Bad Trips

Part of writing and maintaing a good blog is having a therapist. The other part is taking quotes from just anywhere and highlighting them in your blog to give people the impression that you are a learned soul with a deep understanding of human nature. I don't have a therapist (yet) so maybe if I doubled up on the latter, the former would be overlooked. To that end, I thought I'd share some really cool quotes from this great new book I picked up yesterday. It's called Bad Trips, a collection of travel writings edited by Keath Fraser, who we all know as Fraser from the show Fraser. I say a lot of the books I read are good but seriously this time, it's a great book. Some of the authors I'm familiar with, like Graham Greene and Paul Theroux, there's even a couple of mentions of Evelyn Waugh though he doesn't have any work in the book. Maybe I would quote him here too except that Adrienne disappeared with my only Waugh book. Anyway, a good blog isn't wordy, its about yourself or your inspiration or whatever can annoy other people so how's this (from a poem in the book entitled 'Advice To A Traveller'):


When you stand on an empty stony plateau alone
under the fathomless dome of Asia in whose blueness an aeroplane
or an angel sometimes whips up its starch or star -
when you shudder at how infinitesimally small you are,
remember: space that appears to need nothing, does
crave, as a matter of fact, an outside gaze,
a criterion of emptiness - of its depth and scope.
And it's only you who can do the job.
- Translated from the Russian by Joseph Brodsky (author) and George L. Kline


See that one puts you in the mood. Then a good blog will mix it up a bit with something a little less serious, perhaps a bit more personal or something funny but with depth like:


"But this year it occurred to both of us that we are not going to live forever, that our daughter was not forever going to stay a fascinating, loving, three-year-old, and
that on our respective deathbeds we were going to be unlikely to say 'I'm glad I advanced my career in 1986.'"


That's from A Family Vacation by David Mamet. It's really quite good. So you see, professional blogging is not just about pretty pictures (in or out of focus) but also about copying down other people's words to describe the ways you want your audience to imagine you feel. Even if you just made it all up. Or did you?