![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
INSPIRATION
The act of forgetting where you stole your ideas.
click for larger version (widescreen)
Photo by Benjamin Dudoit of Morguefile.
I particularly like this photograph because despite the proximity of three stories of floor-to-ceiling, beautifully bound books (which may not be accessible, it’s hard to tell), none of the people in the photo is actually reading a book. They’re all composing sonnets about the death of literature. The guy in the corner, in fact, is searching online for a word that rhymes with ‘cerulean’.
Nathan Bransford thinks that “the pensive man in the blue shirt in the middle … is trying to forget that someone may have used an evil albino as a villain in the past”. What do you think the others are doing/thinking/working on? Let me know in the comments.
Loading ...
Very demotivating, but I can see one of them reading…
Hey, Technorati, listen up. I’M the only one who gets to post gibberish and nonsensically excerpted blog posts around here. Got that???
Also I really just can’t get enough of this picture. Well done.
Thanks, Nathan. Your gibberish and nonsensically excerpted blog posts are always welcome. Remember, you don’t have to write well, you’re already in publishing.
Sara, is he reading a book, or a spiral-bound study guide or business report?
“Sara, is he reading a book, or a spiral-bound study guide or business report?”
Good point.
Actually, it doesn’t look like he’s reading at all. Looks to me like he’s on a cellphone.
The woman in the second booth from the top is washing down a bologna and mustard sandwich with a cup of tomato soup while watching “White & Nerdy” on YouTube.
The man dressed in black in the center of the picture, upon smelling the soup, whips out a Chinese takeout menu and his cell phone.
The woman in red, as comfortable in her chair as she is with her fate, continuously clicks the “check mail” icon on her Yahoo! Mail. She’s confident that the next click will reward her with word of the acceptance of her historical paranormal romance by the agent she queried thirteen months ago.
The woman in red is oblivious to the gentleman sitting across the aisle from her. His pen is still poised against the paper, though his eye lids are closed, and his chin is resting heavily upon his chest. After spending three hours trying to decipher the first two pages of “Finnegans Wake”, he slipped into a deep slumber…possibly a coma.
Text messaging – what else do people do these days?
Aeschylean rhymes with cerulean, sort of. Maybe he’s penning a tribute to Oresteia.
Is that guy in the middle sleeping?
This looks like the corridor by the café at the British Library, which is next to a glass-walled enclosure where rare books and manuscripts are kept. (It is accessible, but only on submitting a special application.) Since the Library is a reference library, readers can’t take its books out of the Reading Rooms; they have a choice between reading books they have brought in with them and doing something else. It doesn’t really seem terribly surprising that people who have gone in to use the Reading Rooms should take a break, or that all the people taking a break from research should be alike in not reading on their break.
Thanks Helen, that’s interesting.