Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 165

Fat In The Head Dept.

A moment of truth, it would seem.

In another forum, an argument or whether or not a 20+-year veteran of some trade had the right — the use of that word is crucial here — to chew out someone else, using the saltiest language this side of the docks, for a perceived incompetence. The justification for this was what you'd expect: if someone is several orders of magnitude in skill above another, he's earned the right (again, the word is crucial) to not suffer fools gladly.

In a word: NO.

There is no...

Next One Is Real Dept.

I'm now in the homestretch — the last 5,000 to 10,000 words — ofWelcome to the Fold's first draft. Normally I'm reluctant to talk about projects in progress like this, because it feels like eitherbragging or promising more than I can deliver. The book could change drastically in the second draft for all I know, so I don't like to lead on that it's going to be a watermelon when in fact it's going to be a pumpkin. Vegetable metaphors aside, the occasion did bring some other thoughts to mind.

At...

Freak Flagged Dept.

Point of clarification. When talking about "just different enough", it might be easy to think I'm stumping for the kind of far-out creativity that is epitomized by everything fromNaked Lunch to bizarro fiction. Well, not really.

For one, let me takeNaked Lunchand William Burroughs as its own case, separate from the hordes of things it inspired. The more I look at that book and that author, the more I see them as lightning in a bottle — a unique set of circumstances that most people have learn...

JDE Blues Dept.

Every now and then I get caught up with the stuff that passed me by in theaters, if only to see what everyone else is watching. To wit:Furious 6 andRise of the Planet of the Apes. They're the kinds of movies people (okay: me) describe as "well-made", meaning they do their job and send you home. They're not worth a full review, butApes deserves some mention.

Apeswas a strange mix:Bedtime for Bonzo,Flowers for Algernon,and one of the best animated performances ever put on film. I do admit that...

You Suffer But Why? Pt. The Last Dept.

I imagine everyone's getting a little sick of the Buddhism-themed posts this week, so I'll tie everything off with a look at the last of the big-T truths Buddhism espouses: the way you get out of suffering is the same way you get to Carnegie Hall. No, dummy, not via the Columbus Circle A train stop; practice.

I come back a lot to some of the things I picked up from legit Buddhist teachers that stood in stark contrast to the pop "Buddhism" that infests our culture. (John Cage once said that re...

You Suffer But Why? Pt. 3 Dept.

For not-so-constant readers of this blog, parts one and twoof this discussion were all about Buddhism's four "noble truths". No, no, don't run off on me now; I'm not here to sell you flowers or pamphlets. This is more about looking at some common-sense advice that sounds like a greeting card, but finding the harder and wormier truth inside it.

Precept three's been phrased a number of different ways, but they mostly go like this: there's a way out of suffering, and it involves letting go of at...

How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Dept.

Will Enlightenment Save The World? | Hardcore Zen

We won’t end tragedies like the Malaysian Airlines disaster just by meditating until we all have our own glimpses of God. ... Accepting things as they are does not mean you need to be complacent about them. The ability to accept things as they [are] allows you to become better able to make changes when change needs to happen.

The above is in the context of a larger discussion about how what I guess could be called "spiritual materialism" (I wish...

You Suffer But Why? Pt. 2 Dept.

Some months back I noted how discussions of Buddhism by people not familiar with it outside of its pop-culture incarnation often end with them misconstruing it or dismissing it entirely. "Life is suffering" sounds terrible, but the way I put it, a better way to think about the first of Buddhism's four "noble truths" would be "Life and suffering are inextricable". The same goes for the second line item, often described as "The source of suffering is attachment".

Once again, translation is some...

Honk If You Like Baudelaire Dept.

Raise Your Hand If You’ve ReadKnausgaard, by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Would J. K. Rowling have written seven Harry Potters if the first hadn’t sold so well? Would Knausgaard have written six volumes of My Struggle, if the first had not been infinitely more successful (in Norway) than his previous novels? Sales influence both reader and writer — certainly far more than the critics do. In general I see nothing “wrong” with this blurring of lines between literary and gen...

Yackety Twit Dept.

Busy week at work (one which culminated in me getting a company award, my second so far from them!), so not much time for blogging. But the most striking thing of the week so far is me finally getting a handle on how to use Twitter effectively. Here's the short version: use it like a chatroom.

In fact, the very software I settled on to make the most use of this metaphor (Instantbird) treats Twitter like a chatroom in the first place. Each account timeline shows up as if it were an IRC channel...