Ferreum, Ferroux, Ferrienne

VIMEO videos by Afiq Omar 

1.Ferreum
I combined exotic ferrofluid along with metallic objects around the house to craft various footage that demonstrate the properties of ferromagnetism. Shot on a 5D with the amazing 100mm f2.8 L Macro and cut on Adobe Premiere Pro.


2. Ferroux
Second installation of my ongoing series focused on analog visual effects, understanding fluid dynamics, magnetism & natural invisible forces. This time around I experimented with mixing tiny portions of ferrofluid & other chemicals, soap, alcohol, milk etc. Not for the trypophobic for sure.


3. Ferrienne
Ferienne is the third installment of an ongoing experimental study on fluid dynamics, magnetism and cymatics. These invisible forces of nature are then made visible through various liquids and mixtures, and they form patterns that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye. I then manipulated these patterns to compose analog visual effects & using simple editing techniques, create motion graphics that are natural and organic. The basis of it remains simple; to create visually engaging images that are unique and can never be repeated.

I focused more on achieving clean and precise images this time around using a massive amount of material collected over the past 8 weeks. The colour palette was kept similar to that of the human skin, and the textures were manipulated using different backgrounds, further pushing the limits of trypophobia; the fear of holes.

Poetry Wednesday:I'm So Busy

I'm So Busy 
by P G Wodehouse

I always said
That the man I would wed
Must be one who would work all the time.
One with ambition,
Who'd make it his mission
To win a position sublime.
One whose chief pleasure would be
Making a fortune for me;
One who would toil all the day
Down in the market and say:

Lizzie, Lizzie,
I'm so busy,
Don't know what to do.
Goodbye dear, I'm off to the street.
Can't stop now,
I'm cornering wheat.
I shall keep on till I'm dizzy,
Till the deal goes through.
Lizzie, I'm so busy,
I'm making a pile for you.
- - - -  - - - - - - - - --
Don't be deceived,
If you've ever believed
That my taste for hard labor is small.
Stifle the lurking
Idea that I'm shirking,
I never stop working at all.
I may have loafed in the past,
But I am busy at last,
I've found employment and I'm
Working away all the time.

Lizzie, Lizzie,
I'm so busy,
Busy loving you.
That's the job that suits me the best,
Though I never get any rest.
I shall keep on till I'm dizzy
But I shan't get through.
Lizzie, I'm so busy,
So won't you get busy too?
- - - - - - - - - - - -

A Brief History of Four Letter Words

From io9.com

"Scumbag," sounds like the kind of hokey insult that would get you laughed at if you used it. When it was used in a New York Times, it got protests from some older readers, because once upon a time it meant "a used condom." Think about every time you've seen Batman refer, in children's cartoon, to criminals as scum, and you'll begin to understand how obscenity evolves.

There are people who say that animals swear when they, for example, growl or gesture aggressively at people. Although no one could mistake such things for friendly gestures, showing anger isn't the same thing as swearing. Swearing is more complicated than just aggression. Swearing can be a form of affectionate teasing among friends, it can be a way of insulting someone, it can be a way of letting off steam or frustration, or a way of showing unbridled enthusiasm. The only thing all verbal obscenity has in common is the deliberate crossing of social norms. And this is why swear words are always changing.

The Newly Innocent Obscenities

Golly! Zounds! Gadzooks! These are the kind of things Captain Marvel would say. Almost any other superhero would be too mature for such, childish silly words. And yet, during Shakespeare's time, they made him one of the more edgy writers out there. They're not just random sounds, but contractions, meant to make absolutely shocking sentiments less outright obscene. Golly, zounds, and gadzooks were, in order, god's body, god's wounds, and god's hocks. While thinking about the Almighty's ham hock region might offend a few people, each of these words are the kind of things now deemed perfectly innocent. This shows a huge shift in social mores since the time of the Shakespeare.

Religious obscenities, when half of Europe was at war with the other half over the right way to practice Christianity, were a big deal. Referring to God in the corporeal sense was a way to scandalize people. To take the Lord's name in vain was to go against explicit Biblical instructions. These were some of the more obscene concepts of the age, but today are the most mild swear words most people can think of. God, hell, damn, and, to some extent, Jesus Christ, are no big deal anymore. Most people use them.

Ironically, the reason they got a toe hold in current society is the same reason they were so scandalous a few centuries ago. They could be genuine swear words, but they could also be expressions of religious ideas. Far, far back in Simpsons history, there was a storyline about how the kids got a lesson on hell in Sunday School. When asked, afterwards, about what they learned, Bart replied, "Hell." When Marge scolded him, he told her that, no, they had learned about the literal hell, and kept saying hell over and over until Marge, tired of hearing a word she considered inappropriate when coming out of her son's mouth, said, "Bart, you're not in church anymore. Don't swear." The line between actual devotion and blasphemy is tougher to delineate than most censors, and most people, imagine. Eventually most English speakers just stopped trying to find it at all, and people saying things like, "Mother of God," just became a noncontroversial emotional outburst.

The Animals Diverge From Their Excrement

Other swear words, which managed to skate into acceptability under a protective barrier of literalism, are bitch and ass. Both of those started out as literal meanings - animals - and might have been used as insults in their own right in their time. Ass is actually two words blended together to become an obscenity. Ass, the swear word, started out as irs, which meant the back end of anything, not just animals. Over time it became arse, and eventually rounded out and emerged as an ass. The two words were so alike that it was easy to sneak some ass into everyday life. Who remembers the West Wing characters constantly calling each other "jackass," which, being a donkey, was perfectly okay. In the next few years the first part of the word was peeled away, with the understanding that an ass still meant donkey, but eventually everyone stopped kidding themselves and allowed it to be another mild swear word regularly said on TV.

Bitch started out, and remains, a female dog in breeding condition. From there its meaning expanded to anything female in breeding condition, and eventually it expanded to become promiscuous women, angry women, angry or promiscuous homosexual men, or anything "especially disagreeable." Sliding between the slightly sexual, the slightly referring to sexuality, and the literal meaning of the word got bitch into general conversation, and most television shows. It also helps that being "especially disagreeable," rather than meek and accommodating has become a point of pride for both women and male homosexuals, and so even at its most insulting, the word has lost the power to shock as society has moved on.

As for things like pissing and shitting, which is what bitches, asses, and all other animals do, they're old English words. At least one of which dates back to the King James Bible. (2 Ki 18:27 But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?) These words, though not refined back then, have gotten both more abstract and a little more outré. This is an example of the way culture can continually reach for more delicacy. In France, "toilet" used to mean a small towel, which was kept near the chamber pot. It also meant the act of cleansing oneself. Old books often use the phrase, "She spent some time making her toilet," which means grooming and preparing oneself for an event. "Toilet water" was a kind of light perfume. Since these actions happened in private, near a chamber pot, they were used as a euphemism for actually using that chamber pot. Eventually, the word came to mean the actual toilet itself, and not the things near it. After that, saying "I need to go to the toilet," became indelicate, and people had to come up with more abstracted ways of saying the same thing. Cycles like this made piss and shit, while more commonly used in society, more vulgar than they originally were.

