Category Archives: Moment of Zen
Moment of Zen: Tax Day
(1) Lawrence A. Zelenak, a professor of law at Duke University, is the author of Learning to Love Form 1040: Two Cheers for the Return-Based Mass Income Tax, in which he bravely describes the origins, history, and current complexity of the federal income tax. He also offers philosophical reasons and practical suggestions for changing the [...]
In Which Mark Twain Explains My Own Dilemmas with Great Prescience
The only trouble about this town is, that it is too large. You cannot accomplish anything in the way of business, you cannot even pay a friendly call, without devoting a whole day to it—that is, what people call a whole day who do not get up early. Many business men only give audience from [...]
St. Martin’s Press’ High Five
We’ve all heard it a million times: Publishing pays pretty miserably. Unless you’re a high-profile editor or in the C-suite, nobody who works in the the production end of the literary world (or any other end of it, in fact) is getting rich. Even your senior editors probably still have roommates, and forget about the [...]
The Shortest Day
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about books that—for want of a better term—changed my reading DNA as a child and adolescent. Russell Hoban’s recent death brought me back to The Mouse and His Child and what it taught me about tragedy in a narrative and how to deal with it. And Charles Shields’ new [...]
News of the Day: RIP Steve Jobs / The People’s Library
Having a bit of a news junkie evening here at Like Fire headquarters, between squeezing coverage of the Wall Street protesters out of the Internet—once again, when it comes to breaking news that’s not being covered elsewhere, Twitter earns its stars—and the not-unexpected but still sad news of Steve Jobs’ death. Occupy Wall Street is [...]
Wednesday Moment of Zen: Dinah Lenney’s “Against Knowing”
We haven’t had a true Wednesday Moment of Zen for a while now. So I offer to all my Wednesday readers an essay by Dinah Lenney in Brevity about the fine art of Not Knowing. Where fiction writers are generally all right with not being sure where a character or even a plot line is [...]
Wednesday Moment of Zen: Color Commentary
Here in the northeast this time of year is known as Mud Season, characterized by large swaths of brown and gray, broken up here and there by shoots of green that you need to be paying attention to catch. In these pre-spring days, any color at all is appreciated, and Alan Kennedy’s Color/Language Project is [...]
Wednesday Moment of Zen: Organizing the Bookcase
I especially like the dancing dragon and bonsai on the side table. (via Housing Works)
Wednesday Moment of Zen: NYPL Cheesecake
Gothamist has a sexy series of photographs of the New York Public Library up. They lead off with Charles Dickens’ letter opener, made from the paw of one of his favorite old cats, but we don’t have to. Photos also include highlights of its collection, conservators at work, and the Allen Room—a sanctuary for authors [...]
Joan Didion Could See Me Sitting Here from 1968
I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the [...]
