Category Archives: blog

Ravels in Review Friday

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Raveling about art has been happening here since October. To keep you up to date, let’s review what was discussed over the past week:

  • Politics (yes, of all things…I know); I covered both international and domestic political art, with a spotlight on artists who are bucking North Korean’s propaganda bandwagon, and made a slightly enraged comment on Shepard Fairey. Suffice it to say this will be the last mention of said artist on this blog. {My conclusion is government-endorsed political art, from fascism on, is bad art. Correct me if I’m wrong.}

  • And Boxes; To illuminate you on the inner workings of the great and mysterious (and beautiful and intelligent and funny and kind) Art Ravels, I pictorially described my new living conditions.

Check these out and discuss. If you have an insatiable lust for more ravels, see the most interesting and discussed posts lately:

  • Absinthe as a Lifestyle– sometimes it’s good to be bad, and sometimes it produces / destroys artistic geniuses,


As always, read, enjoy, and let me know what you think. Ravels in Review is a new idea for a weekly Friday column, so if you love it, and more importantly if you hate it, tell me. Not that this is a democracy or anything, but I’m a benevolent dictator.

Art of War

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Balancing work and writing has been difficult lately–Eek! Not a boring article of work and writing? Hardly, gentle Reader: this is a war.

My writing and my job are at odds with each other, and lately my job has been winning. People always speak about a work/life balance, but my problem is a work/work balance. Perhaps someday I’ll have an official writing job (perhaps you readers could mail me some checks…) but until then, I work a normal work week and try and squeeze in writing.

Time, in itself, is not the problem. I could work, and then have enough time to write a blog post on a normal workday. But the real difficulty with writing, besides saying things well, is having something to say. When I become consumed with my paying job, I loose the creative bit of my brain. I’m out of the loop on interesting news as well, and can’t process it enough to form an opinion of my own. (Opinions being crucial in this blogging business.) Of course, right now I’m talking about working and blogging, not even working and blogging and sleeping and interacting with humans… which are getting squeezed these days.

Today as I was dealing with drudgery of the day job, I stopped what I was doing and brainstormed. Slow at first, but soon I felt all juiced up and full of ideas and happier. It’s easy to forget the passions that make you happy sometimes. And then I felt inspired to write about the delicate art of balancing work and writing. I myself am not quite an artíste at this balancing act yet, but maybe someday.

Until then, Reader, I accept personal checks or cash or cookies. I am especially partial to holiday cheer in the form of sugar.

Sam Leith defend books, I applaud

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An uplifting and moral article by Sam Leith, the Literary Editor of The Daily Telegraph, a UK newspaper. In “Grand Theft Auto, Twitter and Beowulf all demonstrate that stories will never die,” he defends the strength of the narrative in human culture to the delight of all writers and readers, with emphasis on the unfair attack on books by proponents of modern technology who feel books are antiquary repositories of knowledge.

Knowledge and stories come in many shapes and forms. My personal favorite form is a book, and not at all because I’m trying to write one. In anything, I’d say the book form and I have developed a healthy antagonism for just that reason. But the power of the narrative in its classic form is something I consider obvious.
I blog, but I by no means use this platform as write a long story. I use it to connect to other short pieces and to combine word with images and videos. It communicates in a different way by its medium, which is the point, I fancy, of Leith’s piece, which I encourage all with old-fashioned bookish tastes to read.
In a twist on this, check out Pepys’ Diary in online blog format, where each entry in the diary of Samual Pepys from the 1600s is posted daily, so you can follow his story in much the fashion it was written.