Four Letters and Starting With F

And then there's the swear word that's held steady for half a millennium; fuck. It seemed to spring upon the landscape fully-formed, and already an obscenity. The first instance of use of the word "fuck," came from a satirical poem, written in Latin, in the year 1500. The line is referring to a group of friars, and runs like this: "Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk." If it suddenly starts looking like Kryptonian instead of Latin after the word quia, it's because it had to be written in code. Each letter of the word was swapped out for the letter following it in the alphabet. Remember that the alphabet was in a different order back then, and that Latin conjugates verbs differently, but gxddbov translates as "fuccant." The overall line states, "They are not in Heaven, since they fuck the wives of Ely." That is one racy poem!

The word was, and continued to be, the big daddy of all swear words in English for many years. It became one of the words that kept Lady Chatterley's Lover banned in plenty of places. The word was unutterable in polite company. It's still banned from most television stations and most print media.

Still, it has always been used, and its increasing popularity means that it's becoming less likely to be held back from media discourse. Lately things have been changing especially fast. The FCC lately had to change regulations about fining news stations that aired spontaneous utterings of "fuck," in their news footage. It was found that the word has come to be something people use to express their frustration, instead of solely referring to sex. Frustration is not obscene, so it's highly likely that fuck may be sliding its way into generally and even media acceptability. As soon as the word acquires tones that aren't exactly the literal and obscene meaning that it was originally used to convey, censors relax. They have to. As we've seen, it's too easy to play with language, hiding deeper meanings behind compound words, resetting context, and making words seem innocent. Is it only a matter of time before five hundred years of dirtiness becomes sanitized as a mere expression of frustration? And if so, what to do we say then?

SpaceX Dragon: The Space Capsule That Just Made History

Elon Musk's spacecraft manufacturing company SpaceX made history on 05/25/2012 at 9:56 a.m. ET, when its Dragon capsule was captured by the International Space Station's robotic arm. The vessel berthed at the ISS at 12:12 p.m. ET.

DragonX is the first privately owned space vessel to berth at the International Space Station.

Musk, a co-founder of PayPal, began the SpaceX Dragon capsule project way back in 2005 and developed the craft in four and a half years for about $300 million.

According to SpaceX's site, the Dragon capsule is 20 feet in length, weighs about 9,260 lbs and can carry up to 13,228 lbs to low-earth orbit or up to seven passengers. In December 2008, the project secured $3.1 billion in funding from NASA for a contract of 12 flight missions or more.

Dragon is a free-flying, reusable spacecraft being developed by SpaceX under NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. Initiated internally by SpaceX in 2005, the Dragon spacecraft is made up of a pressurized capsule and unpressurized trunk used for Earth to LEO transport of pressurized cargo, unpressurized cargo, and/or crew members.

The Dragon spacecraft is comprised of 3 main elements: the Nosecone, which protects the vessel and the docking adaptor during ascent; the Spacecraft, which houses the crew and/or pressurized cargo as well as the service section containing avionics, the RCS system, parachutes, and other support infrastructure; and the Trunk, which provides for the stowage of unpressurized cargo and will support Dragon’s solar arrays and thermal radiators.

In December 2008, NASA announced the selection of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) when the Space Shuttle retires. The $1.6 billion contract represents a minimum of 12 flights, with an option to order additional missions for a cumulative total contract value of up to $3.1 billion.

Though designed to address cargo and crew requirements for the ISS, as a free-flying spacecraft Dragon also provides an excellent platform for in-space technology demonstrations and scientific instrument testing. SpaceX is currently manifesting fully commercial, non-ISS Dragon flights under the name “DragonLab”. DragonLab represents an emergent capability for in-space experimentation.

Kevin Smith Riffs on Spoilers

Kevin Smith Riffs on Spoilers, His New Show for Movie Geeks
Interview at Wired.com

Kevin Smith likes to talk. He’ll riff for hours on pretty much anything — comics, farting, hockey, Bruce Willis, the general state of the internet. But mostly he likes to talk about movies. A lot. With people. And with his new series Spoilers, that’s pretty much all he has to do.

The show, which will premiere June 4 on Hulu, will showcase Smith and 50 die-hard movie fans right after they’ve seen a big blockbuster movie on opening night, creating a monster gab-fest full of opinions, fights and — because it’s a Smith endeavor — plenty of gags and a bit of Jason Mewes (the Jay to Smith’s Silent Bob).

“Who doesn’t have something to say in this day and age? Everybody wants a platform — social media is all about, ‘I have an opinion and here it is!’”

The Spoilers audience will consist of fans who sign up through a website, launching Monday, and request the movie they want to see. Filming will take place at Smith’s new SModCo Studios on the Universal Studios CityWalk in Hollywood, where the attendees will watch the movies.

Putting butts in seats is the least of Smith’s worries about the show. “It’s going be easy to fill those slots, but the trick, of course, is filling them with people who have something to say,” the Clerks director said in a phone interview with Wired. “But who doesn’t have something to say in this day and age? Everybody wants a platform — social media is all about, ‘I have an opinion and here it is!’”

Harder than finding an audience for the show and getting them talking, though, will be keeping the ever-verbose Smith and his similarly passionate fans from going on too long and keeping their language in the realm of what can be said on network television (the standard that Hulu shows follow). Zak Knutson, the Chop Shop production company co-founder who will be editing the show, already warned Smith to keep it brief.

“He was like, ‘Look motherfucker. This is not one of those shows you can do for three hours and expect me to cut down to half an hour and deliver it to Hulu in the schedule we’ve got,’” Smith said.

Wired got on the phone with Smith to get the spoilers on Spoilers, which will begin with a 10-episode season and go up each Monday on Hulu and Hulu Plus. In the process, naturally, we got much more than that. Read on to get the geek auteur’s thoughts on Star Wars pen pals, having sway on the internet, and his aspirations for sucking Bill Murray’s dick. (Metaphorically speaking, of course).

Kevin Smith: Thank you! That, to me, was such a big win because as much as I love watching those dudes — you gotta realize Bryan and Walter are two of my dearest friends in the world, and I’ve always thought they were hysterically funny — so to be able to fucking turn on not just TV but AMC and see those dudes on TV? For six times I kept telling myself, like, “If they only do it six times, count your blessings, don’t bitch. Even if you don’t go to Season 2, you struck gold.” This never happens — people don’t turn to you and say, “Let’s do a TV show about your friends.” Then when they said, “Hey, we’re going to do Season 2,” I was just like, “Oh my god legitimacy! True legitimacy!” It was really neat, so I appreciate that.

