I gotta say, Blimpo, until you grow a sense of irony a lot of stuff on this newfangled internet is going to be a ‘closed book’ to you (if you understand the traditional artifact metaphor.)

Amen.

Webster’s New World Dictionary, College Edition.

Wilson: To the use of the periodic sentence.

Interviewer: Surely that is not the whole story.

Wilson: And to my use of the colon and the semi-colon. Writing so long for the New Yorker may have led me a little to overdo the comma.

Interviewer: What else?

Wilson: My invariable habit of writing in pencil on those “legal-size” yellow pads—the kind that are ruled with blue lines. I believe that composing on the typewriter has probably done more than anything else to deteriorate English prose.

“An Interview with Edmund Wilson” (1962)

Write Or Die (I really think the “or” should be capitalized) looks like a great way to do freewriting. I think I will show this to my writing students.

Better, I’ve found, for short bursts of writing to get your thoughts down rather than editing and tweaking. But you’d be surprised how much you get down in 15 minutes if all you do for 15 minutes is write.

And, Schelling’s essay “Ethics, Law and the Exercise of Self-Command” (in “Choice and Consequence”) is fun. It includes the amusing point about societal support for self binding, i.e. you can’t get the courts to enforce contracts you make with yourself. Though interestingly in Arizona you can sign up with the state to be excluded from gambling dens. It also has this example:

“Social controls play a role; the Times Literary Supplement for January 22, 1982, contained a splendid example, a review article by George Steiner on the life and work of the Hungarian radical Georg Lukacs. “When I first called on him, in the winter of 1957-8, in a house still pockmarked with shellbursts and grenade spliters, I stood speechless before the armada of his printed works, as it crowded the bookshelves. Lukacs seized on my puerile wonder and blazed out of his chair in a motion at once vulnerable and amused: ‘You want to know how one gets work done? It’s easy. House arrest, Steiner, house arrest!’”

I wish Mac Freedom was called House Arrest. Anyhow, many of the software targeted at parental control is useful for putting the temptations at a distance. Reading Ainslie makes it clear that you can get a lot of self binding out of merely encrypting the tempting software with a long and tedious password.