Ah yes, the Blogiversary. One year of bringing you the hits. And the catastrophic failures. Our Countdown of Ugh concludes with the worst post of the year, as measured by your complete indifference. Nothing on this site received less love than this one. It came to you, hat in hand, a humble post seeking attention. And the Internet looked elsewhere. The Internet yawned.
What was it? Continue reading
“High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water…”
– Mark Twain
“…but everybody likes water.”
– Mark Twain
“It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.”
– Oscar Wilde
“You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.”
– Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
“A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle…”
– Vladimir Nabokov
Just realized that yesterday I posted what may be the darkest, most morbid post yet. On Valentine’s Day.
Hey, at least it had “love” in the title!
In any case, let’s look at something more optimistic.
“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”
– Anne Frank
“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
– Marcel Proust
Yesterday we started the new series Terrible Poem Breakdown, in which I criticized a Terrible Poem primarily for its negativity. I’ve had it pointed out to me that this may be somewhat hypocritical, coming from me. This blog has not exactly been moondreams and rainbows.
Readers, I’ve been trying to be encouraging! And yet I have conveyed some very bleak thoughts indeed, especially in the What They Knew series. But isn’t that just being real? There’s a fine line between a pessimist and a realist! Sometimes no line at all!
So in the holiday spirit, I’m going to run through the entire next batch of What They Knews. I will look at each of them, examine them for signs of negativity, and assess whether they should be released upon the world or whether they should be buried in my What They Knew Discard vault.
And along the way, I hope to get a better sense of myself. Me, Jacke Wilson, clear-eyed purveyor of uplifting sentiment… Continue reading
(As a followup to yesterday’s post about Marc Maron’s mid-career renaissance…)
“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”
– Émile Zola
In honor of yesterday’s post about the great city of London…
“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
— Samuel Johnson
Jacke Wilson 