On Top Ten Lists (updated)

December 22, 2008
By Bret

2008 is fading fast, and 2009 is just around the corner. It’s the end of the year, and ranked top ten (or twenty or fifty or hundred) lists are cropping up for everything imaginable, as usual.

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Spot. Spot Running. Running, Spot, Running.

December 19, 2008
By Ryan


Ten thousand bucks for dropping subjects from sentences and not using quotation marks.

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Castles In The Sky

November 1, 2008
By Bret

This last August, we took a nice long vacation to Northern California and spent some quality time with just about all of our in-state family. On the Lake Tahoe leg of our trip, we spent a long morning playing in the shallows at Meeks Bay.

While helping the toddlers build and destroy sand castles, I had an idea for a photographic project.

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Practice and Meditation

October 28, 2008
By James

Most of the time, “going to practice” means doing repetitive, tiring, difficult work to get what you really want: a win at your next game, an excellent piano recital performance, a better race time.

Ballet Theatre kids after a particuarly grueling run through.

For me - as an artist - going to practice entails repetitive, tiring, difficult work because I love it.

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Around the Block

October 27, 2008
By Ryan


The worst thing about being a writer is not being able to write. I mean being physically incapable of writing.

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QUOTES

Humility in the wrong place

"What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed....

...the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

–G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy

Make No Little Plans

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us."
–Daniel Burnham, architect of Chicago, quoted in Charles Moore, Daniel H. Burnham: Planner of Cities, II:147. (via Christ is Deeper Still)

Borges on Short Stories


“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”
–Jorge Luis Borges, from the preface to Ficciones

Strickler on Top Ten Lists

See full post for Yancey Strickler’s 2005 taxonomy of top ten music lists, as cited here.

Berry on Writing Poetry


“Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.”
–Wendell Berry, from How to be a Poet

Twain (?) on History


“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
—Attributed to Mark Twain

Lewis on God's Glory


“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Merwin on Writing


“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write”
—W.S. Merwin, Opening the Hand