Writing
Introduction

Andre Gide: Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness & written by reason.

Stephen Leacock: Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring that is difficult.

Sholem Asch: Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you've got something to say.

Erica Jong: When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.

Sharon O'Brien: Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.

Anne Sexton: When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: If any man wishes to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts.

George Mikos: Writing is like a toxic mix of sulfuric acid, cyanide, & lye. It consumes you until you die.

 

Which will last longer: The pyramids, or the Declaration of Independence?

Coding the underlying, invisible software that actualizes this Web site is writing just as much as scripting this sentence is. I enjoy doing both types of writing, & doing them both well.

Fusing the 2 types of writing into a seamless whole greater than the sum of their parts is one of my goals, & is a prime rationale behind creating this Web site. For example, I intended that the Europe Sucks series of essays be scholarly (plus, as the title suggests, highly critical of Europe). Scholarly writing requires something like a bibliography. However, the classic form of printed-book bibliographies, while universally honored & practiced, has not evolved to take full advantage of the Web. So, I mused, what would a Web-based bibliography be? Cutting to the chase, I created one.

An example is the Bibliography section in the Web Publishing - 2.0 Upgrade document. It has around 125 cites or links. The novel aspect of this bibliography is its portability: You can download it & import it into your Web browser's Favorites or Bookmarks. Not too shabby, huh?

But, no never mind. There are more than a few such experiments embodied herein. This fusion process is evolutionary. The more I write on the computer, the more process occurs. What the results of this process will be are indeterminate. The journey is the destination.

I seem to write in 4 different venues:

1)   Humor. I love acerbic, acidic, barbed, biting, black, caustic, clever, contemptuous, dark, derisive, disparaging, edged, gallows, grim, incisive, keen, morbid, mordant, mocking, needled, parodic, pitiless, pungent, razor-sharp, relentless, satiric, scathing, scorching, sharp, sick, sneering, tart, tragicomic, trenchant, unblunted, withering & wry wit. Humour Noir. I also love Thesaurus.com, & Russian humor.

2)   Letters to the Editor. These were phase 1 of my political activism. Posting on the NYTimes Maureen Dowd forum was phase 2. This Web site is phase 3, specifically my treatises on Economics & Politics. Yes, one of my hobbies is politics. Hell of a lot better than chip carving if you ask me.

3)   Poems. Language is music.

4)   Technical Writing. Translating the bizarre, hieroglyphic, & counter-intuitive world of the computer into language that makes sense is very hard. I enjoy it.

Language is like sex, but, then again, so is everything else.