Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?

Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.

Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

Hemingway: Getting the words right.

(Via Shawn Blanc and Leo Babauta)

Here’s the email and attached photos I sent tonight to The Slickman Building (4th floor), somewhere in Britain. It documents my participation, again this year, in the SA4Q event, celebrating the 86th naming day of Russell Hoban. All around the world, pieces of yellow paper with quotes from Hoban books were left in public places – cafe tables, bookshops, park benches, telephone booths, train stations or anywhere the birthday celebrants deemed appropriate. The SA4QE (Slickman A4 Quotation Event) website lists 350 quotes that have been left, on previous birthdays, in big cities and small towns in 14 countries since 2002. Russell Hoban remains one of the most original writers of the twentieth century and one of my very favourites. Here’s what I sent:

Good evening,

Thanks again for this opportunity to participate!

Russell Hoban’s birthday began, in White Rock, British Columbia, Canada, with a menacing darkness squatted defiantly over Semiahmoo Bay. My yellow paper had been wrapped in plastic, as always, to protect it from an inevitable rain coast pelting – and subsequent melting – of Mr. Hoban’s words, but the particularly unwelcoming weather kept me inside until early afternoon …

At 2:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, on Russell Hoban’s naming day when he come 86, the dark clouds parted and the sun shone down. I headed down to the beach with my lovely wife, yellow paper in hand.

It was left on the best bench. Close to the water but distant from the action. A peaceful yet powerful spot. The wind was still whipping up the water. The gulls like that.

I am proud to once again represent for White Rock. I hear that, as of this year, I’m no longer the only Canadian contributor to SA4QE. This makes me proud as well. Here’s what’s written on my paper:

Reality is ungraspable. For convenience we use a limited-reality consensus in which work can be done, transport arranged, and essential services provided. The real reality is something else–only the strangeness of it can be taken in…

Russell Hoban
The Moment Under The Moment, Foreword

My best to all members of the Kraken Community …

And Thank you again, Russ, for the joyous mystery and the mysterious joy

Happy Birthday!

All best

Ra McGuire

Quantum physicist Richard Feynman is one of my heroes. This is from an interview I re-watched last night. I transcribed this bit so I wouldn’t forget it:

“You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt, and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything – and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here – and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit but if I can’t figure it out then I go into something else. But I don’t have to know an answer.

I don’t have to … I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things – by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose – which is the way it really is as far as I can tell … possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.”

~ Richard Feynman

From an interview with the BBC Horizon program; “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.” 1981

Richard was also a helluva conga drum player.

I’ve just uploaded 16 photos from my summer travels to Flickr. You can see them all by clicking here

“I think a lot of the problems we’ve been experiencing come from the fact that no one embraces the miracle and amazement of the present. So many people—steampunks, fundamentalists, hippies, neocons, anti-immigration advocates—feel like there was a better time to live in. They think the present is degraded, faded, and drab. That our world has lost some sort of “spark” or “basic value system” that, if you so much as skim history, you’ll find was never there. Even during the time of the Greeks, there were masses of people lamenting the passing of some sort of “golden age.” But I’d never go back and live in any other time than teetering on tomorrow; this is the greatest time to be alive.”

— Patton Oswalt (via The Office of Frank Chimero)

In the van the other day, somewhere between Sydney Nova Scotia and Rita’s Tea House in Big Pond, I was trying to describe a vocal performance by Amy Winehouse that I’d seen on YouTube. Today I downloaded it so I could show it to my band brothers next time we’re out. I figured I should show it to you as well. It’s one of my very favourites and not on any CD that I know of. It’s just Amy and someone playing a Rhodes Electric piano. I’m in awe every time I see it.

UPDATE: Video link is horked. Click here for a link that should work

When you buy gas for your car, you purchase as much as you need and use it till it runs out. The same is true of electricity, in the sense that you pay for what you use.

When I buy data for my iPhone, though, I pay $30.00 for access to 6 gigabytes of data per month. Although I generally use only a third of that, Rogers Canada denies me the use of the remaining 4GB, despite the fact that I’ve paid them for access to it. When the next month begins, I’m billed again for 6GB. This is not Rogers’ only iPhone data plan, but it was, regrettably, the best option for me.

Then I bought a 3G iPad.

(continue reading this post …)

I haven’t written here much this summer. I did manage to contribute a bit to the Twittersphere, but anything more that 140 characters seemed to be beyond me. I was pretty busy.

Luckily, for the first time ever, Gogo took photographs at every show this summer from his place at the keyboards – so you can get an idea of what my life’s been like for the past few months. Many of these shots necessarily involve the back of my head, but all of them show the party in front of us. Short of standing up there yourself and feeling the palpable love that overwhelms us every night – it’s a stage-side look at what we did this summer. Three of the shows (Parksville, Olds and Cochrane) have two pictures each (Cochrane, so that the collection wouldn’t end on an odd number) but the rest are individual shows and roughly in the order we played them. Every show we’ve done since Canada Day is represented here except for the private one we played for our multimillionaire buddy in Muskoka.

Gogo’s full set of pictures from the tour, including autographed body parts and tour bus exposés are here and I encourage you to check them all out. I thank my rock and roll brother for documenting our experience every night. It’s the first time anyone’s ever done it, and seeing all of them together like this is quite moving for me. Hopefully you enjoy it too.

I’ve finished my first two book on my iPad – “A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan and “Wild Years – The Music and Myth of Tom Waits” by Jay S. Jacobs.

“Goon Squad” is a truly contemporary book that wanders shamelessly through time, observing the tumultuous lives of a cast of characters all vaguely associated with the music industry. I liked it a lot. The Tom Waits book is a pretty straightforward chronicle of a very private man’s career. I would have liked to see more detail, but appreciate what I learned.

I really enjoy reading on the iPad. On the whole, I like it better than reading traditional books.

At first I missed not being able to gauge, by the amount of pages shifted from the right hand to the left, how far along in the story I was, but it’s not so much a loss as a change of habit. My iPad has helped be break that habit and realize that reading, like life, is all about the journey. The distance yet to be travelled should not be a distracting consideration. At any rate, a quick touch of the screen will show me.

I’ve read my iPad in airports, on planes, in vans, in restaurants, in hotel rooms, in beds in hotel rooms and in all circumstances, except bright sunlight, the experience has been more comfortable and all-round more rewarding. Part of this is due to the excellent Marware Eco-Vue case I bought while waiting for my iPad to arrive. Thanks to the multiple configurations of the case, I rarely have to hold the iPad with my hands. Even while sitting with my legs crossed the micro-fibre lining grips my jeans and holds the screen in place.

I was most looking forward to reading comic books and graphic novels on the bright, colourful and nearly comic-book-shaped iPad screen, and that experience has been everything I hoped for. I’ve been re-reading some favourites and discovering new titles (like Ed Brubaker’s amazing “Criminal”).

Although the time difference probably measures in miliseconds, the iPad is quicker in and out of the backpack and, as a result, more likely to be deployed. There is a general feel of convenience to it that my heavier, hinged, MacBook Pro seems, more and more, to lack.

For the moment though, and until I’m more used to the iPads glass keyboard, anything longer than a few paragraphs gets written on this trusty laptop.

Connor’s photography has been featured on the UK Blog ‘G Squared‘ in a post called “and we Give You Connor McGuire”. Check it there and also stop by his Flickr page to see some more of his work.