Max Riffner

The Parlor

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Stray Bullet Points

• I really, really need to redesign this site. I have about 30 odd ideas I want to do to fix this whole place up with a new coat of paint and some new rooms, with improved insulation? I don’t know how much further I can take the home improvement/remodeling metaphor…
• One of the things I would like to do is just post. I think blogs like this got me thinking that I, too, should be focused, when ironically one of my favoritefavoritefavs is FTrain.com. What happened, Blogging Internet? Why do we have to laser-focus on a topic anymore? Why can’t we just write?
• Speaking of just writing, what happened to the short story? Stephen King has a good explanation at the NYTimes.com. I miss writing short stories. I wrote many short stories in college when I switched majors (from Art Education [dear god, I was triple majoring at one time in Art, Graphic Design, and Art Education], so I picked up a minor in English). You could do worse than publish short fiction like Ftrain. DaringFireball.com (a blog which I seem to have just rallied against and has insanely good writing) pointed me to the link.
• Not that I’m getting much writing done; blame Tivo. I finally got one. I get it now. Oh sweet Jesus, I get it. Life is my new favorite series that it suggested. I like it quite a bit. I’m in a TV lull since getting every episode of The Wire in a mere two months.
• That’s where Netflix comes into play. Hello Dr. Who. You’re next on my queue.
• Thinking about design quite a bit this week (it’s award season). Khoi never said it better than with this article. I have some illustration work to show at this one, or else I wouldn’t even bother to enter anything exactly because I can feel my webwork be admonished because it isn’t letterpressed.
• However, speaking of Khoi and design: A Brief Message delivers. With mustard.
• Other web content I love: I finally have a subscription to The Comics Journal. The online subscriber area is a nice touch.
• Some might take this to mean that I will only be doing mini-comics forever now.
• Which if you think about it is nothing more than a short story.
• See how it all came around somehow?
• And back to the very beginning: I would like to post smaller pieces, like, each of these bullet points could be a post instead of making me seem like an insane recluse who has been using PowerPoint too much (or Keynote, I guess, I’m a Mac user).

Monday October 1, 2007    

Holtmann
Oct 5, 01:59 PM

# 1

And a bullet through the chest.

I love short fiction — I love fiction, I love great writing — but the act of reading, and not just Literature with a capital L, is in decline. Just page through the NEA’s report “Reading at Risk”: http://www.nea.gov/pub/pubLit.php. Next month we’ll announce an equally staggering report.

The antidote, if there is one, is to keep reading, to encourage other people to read, to write, to keep writing. Otherwise, what a shabby future we have to look forward to.

You can also browse through the Parlor archives.