Endless Hybrids: work as a journey of creativity
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DCI and the search for a new library director
As Washington and Lee begins the search for a new library director, the provost asked each of the librarians if they wanted to present a short talk to the search committee as part of an information session on The 21st Century Library. Each of us had the opportunity to give a short presentation about “your […]
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Storytelling in the mid-century
This essay was first posted on our book design blog on July 5, 2011. That site is no longer active. My daughter Mila, born on the second day of this year, will grow up in an era dominated by multi-touch tablets, with ever decreasing thickness and ever increasing capabilities. (Her adulthood likely will be spent […]
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Writing as espionage
“We remained travelers, enclosed in the self, capable, possibly, of transforming ourselves in contact with alterity, but certainly not of experiencing it profoundly. We are spies, we make the rapid, furtive contact of spies. When Chateaubriand invented travel literature with his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem in 1811, long before Stendhal and his Memoirs of […]
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On SEO
I don’t think much anymore about SEO (i.e., optimizing my content and site for search engines). For those who do (and there are good reasons for doing so if you’re trying to build an audience), then Google’s Webmaster site has posted a good article about Google’s ‘core updates’.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee on Writing
“My single rule for writing is the same as my rule for science. You cannot know the answer if you don’t know the question. Before I write anything. I ask myself: what is the question that I am trying to answer?” Source
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My failure in meditation
If I could tell anything to my 20 year old self, it would be to get serious about meditation. But that would have been so hard in 1985-86. So hard. There was so little information available, especially in those pre-Internet days to a boy living in Tennessee. I was going to Sewanee, an Episcopal college […]
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Deep Reading
The following is a message I sent Sunday night to my provost Marc Conner, who is an English professor and scholar of African-American literature. By chance over the weekend, I stumbled across something that he wrote at the end of The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling by Charles […]
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All those unread books
“Aย good library is filled with mostly unread books. That’s the point. “
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A pebble in the path
Through the Tim Ferris podcast, I learned about Jerry Colonna, who has very inspiring thoughts about life and work. Jerry is popping up in many places with the publication of his book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up. I’ll be mentioning that book in several upcoming posts. It’s a spectacular work; I listened […]
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Am I preparing to die?
In the last month, particularly, I have been coming to a place of peace and clam about my life. As I was walking through the stacks on the 2nd floor of the library, I felt a slight tug in the muscle of my chest. Nothing more than a muscle contraction, I told myself without any […]