I’m a huge fan of John Irving. If you happen to not like the stuff I write and wish I’d never gotten the itch to put it out in public, then you can put at least a bit of the responsibility on his shoulders. To me, his work is the perfect blend of literary and popular fiction. You get the brain candy of his absurd plots and loveable characters, and yet, when you’re done, you don’t feel like you’ve just junked out. Your brain has been nourished, you’re a little more understanding of everyone’s eccentricities, and you understand that you can laugh and cry about the world at the same time. I remember reading someone’s review of A Prayer for Owen Meany. They used the book as a test for whether or not a relationship could last. If the person reading it didn’t like it, then they simply didn’t have a soul, and there would be trouble ahead. That’s pretty high praise for a book, but it’s praise that is well earned.
Irving’s writing has soul. If he was a musician, he’d be an old blues player. His writing is very firmly grounded in the world of the average American, and he has a talent for making those lives into epic tales of love and loss. Yes, he seems to have a predisposition towards bears and writing about writers and New England and a number of other things that you come to expect will show up at least once in every couple of novels, but that’s what he knows, and I would argue that it’s a testament to his talent as a writer that he’s made those things vivid enough for us to notice their repetition.
I haven’t read his latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River, yet, but it’s on the bookshelf begging for me to finish off those other books and get to it. I’m looking forward to the moment I can do that.
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I was noticing a lot of images floating around the web that shared a common theme. They either were or looked like a post card, and they had some sort of secret hope or fear or memory written on them. A couple of days ago, I finally decided to track down the source. Of course, in the age of Google, tracking down the source hardly ever amounts to more than an hour of dedicated searching. The only difficulty with these images was that they didn’t contain any sort of brand logo… only a certain style. In addition, the images I had been looking at had no sort of attribution made by the person who had uploaded them (tsk, tsk!) After typing in a few of the secrets, I eventually found a link to one of the images, which mentioned “Post Secret” and voila! I had found the source. Kind of.
Frank Warren had the idea back in 2003 to ask a bunch of strangers to send him their deepest, darkest secrets. Turns out, a lot of people have some pretty interesting secrets. Enough for Frank to be swamped with postcards and have enough material to pump out five books (that I know of) to date. I now have four of them on order. Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about:
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Check out this awesome post from rtcrooks on sloshspot.com. With motivational posters like the following, how can you go wrong? 
Stereogum reported last week that U2’s Bono is going to be writing 6-10 Op-Ed pieces for the Times in 2009. Pay: $0. I know a lot of people get annoyed with Bono saving the world and all, but I think it’s pretty cool that the guy gets involved in basically everything. So now he get’s to add NY Times writer to his resume. Sweet.
Elizabeth May just about won my vote (and may still) with this statement:
We believe, as in the recent theories of Richard Florida, that there is such a thing as a creative class. And the creative class leads to investment, leads to greater economic activity, leads to community health.
It isn’t just that she shares my taste in sociological reading. The Green Party’s entire platform, on everything from the economy to the environment to foreign policy, rewards and protects creativity, which is often undervalued by the powers that be.
We’re becoming a culture of managers in North America, but to be good and effective, managers have to manage something. Every society needs a sustainable level of production to support the managerial class. Florida’s book looks at the emerging creative class, which represents a refreshing middle ground between a factory worker and a manager.
The classic structure has been that the factory worker works his way up into various levels of management. The emerging creative class adds another option for movement, one where instead of moving up or down on a ladder, you tend to move laterally. Creative jobs are generally more fun and higher paying than assembly line work, but unlike management, they involve creating something, which ensures that our economy is fueled by real production. And, as the managerial class adjusts to handle this new style of worker, I think we’re getting better managers.
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