Jag var på ett AddSkills-seminarium om Microsoft Office 2010 idag, och bestämde mig för att anteckna litet om det som skiljer Office 2007 från Office 2010. Read it and weep learn!

Culled from pages 114-115 in “The Paris Review Interviews: vol. 2“, I love the following snippet that tells of how Isaac Bashevis Singer thinks future technology will enable rather than disable the writer.

INTERVIEWER

Some commentators on the current scene, notably Marshall McLuhan, feel that literature as we have known it for hundreds of years is an anachronism, that it’s on the way out. The reading of stories and novels, they feel, is soon to be a thing of the past, because of electronic entertainments, radio, television, film, stereophonic records, magnetic tapes, and other mechanical means of communication yet to be invented. Do you believe this to be true?

SINGER

It will be true if our writers will not be good writers. But if we have people with the power to tell a story, there will always be readers. I don’t think that human nature is going to change to such a degree that people will stop being interested in a work of imagination. Certainly, the true facts, the real facts, are always interesting. Today nonfiction plays a very big part—to hear stories about what happened. If people jet to the moon, journalists will tell us, or films will tell us, what happened there, and these will be more interesting stories than anything a fiction writer can produce. But still there will be a place for the good fiction writer. There is no machine and no kind of reporting and no kind of film that can do what a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky or Gogol did. It is true that poetry has suffered a great blow in our times. But not because of television or because of other things, but because poetry itself became bad. If we are going to have numbers of bad novels, and bad novelists imitate each other, what they write will be neither interesting nor understood. Naturally, this may kill the novel, at least for a time. But I don’t think that literature, good literature, has anything to fear from technology. The very opposite. The more technology the more people will be interested in what the human mind can produce without the help of electronics.

“Fantasy Mission Force” [Jackie Chan], 4,6/10

“Wheels On Meals” [Jackie Chan], 6,9/10

From the non-embeddable films we have “The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes“, where Christopher Lee hosts an overview of Sherlock Holmes as Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of him, as portrayed on the stage, on radio, television, and in the motion pictures by dozens of actors from 1900 to 1985. So sticky! Lee is – as always – great fun without meaning to be.

Also, you have “Raw Spice: The Unofficial Story Of The Making Of The Spice Girls“! Get back to the 90s…

“Fist of Fury” [Bruce Lee], 7.0/10

Bruce Lee! Wooo!

From “The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 2“, page 53:

INTERVIEWER

What is the function of the critic?

FAULKNER

The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews. The critic too is trying to say, “Kilroy was here.” His function is not directed toward the artist himself. The artist is a cut above the critic, for the artist is writing something that will move the critic. The critic is writing something that will move everybody but the artist.

INTERVIEWER

So you never feel the need to discuss your work with anyone?

FAULKNER

No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don’t need to talk about it. If it doesn’t please me, talking about it won’t improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer, I don’t get any pleasure from talking shop.

Apparently, Faulkner appeared to have a rather big stick up his behind and saw himself as better than others…

INTERVIEWER

Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they have read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?

FAULKNER

Read it four times.

…but apart from that, I think he’s right in the sense that you have to find your own way and try not to care too much what others think of your writing. And to end it all:

INTERVIEWER

How does a writer become a serious novelist?

FAULKNER

Ninety-nine percent talent…ninety-nine percent discipline…ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

I’m not totally sure I agree, but “try to be better than yourself” seems like a good point.

Who could ever have thought a book where authors, poets, an editor and a director who have no special item to promote could ever be something precious?

Well, considering these people are, in order, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, James M. Cain, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Stone, Robert Gottlieb, Richard Price, Billy Wilder, Jack Gilbert and Joan Didion, the die is kinda cast.

The subjects vary. And so do the tones of the people involved. While Parker and Capote kick off the book by being very funny and obliging, Hemingway and Eliot are much more serious, yet still cast a wholly different shadow on things, at least considering how Hemingway divulges no intimacies in his books while Capote could seemingly stab into any aspect of his writing.

I’ve never before come across such a great collection of inspiration and depth into the art of creating books, apart from sheer writing and living.

My faves: Parker, Capote, Hemingway, Borges, Vonnegut, Gottlieb, Wilder and Gilbert. Those are many, right? Says a lot.

Can’t wait to get into the second volume!

Here are some screen-shots of mine from this book. Oooh.

We’ve just started a one-month trial subscription to a Swedish morning paper and as such, I’m suddenly partaking in the game that is the daily news, which is something I’ve skipped except through very filtered ways, i.e. RSS-feeds and Twitter, which are of course very pre-filtered by myself and limited to certain areas; I’m not trying to kid myself to thinking that this paper isn’t filtered in every way, from the political arena to who knows who in the editorial office, but it proffers me more than what I’m used to which is really a good thing; it’s lovely to sit and read the morning paper during the weekend with Mia, both of us sipping a cuppa.

Meanwhile, the Swedish TV-jumble that is “Glamorama“, is on TV. A marathon. Mia and I dive through the existence of three girls who have much money and no parlay. Anna Hibbs, one of the mains: “The TV-presenter said we’re ‘jet-set girls‘. How could he say that? I only travel by express train!”

I read of the US having left Iraq two weeks in advance of Obama’s promised deadline date, appx. seven years after Bush touted “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!“. Now, Al-Qaeda and their likes have a much stronger fan-base in said country. There are up to a million killed in Iraq during the last seven years. It just makes me want to play Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous” as remixed by Holy Fuck, at obnoxious levels and forget about the entire, maddening thing. Bureaucrats making decisions that affect millions, not even having to push the button that launches the missiles.

Blixa sits comfortably numb on the back of our fat-screen TV, warming herself while definitely not watching what’s going on. Her eyes are even closed.

And the day has just started. Sunday at home. Mmm!

Yep, I stole this pen!

I was a lot cuter when I was little. And I love the wallpaper.

To negate all of that negative Friday 13th nonsense.