Me:  Any idea where the pilot light would be on an oven?

You: Why?

Me: Because I wanted to make rolls from a can last night and my oven wouldn’t get hot.

You: I’m going to leave that one alone.

Me: What?

You: Never mind.

Me: You’re making jokes, meanwhile my apartment is filling up with gas. Meanwhile, I’m going to explode.

You: It’s possible. So what’d you do with the rolls?

Me: I cooked them in a pan on the stove until the bottoms all burnt - then I microwaved them on high for 45 seconds.

You: (silence)

Me: No really, it worked… kind of. They weren’t horrible.

You: (silence)

Me: Hello?

I’ve been a follower of TwitterLit for a while now (via Twitter, of course.) Their slogan is: Twittering the first lines of books, so you don’t have to. Like we would. The idea is they post the first lines of books like bait with a link to the amazon.com site where you can buy it. They don’t give you the title or author - just that first line. In all the months I’ve been reading their updates, only a handful of times have I been interested enough to click the link and find out which book it’s from. Never, have I purchased the book.

As writers, we spend many agonizing hours or years thinking about that first line.(And, if you’re me, you spend just as long thinking about the first line of each chapter/scene.) While I’ve never found any good new reads via TwitterLit, its a fun exercise in examining first lines and how important they really are. Anyone else follow this feed on Twitter? Know of any other good feeds for writing?

A few from the top of their current Twitter page:

“A man like me is not supposed to have doubts”

“I grew up pointing a finger-gun at Mr. Whipple”

“I hid in my room”

“This is Lexie Madison’s story, not mine”

“Early November”

I’ve been looking for my character Neal. I had him, then I lost him. Time to strap him down to the interrogation chair and see if he’ll speak.

What File Is: (taken from their website)

The purpose of FILE is to collect and display photographs that treat subjects in unexpected ways. Alternate takes, odd angles, unconventional observations - these are some of the ways photographs collected in FILE reinterpret traditional genres. We leave the Kodak Moments to the family album, the glossy fashion spreads to Vogue, and the photo finishes to ESPN. Rather than taking the well-trod paths, we veer off to get a different perspective. Confused? Browse The Collection. The photos say it better than we can.

I absolutely love File, so it was a huge honor (and surprise) when I searched myself on Technorati today and found they’d just (as in, seconds ago) published one of my photographs. Thanks, File! Besos!

The Writer’s Notebook $250

(from UCLA’s course catalog / Fall 2008)

Whether you call it a journal, diary, sketchbook, or life book, the writer’s notebook serves as a nesting ground for ideas, observations, and reflections, and is a powerful way to enhance creativity and develop a greater sensitivity to your environment and feelings. It also provides a stimulating place to begin your first drafts and encourage your inner voice to speak out. Through lectures, exercises, and discussion of published journals, participants learn the benefits of keeping a notebook, what to include and how to use the contents, and how to mine the notebook for future literary works. By the end of the two days, students have the beginning of an organized notebook which can serve as an ongoing foundation for future works and a vital supplement for both formal and informal pieces of writing. The course is useful for neophyte and experienced fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets. Students should bring a journal or notebook to the first class.(2 Meetings)

Really? $250 to learn how to tape shit you find cool in a notebook? To learn how to make notes, write down the ideas that fog up your head before you forget them? I must be missing the point here…

The below photos are not my own. I came across them along with many blurry others - equally wonderful - in a found collection called “What We Remember” at the site SquareAmerica.com

Its funny to me, the way we struggle to remember each detail of things. The constant quest for crisper real-life photography. A more precise documentation. The most fail-proof means of archive like to bypass our minds’ own inferior memory system. Comparatively speaking.

But maybe we’re not meant to remember so clearly. Maybe its some kind of emotional survival to gloss over the bad parts of our past. Blur out the mundane. Filter facts down to that beautiful, soft and warm little core of the moment - of the person - the place - because, without it, moving on might be hard. Also, forgiveness. Or acceptance.

Or maybe what this is about is really just some really awesome old photographs.