hits

Why do we use the same word - 'myth' - for stories that aren't true, but also for stories that, while not literally true, carry a lot of moral truth. 

metanarrative

E L Doctorow said that whatever a writer says about their own novel, is just part of the fiction and not to be trusted.

This applies in an interesting way to Mary Shelley's introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein because, firstly, there are reasons to doubt the veracity of the story that Mary tells, but also, it's the perfect story told with all the verve and wit of the novelist that Mary Shelley is. 

Like Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein's structure is one of nested narratives - a story within a story within a story - and in a way, Mary Shelley's introduction is like the perfect packaging - a perfect outer narrative for the novel/ a perfect introduction/ a great story. 

She needed to answer the question that was frequently put to her - “How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” - with a story, and that's what she provided. 

science fiction, a poem

remember when pinterest used to have pages

you would say i'm just going to scroll to the end of this page

now you can't do that any more

but does that make you scroll less or more

when you're always at the beginning of an endless scroll as opposed to being at some point in a finite page

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first ever

In 1659, Christiaan Huygens used his homemade telescope to become the first person ever to observe and document the surface features of Mars. 

lit

Good literary criticism is not purely systematic and analytical. It's not like science. It's like poetry. 

structure

I think being creative is not about being able to come up with lots of different ideas. It's more about developing a process and you do the same process over and over and over, but experiment within the parameters of the process. 

just tell me what to do

Can an ideology be imposed systemically? Like, is it possible to be a true believer by following a set of rules or principles? 

I said to Minh once that I wish the Bible just told us explicitly what we need to do....like a checklist. And his response was 'no you don't'. He said that not so much because it's a bad idea, but because he knew I would hate that, but it is a bad idea.