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Some final notes from a cold brain

The lurgy is finally lifting, thankfully. For a while there it was impossible to sleep AND breathe simultaneously. Which can add a layer of difficulty to, oh, everything.

From the weekend surfing:

* Rebecca Solnit, “You know, a lot of my work has been based on the field of disaster sociology, which emerged after the World War II, when the US government decided it wanted to know how human beings would behave in the aftermath of an all-out nuclear war. The assumption, as it often is, is that we would become childlike and sheepish and panic and be helpless, or that we’d become sort of venal and savage and barbaric. And the disaster scholars started to look at this and eventually dismantled almost every stereotype we have and found that people are actually, as I’ve been saying, resourceful, altruistic, brave, innovative and often oddly joyful, because a lot of the alienation and isolation of everyday life is removed. [snip] What you also see is that because the authorities think that we’re monsters, they themselves panic and become the monsters in disaster.” Elite panic, it’s called. Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell, has gone into the shopping cart.

* How to Innovate Like Apple: this includes nurturing talent, flattening hierarchies, and ignoring market research.

* Relatedly, an article on why big business isn’t bothered about helping you find your stolen iPhone.

* Follow the Reader: a blog for readers

* The Short Review: a review site for short story collections (I so wish I’d known about this a year back when I was putting together my own short story collection — think of all the brilliant ideas I could’ve stolen learned from!

* And finally, via catsparx: if architects had to work like web designers (so. very. true.)

And the even better news is that the brain is working well enough again for me to be pushing forward on the writing schedule. Over the past few days I’m managed to get halfway through my Ishtar contemporary novella (currently being brought down from 23K to the requisite 20K) & I am having a blast with this project.

Ah, Ishtar. Putting the FUN! back into love & war.