“I got one of those long stick mics from the ’70s, like a Donahue-type mic, and I’m getting in everyone’s face like, ‘What did you think?’ When you turn the mic on the audience it’s pure gold.”

Wired: You’re becoming something of a force in TV now.

Smith: That led to this show [Spoilers]. Because, here’s what I learned doing Comic Book Men: When I pitched it, it was like, “It’s Pawn Stars in a comic book store.” And the spine was always going to be transactions — people coming in with stuff and Walter deciding whether to buy it or not. And what was learned when we aired the shows was the will-he-won’t-he-buy-it? — people didn’t care about that. It didn’t matter. What they loved was just seeing the thing come in and seeing the conversation that it kickstarted. So with Spoilers I was like, “OK, man, let’s take the notion of what we, those of us who really love movies, do online afterward — we go and we chitchat about it on an internet forum. Let’s take it and do it live.”

Being on Talking Dead, man, is a real eye-opener because it was like, “This counts? This TV show just happened and this TV show is about the TV show that just happened? This is amazing!” So, let’s take all this that we’ve learned, or what I did with the Red State tour, or what I’ve been doing for years, which is showing a movie and then having a Q&A afterward — let’s take all that stuff and put it into Spoilers. The notion is: Watch the movie with everybody, we take them out and pay for them to go see the movie, kick back — on opening day, none of this early bullshit, ain’t doing it like those critics, doing it legit — and then just go down the street, sit down and have a gabfest, man.

I got one of those long stick mics from the ’70s, like a Donahue-type mic, and I’m getting in everyone’s face like, “What did you think?” Instead of co-hosts in a movie-reviews show where you’ve got a fat guy and a skinny guy saying “yes” or “no,” it’s a fat guy and 50 other people. It’s not the normal constant. I was forced to watch Donahue as a kid. My grandmother would be like, “Oh, my Donahue is on.” The first half of it was painful because it was like pundits and windbags talking to each other. But what I loved when I tuned in was when he turned the mic on the audience. Because the whole time he’s up there, you see people in the audience shaking their heads and they’ve gotta get something off their chests, they don’t agree. And when you turn the mic on the audience it’s pure gold.

Wired: Especially movie geeks.

“I’ll have on my friend Malcolm Ingram, who hates everything. He’s one of these nihilists. If it’s popular he can’t stand it. He represents the internet.”
Smith: I figure, if I’m sitting down with movie fans who just watched a movie? These cats are going to be electric. I don’t need a co-host — I’m going to have 50 different co-hosts every week. That’s just for the first half of the show. Then we’ll get into the segments and stuff we do.

Wired: What’s the format? What kind of segments can fans expect from Spoilers?

Smith: We’re going to do a beat called Movie Goon where like I’ll have on my friend Malcolm Ingram, who hates everything. He’s one of these nihilists. If it’s popular, he can’t stand it. He represents the internet. So we’ll bring him on and let him have his say and then we’ll beat him up verbally and tell him why he’s wrong — have a good old-fashioned debate.

We’re going to do a bit called Criterion Corner, where we sit around and geek out over the library and talk about flicks that maybe people don’t know about. There’s so many titles in the Criterion Collection now that people don’t even know them all. We’re doing cartoons as well. We’ll be doing a Hollywood Babble-On cartoon.

Segment four is Icon Interviews, where we sit somebody down in the chair and gush over them. Grab a Stan Lee, or if we’re lucky, get man-of-the-moment Joss Whedon. Plop them down in what we call the “high chair” — it’s like a throne. We modeled it off the Conan throne. We just sit there and I Q&A with them, and then I turn it over to the audience and let them Q&A as well.

Then we’ll end with a little Jason Mewes bit as well. He’s excited to be the bit guy. We’ve got this bit we do in the live show called “Let Us Act,” where we pull people from the audience and they do scenes from movies with Mewes, so we’re going to do some of that.

Wired: You’ve done movies, podcasts, a TV show and countless other things. Why do a web show on Hulu?

Smith: To me it’s like, go where you got the juice. And where do I have the most juice in this world? It ain’t multiplexes — it’s online. Online I’ve got some sway. I’m like Lawnmower Man in that movie, I’m god here! You take me offline and in the real world I’m a fat, schlubby idiot. There it makes more sense for me, rather than be like, “Hey everybody! Close your computer and turn on your television!” It’s way easier for me to go on Twitter and drop a link and say, “Here’s the latest episode of Spoilers — go watch it at your convenience.”

Wired: It seems like more directors and actors are headed to web series these days, right?

“When I first got in the movie business people were like, ‘Ew, TV.’ Right now the internet is in the same place TV was when I started in film.”

Smith: When I first got in the movie business people were like, “Ew, TV.” Like, they ghetto-ized it. Now TV is this dominant medium and film people look at it and go, “Man, I want to do a TV show.” Right now the internet is in the same place TV was when I started in film. Everybody’s got a laptop. The fluidity between online and networks, it exists. Hulu is owned by a couple networks, so obviously the networks are very much alive and well. I watch my 30 Rock episodes on Hulu anyway and I know there are a lot of people like me. If I’m one of those cats and open up my Hulu and there’s 30 Rock and right next to it is Spoilers? What do I fucking know? It could be on some channel I’m unaware of. I’m just watching the show and then I’m like, “Oh it’s a Hulu original. Go figure.” There’s fluidity now. Nobody cares. There’s no difference now between what is a TV show and what is not.

Comic Book Men, when it ran on AMC, only ran in the U.S., but meanwhile on Twitter I would say 25 percent of my reaction came from people who were overseas who can’t possibly watch it except to BitTorrent or grab it on Usenet. So if they’re already doing that? Shit man, why am I wasting my time going over here, converting it, and then hoping that they catch up with it online when I can simply give them a link and say, “I’ll be over here on Hulu waiting for you any time you’re ready for me.” Create content, leave it there. No more of this, “Let’s spend a shit-ton of money to make sure they come on opening weekend!” That’s a fool’s errand unless you have The Avengers in your back pocket.

Wired: Speaking of Avengers, is Spoilers just going to focus on geek and genre pictures, or will you also throw in the random rom-com or indie film?

“I think you might be able to pull it off with [thought-provoking] movies like, ‘Oh my god, The King’s Speechwho knew?!’ Even like, ‘Oh my god the movie with Fassbender, his dick saves it!’”

