[A Pleasurable Headache] Godless Grifters & The Swartzelder Method
A short one this week as the day job becomes a chaotic mess. Never take time off, kids. You’ll just come back to so much work.
Links
Young, Male and Anti-Feminist – The Gen Z Boys Who Hate Women
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyv7by/anti-feminist-gen-z-boys-who-hate-women
Shocking absolutely no-one is the fact that half of young men in the UK believe Feminism has “gone too far” (whatever that means). Hannah Ewens at Vice takes a look at the online/political movements that are all to happy to keep these young men angry and outraged.
Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right
Salon on the numerous members of the Intellectual Dark Web, where they are now, and what they’re currently up to. The headline is a spoiler.
Everything Zen: David Prior on “The Empty Man”
https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/everything-zen-david-prior-on-the-empty-man-9701
MUBI interview David Prior, the director of previously mentioned hidden horror gem, The Empty Man. I’m so glad to see a number of websites are discovering this one and shouting from the rooftops about it. I especially loved this part about Prior’s use of ambiguity:
“Well, I’m cautious when I talk about this stuff because when you’re setting out to tell a story that trades in ambiguity… let’s just say ambiguity is not an excuse to not make up your mind, it has to be pretty surgically deployed. But at the same time it would betray the intent to try to collapse the entire movie into one interpretation. If you’re trying to create a situation where people are invited to wrestle with some ideas, then you’re robbing them of the experience that you tried to give them in the first place, provided you’re lucky enough to find people who are even interested in such a thing.”
The Snitch
https://magazine.atavist.com/the-snitch-fbi-scott-kimball-informant-killer-colorado/
A heck of a true-crime long read about an FBI informant who is not what he seems.
The Swartzwelder Method: Because Writing Should Be Fun
https://litreactor.com/columns/the-swartzwelder-method-because-writing-should-be-fun
Who knew that all this time I was a proponent and practitioner of the Swartzelder method? This piece touches on a recent New Yorker interview with the legendary and infamous Simpsons writer. In it he details some of his practices around writing that difficult first draft.
” Swartzwelder’s method is to bang out a draft that he knows is horrible, all in one go, if possible. Then, he comes back and edits it the next day.
“These crappy drafts include stand-in dialog, maybe a stage direction with no joke. It’s mostly made up of all the boring parts of typing out a story so that way, the next day, it’s an empty vessel just waiting to be filled with funny.”
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Finally, please take a moment to read Rebecca Hazelton’s The Man: A Compilation. It is quite something.
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I’m off to hibernate until Monday morning. See you in two!