Cyberflanerie: STUFF & Stuff & More Stuff Edition

Seth Godin on the Nitty-Gritty Boring Stuff (of being an artist-- or whatever).

For those who don't have much stuff (or happen to have some spare $$$ for a writing studio): the Molecule Tiny House.

Mike Clelland on how to pack only micro amounts of stuff and hike off into the sunset (watch out for that link to his UFO abduction blog, though).

Lighten Up! Free Yourself from Clutter by Michelle Passoff. One of my faves.

They're called "garbage gyres": NYT on those Texas-sized floating islands of plastic.

For the metaphysically inclined: Rose Rosetree on 15 types of "STUFF" (astral whatnot that can get stuck in the aura, that is).

More metaphysical stuff: Karen Kingston on the energies in stuff (objects).

Five Death Bed Regrets (not one to do with stuff…) via the blog about dealing with stuff by Julie Hall, author of The Boomer Burden, a peace-inducing book about dealing with your parents' lifetime accumulation of stuff.

COMMENTS always welcome

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SURF ON:

Madam Mayo:
>30 Deadly-Effective Ways to Free Up Bits, Drips & Gimungously Vast Swaths of Time for Writing
>Decluttering a Library: The 10 Question Flow Chart
>On Decluttering Your Writing or, Respecting the Integrity of Narrative Design
>Guest-blogger Regina Leeds on 5 + 1 resources to Make Writer Happy in an Organized Space

And on the homepage, www.cmmayo.com:
>Ten Tips for Organizing a Novel-in-Progress
>Updates on Recommended Books on Mexico
>Updates about my upcoming workshop on Literary Travel Writing at the Writer's Center & other events

Writers Blogs: Questions and Observations Post Panel at AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Conference in Seattle

Apart from getting my picture taken in the book fair holding a loft a giant stuffed fish, late yesterday afternoon I was on the panel chaired by poet Zack Rogow with novelist Charles Johnson (standing in for E. Ethelbert Miller) and another extraordinary poet, Mark Doty.

Doty gave the lie to my rather cavalier assertion that blogging about oneself was narcissistic. I still have zero interest in blogging about my personal life (so far, no tweeting about my food, either!!), but Mark read from his blog a piece about his personal life, a painful story about how his house "bit him," pure poetry, and all I can say is, I salaam.  Do read more over at Doty's blog.

Charles Johnson paid homage to dear Ethelbert, who has long been an angel of both Washington DC and national literary culture.

Zack Rogow's talk, about his go-to blog, Advice for Writers, started out with practical tips for bloggers and ended with a reading from his blog of his new translation of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo," the poem that ends with one of the most jarringly perfect last lines.

My talk was "Eight Conclusions After 8 Years of Blogging."

To get a sense of the level of things, I first asked the audience, maybe 150 writers, how many had blogs? Up went the overwhelming majority of hands. How many had been blogging for more than 2 years? A sparse scattering. Five years? I counted two hands. Oh my goodness, I felt like Methuselah.

As for the questions, what struck me about many of them (both during and after the event) was their anxious flavor, the concern about the variety of problems a blog could bring a writer. There are valid concerns, of course, and it's good to get one's mind around the genre, or at least take its temperature and a sounding before doing a cannonball into the deep end. But it seems to me that what we basically have here is the very same fear around any writing, any publishing. It's all just "monsters under the bed" stuff, after all. Or, as Rose Rosetree calls it, STUFF, that is, astral clutter, including frozen blocks, in one's personal energy field.

Speaking of clutter, one of the many appealing things to me about blogging is that it doesn't require physical space except for, say, a place to plunk one's laptop while typing. All of my book projects, on the other hand, have each produced a mountain of research files and then contracts and then marketing materials and such, plus a little (well, not so little) library of related books. Finding space is a challenge.

More anon.

COMMENTS

Is Anybody Else Tired of Owning Stuff?

Check out this blog post by Charles Hugh Smith.

I do enjoy beautiful and useful things. Alas, most of the rest of it is made in China. I think that's much of the problem. Not that there are not many beautiful and useful things made in China! But scads of what we buy today -- clothing and household electronics, especially-- is just junk, poorly made, and more likely than not by people who are either close to slavery or maybe even, and once you're done with it, unless you want to pay to store it because you've got some pesky chakra attachment to it, it's not worth $5.

At Goodwill recently in Silicon Valley, I was there when a woman drove up in a late model open-roofed Jeep ferrying the great sausage roll of an oversized Oriental carpet. The Goodwill worker told her, "It's too large, they'll probably recycle it." She pouted. "I should have Craig Listed it!" But in a split second she said, "Oh well." Then she hopped in her Jeep, and blazed out of the lot.

P.S. How to Declutter a Library: The 10 Question Flow Chart, ye olde blog post by Yours Truly.
And: Decluttering Your Writing Or, The Integrity of Design.