Smith: We’re going to launch in the summer blockbuster season, so that gives us our pick of the litter of big, fun movies. But I’m a comedy guy, so we’ll mix those in there, and I’m an indie guy, so we’re going to try to mix those in there as well. But we know for a fact, god willing, if we’re lucky enough to go for a second season, if we launch a second season it would be Oscar season so we would have to do a different kind of Spoilers, where we’re looking at these thought-provoking pictures and stuff. Movies are movies, at the end of the day. Even Ordinary People is fun to talk about in a room, if you get enough different personalities talking about it. I think it’s possible to pull it off even with movies that aren’t like, “Oh my god The Avengers, wasn’t that cool?!” or “Oh my god The Dark Knight Rises, wasn’t that amazing?!” or “Oh my god Prometheus!” I think you might be able to pull it off with movies like, “Oh my god, The King’s Speech, who knew?!” Even like, “Oh my god the movie with Fassbender, his dick saves it!” You’ll get content out of it.

That’s the beauty of sitting down with 50 different personalities. While you’re shooting it, anything goes, man. One of them could knife me, you know what I’m saying? We’re sitting there getting so passionate about the back and forth — they don’t like the movie and I do and suddenly it’s like, “Aaahhh!” Hopefully we’ll have a metal detector and that won’t happen.

Wired: It’s not a good argument unless it comes to blows.

Smith: I’ll take a punch in the name of movies. Some people say I owe movies a punch or two based on Cop Out and Jersey Girl. I’ll take those punches.

Wired: So is this your chance to be a movie critic after being subjected to them for so long?

Smith: Film criticism became very, you know, yes-or-no, black-and-white, thumbs-up-thumbs-down kind of affair. You don’t really see movies handled by “professionals” on TV the way they’re handled on the internet. That’s where you see people just love on a movie. So, I’m like, “Let’s do that version.”

“I’ll never be a guy who’s just like, ‘It’s bullshit! It sucks! It’s the worst!’ I know what goes in to making a movie.”

Before I was a moviemaker, I was a movie lover. And I would sit around and watch At the Movies and Sneak Previews because A) I was a kid and I wanted to see clips of the movies that were coming, but B) These were the only two people in the world who talked about movies like they were important. They were the proto-geeks, the proto-internet — Siskel and Ebert — who talked about movies with such enthusiasm that it made you feel like, “Oh my god, this is as important as watching the evening news.” And it is. Movies are as important as watching the evening news because the evening news is so fucking depressing. You need a movie to escape.

For years I was just a movie lover and then for this weird, wonderful period of time I was a moviemaker. So that gives you this different insight into the process where, I’ll never be a guy who’s just like, “It’s bullshit! It sucks! It’s the worst!” I know what goes into making a movie. I know nobody sets out to make a bad movie. At least I’ll be able to bring some sensibility to it, having done it. For years, you were always able to throw at a critic, “Yeah? What does your movie look like?” So now, I’ve got a bunch of movies under my belt, so I can go out there and talk about movies in a judicious way. Plus, you stick around long enough, they give you chairman emeritus status on anything. I’ve been in the movie business 20 years, and even if I suck at the job, they’re like, “He’s been around, he’s an expert.”

“I would love to suck Bill Murray’s dick in that way that I do — not the actual dick-in-mouth version, but the verbal, ‘Oh my god, without you I wouldn’t be who I am!’ way.”
Wired: Do you have any dream guests for the show?

Smith: I can talk to absolutely anybody. But in the world of people that I would just love to sit there and be like, “Let me ask you this! Let me ask you this! Let me love you about this and let this audience do the same.” I think an ultimate get for me — and we’ll never get him — Bill Murray. This is going to sound weird, but I would love to suck Bill Murray’s dick in that way that I do — not the actual dick-in-mouth version, but the verbal, “Oh my god, without you I wouldn’t be who I am!” way. That’s the people I gravitate toward, who without their art I don’t think I would have gravitated toward mine.

It’s much easier to go to people I know I can get. I know I can turn to Edgar Wright and say, “Dude, let’s sit down and talk about Scott Pilgrim. Because this audience will still love talking about Scott Pilgrim. Let’s talk about Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.” With Stan [Lee], it’s obviously easy because you have a lifetime to talk about. But I look forward to talking to cats that I don’t know that well, but I know their work and kind of dig it, like Gerard Way. I want to sit down Gerard Way and be like, “Dude, you could get so much pussy, why do you bother writing comic books?

Smith: When Clerks came out — and I’m not saying “I did this fucking first!” — but when Clerks came out nobody was talking about Star Wars anymore. Star Wars were three movies that happened and they were done and we had moved on as culture. George Lucas hadn’t started talking about, “I’m going to do this again!” So when I talked about Star Wars in Clerks, it was this weird moment because that’s what me and my friends would do. So Clerks plays at Sundance — but that’s in America and when the movie plays there, people talk about Star Wars, people are like, “Yeah, yeah, I remember Star Wars.”

When I went to Cannes and I sat down with a French journalist, and this was the first time I’d went overseas with the movie. I’m sitting down with a dude who doesn’t speak very good English, but I don’t speak any French whatsoever so it doesn’t matter, and he’s measuring his words so carefully so as to not sound like he doesn’t know English and this is what he says, “Uh, Jay and, uh, Bob ….” I say, “Silent Bob.” He says, “Yes.” Then, “They are R2-D2 and C-3PO, no?” And suddenly I was like, “What?! How do you know Star Wars?” And I realized that’s what we share. Everywhere people wanted to talk about it.

This generation, that would be The Avengers or the Harry Potter series or something like that. But the birth of pop culture was right at that moment. But the sad thing is it will eventually go away. Now it’s hard because everybody does it. It was easier for me, back in the day. Even in Clerks 2 I had to transition from talking about Star Wars to talking about Lord of the Rings. If I talked about Lord of the Rings now people would be like, “What is this, 2000? Move on!” Now if you want to pop culture riff you’ve gotta do Avengers, Hunger Games, stuff like that.

“I joined the Star Wars Fan Club and got me a pen pal. I had this dude up in Alberta, Canada, who I would write back and forth to about Star Wars.”

Wired: Do you think the rise of Star Wars fandom as it is, and the plethora of pop-culture references to it, coincides with the rise of the internet?

Smith: When I was a kid there was no fuckin’ internet, so if you wanted to talk to somebody about Star Wars you had to write a letter to Starlog and hope it got published. Or, like I did, I joined the Star Wars Fan Club and got me a pen pal. I had this dude up in Alberta, Canada, who I would write back and forth to about Star Wars. I always compare it to what I guess it’s like for gay dudes when they had to go into a public restroom back in the day — tap the foot on the floor to try and see who is interested. Back then, man, you would write to a guy — a stranger in another country — and be like, “Do you like Boba Fett’s jetpack?” and hope he’d write back.

