezuela; Mumbai, India; Nairobi, Kenya; and Jakarta, Indonesia. As the site notes, for 2008, for the first time, more of humanity is living in urban areas than rural ones, and more than a third of us citydwellers have homes in the slums. They are the fastest growing segment of urban life, existing at the edge of both the physical city and our understanding.

http://www.theplaceswelive.com/

So I’m at the beginning of a long book project, and for the first time I’m having to deal with a large number of files on my computer in some sort of systematic way, keeping track of the little, random text files I write late at night as well as longer pieces I keep coming back to and working on in a way that resembles diligence. There’s also a lot of material that I’ve written over the last few years as this project has been brewing, scattered over several computers and operating systems, tucked into folders and sub-folders, often in places that don’t make sense.

I just started re-reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and it starts off with her going back to something she wrote shortly after her husband’s sudden death:

Life changes fast. 
Life changes in the instant. 
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. 
The question of self-pity.
(more…)

Two random links I’ve come across recently both pointing to similar things: The mundane details of the working lives of writers. This may be a bit too inside-baseball for anyone not writing or at least unhealthily obsessed with the writing life, but both offer the same charm of seeing what routines and superstitions other writers cling to in order to get the work done.

Writer’s Rooms

This is an on-going series from the Guardian offering “portraits of the spaces where authors create.” Each post is a photograph of a writer’s studio or study, with a few words describing their habits an routines. From Martin Amis to Joshua Ferris to Jane Austin to Sarah Waters, good clean time-wasting fun.

Daily Routines

Dedicated to collecting the daily routines of writers and other artists, culled from biographies and interviews. There’s something undeniably satisfying in seeing how we are all such creatures of habit, and how we constantly let ourselves (and our work) down in small, daily ways, but seek to overcome those letdowns with something akin to personal tradition.

A beautiful, moving site by Phillip Toledano that mixes photography and words to lovingly depict the complicated bond between a father and a son later in life. Doesn’t need much introduction, just click towards the bottom of each image to go to the next:

As if the iPhone didn’t already have that untoward sheen of luxury about it, a developer is now selling an application you can buy for your phone (through the Apple Apps store) called I Am Rich. The name is basically the functionality: It costs $1000 to download, and does absolutely nothing. Owning it is a badge, much like owning a BMW, that says, “Hey, I’ve got money to burn.” Only unlike a BMW, I Am Rich is totally useless, so it’s more like a badge that says, “Hey, I’ve got money to burn and I’m a total idiot. Please feel free to hate me.”

Update: It’s been taken down. Not clear if Apple yanked it or the developer, suspiciously named Armin Heinrich, took it down of his own accord.

Via Wired