Now, man, you can commune with people without communing with them. We can talk to strangers about the things we’re passionate about. And things that would never have fan bases can build fan bases. If there was no internet, my career would’ve been over years ago. But what I can do is put people in touch with one another. Here’s a dude over in Alaska who likes me, and a chick in Florida who likes me, and now they’ve fucking met through a website and you become a conduit. So thank god for the internet, it allows somebody like me to kind of thrive. Otherwise, short attention spans and costly budgets would’ve kept me from getting an audience together years and years ago. I would’ve been out on my ass.

8 Websites You Need to STOP Building

Original from theOatmeal.com

The Cost of an Alien Invasion

 By Jordan Zakarin, Hollywood Reporter

The wreckage in Midtown Manhattan, all told, would top the financial carnage of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Japanese tsunami.

Just as it has been for centuries of immigrants and desperately lost, subway map-reading tourists, New York City is a favorite destination for angry, carnage-minded mutants, monsters and aliens -- though they intend to destroy the city's landmarks, not capture them in Instagram photos.

The latest invaders are the Chitauri, the shape-shifting aliens that descend upon Manhattan in the climactic battle in The Avengers. And with their starships and smaller, strikingly Kawasaki Jet Ski-like racers, they certainly succeed in wreaking havoc on the city. To walk out of a screening of the movie into the light of Park Avenue is a shock, with its clean streets and undented skyline, so to get a sense of just how much damage the Chitauri would have caused had the film been real life, The Hollywood Reporter reached out to Kinetic Analysis Corp., one of the leading disaster-cost prediction and assessment firms in the nation.

 
In an exclusive report for THR, KAC, led by Chuck Watson and Sara Jupin, employed computer models used for predicting the destruction of nuclear weapons and concluded that the physical damage of the invasion would be $60 billion-$70 billion, with economic and cleanup costs hitting $90 billion. Add on the loss of thousands of lives, and KAC puts the overall price tag at $160 billion.
 
For context, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks cost $83 billion, Hurricane Katrina cost $90 billion, and the tsunami in Japan last year washed away $122 billion. 

 
Although many buildings in the fight's East Midtown arena suffered extensive structural damage, most were limited to the more superficial destruction of windows, facade and some interiors. Those buildings that had their tops crushed, though, would be especially costly and time-consuming to fix, as would be Grand Central Station, through which a warship crashed.

 
"The extensive damage to Grand Central Terminal could prove highly disruptive, depending on the subsurface damage to the subway system," KAC notes. "Although such damage is unlikely, as the 9/11 events showed, collapsing buildings can cause significant damage to subsurface infrastructure such as gas, communications and electrical systems. Detailed site surveys will be required to assess the state of the subterranean infrastructure."

 
KAC also predicts that liability would be a major issue. Who, exactly, will have to pay for the damage? S.H.I.E.L.D., they note, is likely protected as a government agency, though probes eventually will look into its role in predicting, preventing and responding to the invasion -- just as they looked into the Ghostbusters.
 
"Most insurance policies have special provisions for acts of war, civil unrest or terrorism," KAC adds. "Given the involvement of individuals considered deities in some cultures (Thor, Loki), there is even the potential to classify the event as an 'act of God,' though that designation would be subject to strenuous theological and legal debate."

 
Watson said he was surprised by a lower-than-expected total. "Compared to the aliens in Independence Day, for example, these guys were amateurs," he told THR. "Of course, the Chitauri/Loki alliance were more interested in conquest and ruling, whereas the ID aliens were just looking for lunch or something."
 
Still, with a $700 million two-week gross to protect, Marvel and Disney are lucky all the damage happened onscreen.

 

Chitauri Invasion of New York City 

Post Event Damage Estimate (Created by KAC R&D)

Summary

The May 4th, 2012 invasion by the Chitauri through an inter-dimensional portal caused significant damage to the New York City area. As with past natural, anthropogenic, and unnatural catastrophes, it often takes months or years to generate an accurate damage and loss estimate. Using sophisticated computer models, Kinetic Analysis Corporation (KAC) can provide damage forecasts days or even weeks ahead of time for events that can be anticipated or hypothesized (hurricanes, winter storms, asteroid impacts, etc.), as well as estimates of damage from unforeseen events such as earthquakes and associated tsunamis, industrial disasters, monster attacks, or alien invasions, usually within minutes of their occurrence. Using computer models created by KAC R&D for estimating nuclear weapons effects, as well as techniques developed for use in predicting damage in Japan from attacks by ゴジラ(Godzilla), モスラ (Mothra), and particularly メカゴジラ (Mechagodzilla), the damages and losses resulting from this weekend’s invasion by the Chitauri have been estimated. 

KAC expects the physical damage from the invasion to be $60 to $70 Billion Dollars, with secondary economic impacts from cleanup, loss of business, disruptions to commerce and services, etc. causing an additional $90 Billion dollars. Casualties are undoubtedly in the high thousands. Therefore, we estimate the total economic impact to be at least $160 Billion dollars. This compares with the direct impact from

the September 11th 2001 attacks of $30 Billion dollars (total impact $83 Billion). For additional context, comparable disasters include the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami ($122 Billion), the 1995 Kobe Earthquake ($140 Billion), and Hurricane Katrina at over $90 Billion. 

Damage Assessment and Discussion

A combination of satellite imagery, documentary footage, and news reports were used for the damage assessment. The pre-event exposure was derived from KAC’s spring 2012, US High Resolution infrastructure database. The island of Manhattan contains some of the most valuable and densely populated property in the world. Within one mile of the invasion site is over $40 Billion Dollars of residential property, and at least 10 times that amount of commercial property. 

Although at least two dozen buildings suffered extensive structural damage or collapse during the attack and defense of the city, most of the damage appeared to be to windows, facades and exterior features of the buildings. For buildings that did not suffer significant structural failure or penetration by the fighting, interior contents damage should be limited. However, damage to the upper levels of a large number of buildings will be costly and time consuming to repair, as the number of companies equipped to undertake such efforts is limited. Price gouging and demand surge, the inflation in prices due to limited supplies and significant damage in a local area, may be a problem if state and local officials are not vigilant. 

Numerous vehicles were damaged or destroyed during the attack, as well as significant infrastructure such as roads and bridges. The extensive damage to Grand Central Terminal could prove highly disruptive,depending on the sub-surface damage to the subway system. Although such damage appeared unlikely, as the 9/11 events showed, collapsing buildings can cause significant damage to sub- surface infrastructure such as gas, communications, and electrical systems. Detailed site surveys will be required to assess the state of the subterranean infrastructure. 

As noted in the estimate, recovery costs are likely to be greater than direct costs, especially debris cleanup and removal. Cleanup from monster attacks and alien invasions often have complications not found in natural catastrophes. Although hazardous waste is always a factor in post-event cleanup (such as the significant contamination from damage to industrial facilities after Katrina),  the radioactive and chemical contamination in a post-invasion environment are often extreme. The Chitauri themselves, being organic, almost certainly constitute a bio-hazard and the cleanup of their remains will have to be conducted with appropriate decontamination protocols. 

Financing, Insurance and Liability Issues 
Immediate expenses such as cleanup and casualty assistance will have to be borne by various government agencies and private individuals. The impacts on local, state, and federal budgets are likely to be severe in the short term. The insurance industry will no doubt provide some immediate assistance for public relations reasons if nothing else; however, the ultimate costs of rebuilding and how those costs are allocated are highly contract specific. Most insurance policies have special provisions for acts of war, civil unrest, or terrorism. Given the involvement of individuals considered deities in some cultures (Thor, Loki), there is even the potential to classify the event as an “Act of God”, although that designation would be subject to strenuous theological and legal debate. Many policies have special provisions or exclusions for acts of war or terrorism. After the September 2001 attacks, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) was passed to provide a federal “backstop” for insurance claims related to acts of terrorism. TRIA will no doubt come into play over this event. At this time the exact breakdown of Federal, State, local, and private costs is difficult to assess. With previous catastrophic loss events there was often a scramble to transfer liability between the various parties. 

As a quasi-governmental organization, S.H.I.E.L.D. is in all likelihood protected from liability through sovereign immunity. While gratitude over repelling the invasion will persist in the short term, in the longer term the events leading up to the opening of the portal will in all likelihood be examined in detail, and that immunity probed for legal weakness (recall the regulatory and legal consequences to the Ghostbusters over the Gozer incident of 1984). In addition, there was considerable collateral damage of questionable necessity by at least one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives (Hulk). Given the dollar amounts involved, the litigiousness of American society, and the high density of skilled attorneys surviving in the New York City area, the exact classification of this event, financial liability, and ultimate responsibility will no doubt be subject to extensive litigation for many years to come.

Under the Sea-Stop Motion

Stop Motion amazing visualization of things going on Under the Sea:

Poetry Wednesday: Preludes

"Preludes" 
By T. S. Eliot

I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

The Power of Introverts

By Susan Cain, HuffingtonPost.com

Today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We're told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts -- which means that we've lost sight of who we really are. Depending on which study you consult, one-third to one-half of Americans are introverts -- in other words, one out of every two or three people you know. (Given that the United States is among the most extroverted of nations, the number must be at least as high in other parts of the world.) If you're not an introvert yourself, you are surely raising, managing, married to, or coupled with one.

If these statistics surprise you, that's probably because so many people pretend to be extroverts. Closet introverts pass undetected on playgrounds, in high school locker rooms, and in the corridors of corporate America. Some fool even themselves, until some life event -- a layoff, an empty nest, an inheritance that frees them to spend time as they like -- jolts them into taking stock of their true natures. You have only to raise the subject of this book with your friends and acquaintances to find that the most unlikely people consider themselves introverts.

It makes sense that so many introverts hide even from themselves. We live with a value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal -- the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers action to contemplation, risk- taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one type of individual -- the kind who's comfortable "putting himself out there." Sure, we allow technologically gifted loners who launch companies in garages to have any personality they please, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, and our tolerance extends mainly to those who get fabulously wealthy or hold the promise of doing so.

Introversion -- along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness -- is now a second- class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man's world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we've turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

The Extrovert Ideal has been documented in many studies, though this research has never been grouped under a single name. Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better- looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends. Velocity of speech counts as well as volume: we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slow ones. The same dynamics apply in groups, where research shows that the voluble are considered smarter than the reticent -- even though there's zero correlation between the gift of gab and good ideas. Even the word introvert is stigmatized -- one informal study, by psychologist Laurie Helgoe, found that introverts described their own physical appearance in vivid language ( "green-blue eyes," "exotic," "high cheekbones"), but when asked to describe generic introverts they drew a bland and distasteful picture ("ungainly," "neutral colors," "skin problems").

But we make a grave mistake to embrace the Extrovert Ideal so unthinkingly. Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions -- from the theory of evolution to van Gogh's sunflowers to the personal computer -- came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there.

Copyright 2012 by Susan Cain.  
From the book: QUIET: The Power Of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Inventions That Mattered

Features on world-changing breakthroughs by Malcolm Gladwell, Walter Isaacson, and others (from Byliner.com).

"An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in," Tim O'Reilly once mused, "not in the world it started." That's certainly true of television, which Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in 2002, and why the man who invented it is long lost to history. "Philo T. Farnsworth was the inventor of television," Gladwell wrote. "Through the nineteen-thirties and forties, he engaged in a heroic battle to perfect and commercialize his discovery, fending off creditors and predators, and working himself to the point of emotional and physical exhaustion. His nemesis was David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, then one of the most powerful American electronics companies."

In 2003, Walter Isaacson surveyed the inventions of Benjamin Franklin. "He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it," Isaacson wrote of the founding father. "He devised bifocal glasses and clean-burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He was a pioneer of do-it-yourself civic improvement, launching such schemes as a lending library, volunteer fire corps, insurance association and matching-grant fund raiser. He helped invent America's unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism."

On its fortieth birthday, Oliver Burkeman described the Internet's beginnings. "It's impossible to say for certain when the Internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is," he wrote. "But 29 October 1969 – 40 years ago next week – has a strong claim for being, as [Leonard] Kleinrock puts it today, 'the day the infant internet uttered its first words'. At 10.30pm, as Kleinrock's fellow professors and students crowded around, a computer was connected to the IMP, which made contact with a second IMP, attached to a second computer, several hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, and an undergraduate named Charley Kline tapped out a message. Samuel Morse, sending the first telegraph message 125 years previously, chose the portentous phrase: 'What hath God wrought?' But Kline's task was to log in remotely from LA to the Stanford machine, and there was no opportunity for portentousness: his instructions were to type the command LOGIN."

And Carol Hoffman reported on a man intent on celebrating the invention of flight. "Rick Young—restaurateur, technophile, obsessed basement hobbyist—is about to pilot the first perfect replica of the 1903 Wright flyer, the rickety, wood-and-fabric biplane that kick started aviation history," she wrote. "At least four other teams are poised to launch flyers of their own, but Young is rushing to make it into the record books first—or become the race's first casualty."  

Spotlighted Stories:

No. 1 The Televisionary by Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker | May 2002

No. 2 Citizen Ben's Great Virtues by Walter Isaacson
Time | June 2003

No. 3 One Hundred Years of Altitude by Carol Hoffman
Outside | June 2002

No. 4 Forty Years of the Internet by Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian | October 2009

The "Sounds of Aronofsky"

By Forrest Wickman, Slate.com

Brow Beat sometimes enjoys singling out a filmmaker’s particular stylistic tics and signatures, and we’re not alone. Vimeo user kogonada has carved out a niche for doing this in the form of video essays on the web. He specializes in just this one type of video essay, and his work is remarkably consistent: Before we posted his compilation of Wes Anderson overhead shots, and then his compilation of Quentin Tarantino’s shots from below, he had already published a popular compilation of point-of-view shots from Breaking Bad.




Now kogonada has turned his microscope on the sound effects of Darren Aronofsky, director of Black Swan, The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, and Pi. As the video highlights, Aronofsky uses an unusually heightened style, examining many actions at only a nose’s length—and the sound effects, which sometimes make the tiniest noises sound almost thunderous, match that approach. In some particularly unusual and even cartoonish cases a single sound effect tells a whole action: A slurp (over a jump cut) represents eating, a ka-ching from an imaginary cash register represents a sale.

These extreme close-ups and equally magnified sound effects are most well-known from Requiem for a Dream, in which they’re used to parallel various kinds of addiction (not just hard drugs but others like television and coffee), and this cut is particularly heavy on inserts from that film. It’s lighter on shots from Black Swan and The Wrestler, for which Aronofsky largely reinvented his style. But the video makes clear that Aronofsky didn’t do away with these techniques completely. Regardless of the differences, I agree with what the last shot seems to suggest about these effects: They’re all pretty transporting.

Unimpressed Astronaut_v2

This Astronaut is still Unimpressed...

50 Years Of Government Spending In 1 Graph

From NPR.com

Of each dollar the federal government spends, how much goes to defense? How much goes to Social Security? How much goes to interest on the debt? And how has this sort of thing changed over time?

The graphic below answers these questions. It shows the major components of federal spending 50 years ago, 25 years ago, and last year.

A few notes:

Defense spending has shrunk significantly as a percentage of total government spending. But it remains the largest single category of federal spending. The figures in the graph include veterans' benefits as well as funding for current operations.

Medicaid, Medicare and other health services are the huge gainers here. Together, they make up a quarter of government spending. Fifty years ago Medicare and Medicaid didn't even exist, and federal spending on other health-related services made up a tiny sliver of the whole.

Safety net programs include unemployment compensation, food stamps and housing assistance. Spending on these programs surged during and after the most recent recession, as unemployment rose sharply.

Interest refers to interest the government pays on the national debt. In 1987, the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds was around 9 percent, driving up the share of government spending that went to interest. Today, the rate on 10-year Treasuries is roughly 2 percent.

Other includes spending on science, NASA, energy, natural resources, and agriculture, among other things.

Bonus Numbers! Federal spending has grown roughly as fast as the overall economy over the past 50 years. In 1962, federal spending was $707 billion and accounted for 18 percent of U.S. GDP. In 2011, federal spending was $3.1 trillion and accounted for 24 percent of GDP. (The dollar figures are adjusted for inflation.)

3D Light Show

A 3D Light Show filmed in Cologne, Germany.   Quite amazing....

Poetry Wednesday: The More Loving One

The More Loving One
by W. H. Auden    

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Close Reading: Can Creative Writing be Taught?

Can creative writing be taught?

by Francine Prose, The Atlantic

Novelist and critic Francine Prose talks about creativity, literary craftsmanship, and her new book, Reading Like a Writer.

It’s a reasonable question, but no matter how often I’ve been asked it, I never know quite what to say. Because if what people mean is: Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? then the answer is no. Which may be why the question is so often asked in a skeptical tone implying that, unlike the multiplication tables or the principles of auto mechanics, creativity can’t be transmitted from teacher to student. Imagine Milton enrolling in a graduate program for help with Paradise Lost, or Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don’t believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he’s a giant bug.

What confuses me is not the sensibleness of the question but the fact that, when addressed to me, it’s being asked of a writer who has taught writing, on and off, for almost twenty years. What would it say about me, my students, and the hours we’ve spent in the classroom if I said that any attempt to teach the writing of fiction is a complete waste of time? I should probably just go ahead and admit that I’ve been committing criminal fraud.

Instead I answer by recalling my own most valuable experience, not as a teacher, but as a student in one of the few fiction workshops I have ever taken. This was in the 1970s, during my brief career as a graduate student in medieval English literature, when I was allowed the indulgence of taking one fiction class. Its generous teacher showed me, among other things, how to line-edit my work. For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.

Meanwhile, my classmates were providing me with my first real audience. In that prehistory, before mass photocopying enabled students to distribute manuscripts in advance, we read our work aloud. That year I was beginning what would become my first novel. And what made an important difference to me was the attention I felt in the room as the others listened. I was very encouraged by their eagerness to hear more.

That’s the experience I describe, the answer I give to people who ask about teaching creative writing: A workshop can be useful. A good teacher can show you how to edit your work. The right class can encourage you and form the basis of a community that will help and sustain you.

But that class, as helpful as it was, is not where I learned to write.

Like most—maybe all—writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, from reading books.

Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson. And who could have asked for better teachers: generous, uncritical, blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be?

Though writers have learned from the masters in a formal, methodical way—Harry Crews has described taking apart a Graham Greene novel to see how many chapters it contained, how much time it covered, how Greene handled pacing, tone, and point of view—the truth is that this sort of education more often involves a kind of osmosis. After I’ve written an essay in which I’ve quoted at length from great writers, so that I’ve had to copy out long passages of their work, I’ve noticed that my own work becomes, however briefly, just a little more fluent.

In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and reread the authors I most loved. I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue. And as I wrote, I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls “putting every word on trial for its life”: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma and putting the comma back in.

I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer had made. And though I can’t recall every source of inspiration and instruction, I can remember the novels and stories that seemed to me revelations: wells of beauty and pleasure that were also textbooks, courses of private lessons in the art of fiction.

When I was a high school junior, our English teacher assigned a term paper on the theme of blindness in Oedipus Rex and King Lear. We were supposed to go through the two tragedies and circle every reference to eyes, light, darkness, and vision, then draw some conclusion on which we would base our final essay.

The exercise seemed to us dull, mechanical. We felt we were way beyond it. All of us knew that blindness played a starring role in both dramas.

Still, we liked our English teacher, and we wanted to please him. And searching for every relevant word turned out to have an enjoyable treasure-hunt aspect, a Where’s Waldo detective thrill. Once we started looking for eyes, we found them everywhere, glinting at us, winking from every page.

Long before the blinding of Oedipus or Gloucester, the language of vision and its opposite was preparing us, consciously or unconsciously, for those violent mutilations. It asked us to consider what it meant to be clear-sighted or obtuse, short-sighted or prescient, to heed the signs and warnings, to see or deny what was right in front of one’s eyes. Teiresias, Oedipus, Goneril, Kent—all of them could be defined by the sincerity or falseness with which they mused or ranted on the subject of literal or metaphorical blindness.

Tracing those patterns and making those connections was fun. Like cracking a code that the playwright had embedded in the text, a riddle that existed just for me to decipher. I felt as if I were engaged in some intimate communication with the writer, as if the ghosts of Sophocles and Shakespeare had been waiting patiently all those centuries for a bookish sixteen-year-old to come along and find them.

I believed that I was learning to read in a whole new way. But this was only partly true. Because in fact I was merely relearning to read in an old way that I had learned, but forgotten.

We all begin as close readers. Even before we learn to read, the process of being read aloud to, and of listening, is one in which we are taking in one word after another, one phrase at a time, in which we are paying attention to whatever each word or phrase is transmitting. Word by word is how we learn to hear and then read, which seems only fitting, because that is how the books we are reading were written in the first place.

The more we read, the faster we can perform that magic trick of seeing how the letters have been combined into words that have meaning. The more we read, the more we comprehend, the more likely we are to discover new ways to read, each one tailored to the reason why we are reading a particular book.

At first, the thrill of our own brand-new expertise is all we ask or expect from Dick and Jane. But soon we begin to ask what else those marks on the page can give us. We begin to want information, entertainment, invention, even truth and beauty. We concentrate, we skim, we skip words, put down the book and daydream, start over, and reread. We finish a book and return to it years later to see what we might have missed, or the ways in which time and age have affected our understanding.

As a child, I was drawn to the works of the great escapist children’s writers. Especially if I could return to my own bed in time to turn off the lights, I liked trading my familiar world for the London of the four children whose nanny parachuted into their lives on her umbrella and who turned the most routine shopping trip into a magical outing. I would have gladly followed the white rabbit down into the rabbit hole and had tea with the Mad Hatter. I loved novels in which children stepped through portals—a garden, a wardrobe—into an alternate universe.

Children love the imagination, with its kaleidoscopic possibilities and its protest against the way that children are always being told exactly what’s true and false, what’s real and what’s illusion. Perhaps my taste in reading had something to do with the limitations I was discovering, day by day: the brick walls of time and space, science and probability, to say nothing of whatever messages I was picking up from the culture. I liked novels with plucky heroines like Pippi Longstocking, the astringent Jane Eyre, and the daughters in Little Women, girls whose resourcefulness and intelligence don’t automatically exclude them from the pleasures of male attention.

Each word of these novels was a yellow brick in the road to Oz. Some chapters I read and reread so as to repeat the dependable, out-of-body sensation of being somewhere else. I read addictively, constantly. On one family vacation my father pleaded with me to close my book long enough to look at the Grand Canyon. I borrowed stacks of books from the public library: novels, biographies, history, anything that looked even remotely engaging.

Along with pre-adolescence came a more pressing desire for escape. I read more widely, more indiscriminately, and mostly with an interest in how far a book could take me from my life and how long it could keep me there. Gone With the Wind. Pearl Buck. Edna Ferber. Fat James Michener best-sellers with a dash of history sprinkled in to cool down the steamy love scenes between the Hawaiian girls and the missionaries, the geishas and the GIs. I also appreciated these books for the often misleading nuggets of information they provided about sex in that innocent era, the 1950s. I turned the pages of these page-turners as fast as I could. Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.

I was fortunate to have good teachers, and friends who were also readers. The books I read became more challenging, better written, more substantial. Steinbeck, Camus. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Twain, Salinger, Anne Frank. Little beatniks, my friends and I were passionate fans of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. We read Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and the proto-hippie classics of Herman Hesse, Carlos Castenada—Mary Poppins for people who thought they’d outgrown the flying nanny. I must have been vaguely aware of the power of language, but only dimly, and only as it applied to whatever effect the book was having on me.

All of that changed with every mark I made on the pages of King Lear and Oedipus Rex. I still have my old copy of Sophocles, heavily underlined, covered with sweet, embarrassing notes-to-self (“irony?” “recognition of fate?”) written in my rounded, heartbreakingly neat, schoolgirl print. Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering a handwriting that you know was once yours, but that now seems only dimly familiar, can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

Focusing on language proved to be a practical skill, useful the way sight-reading with ease can come in handy for a musician. My high school English teacher had only recently graduated from a college where his own English professors taught what was called New Criticism, a school of thought that favored reading what was on the page with only passing reference to the biography of the writer or the period in which the text was written. Luckily for me, that approach to literature was still in fashion when I graduated and went on to college. At my university the faculty included a well-known professor and critic whose belief in close reading trickled down and influenced the entire humanities program. In French class we spent an hour each Friday afternoon working our way from The Song of Roland to Sartre, paragraph by paragraph, focusing on small sections for what was called the explication de texte.

On many occasions, of course, I had to skim as rapidly as I could to get through those survey courses that gave us two weeks to finish Don Quixote, ten days for War and Peace—courses designed to produce college graduates who could say they’d read the classics. By then I knew enough to regret having to read those books that way. And I promised myself that I would revisit them as soon as I could give them the time and attention they deserved.

Only once did my passion for reading steer me in the wrong direction, and that was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that my love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I had trouble understanding what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious shiver that would later seem like a warning about what would happen to the teaching of literature over the decade or so after I dropped out of my Ph.D. program. That was when literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students that they were reading “texts” in which ideas and politics trumped what the writer actually wrote.

I left graduate school and became a writer. I wrote my first novel in India, in Bombay, where I read as omnivorously as I had as a child, rereading classics that I borrowed from the old-fashioned, musty, beautiful university library that seemed to have acquired almost nothing written after 1920. Afraid of running out of books, I decided to slow myself down by reading Proust in French.

Reading a masterpiece in a language for which you need a dictionary is in itself a course in reading word by word. And as I puzzled out the gorgeous, labyrinthine sentences, I discovered how reading a masterpiece can make you want to write one.

A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem; it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction. But the relationship between reading and writing is rarely so clear-cut, and in fact my first novel could hardly have been less Proustian.

More often the connection has to do with whatever mysterious promptings make you want to write. It’s like watching someone dance and then secretly, in your own room, trying out a few steps. I often think of learning to write by reading as something like the way I first began to read. I had a few picture books I’d memorized and pretended I could read, as a sort of party trick that I did repeatedly for my parents, who were also pretending—in their case, to be amused. I never knew exactly when I crossed the line from pretending to actually being able, but that was how it happened.

Not long ago a friend told me that her students complained that reading masterpieces made them feel stupid. But I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter. I’ve also heard fellow writers say that they cannot read while working on a book of their own, for fear that Tolstoy or Shakespeare might influence them. I’ve always hoped they would influence me, and I wonder if I would have taken so happily to being a writer if it meant that I couldn’t read during the years I might need to complete a novel.

To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy I have found is to read the work of a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.