(no subject)

[kalidasiom]

"[W]riters are at their least pretty, perhaps, when they are actually writing. Eyes redden, caffeine levels rise like geysers, fingernails go missing without trace. Given the amount of hair-tearing that goes on, it should be statistically provable that 85 percent of poets, say, are completely bald and that a formal meeting of the creative writing faculty at any major university should be indistinguishable from a box of free-range eggs. Yet poets are, and always have been, irretrievably hairy, a mystery that only Darwin could solve; it may be that they have evolved to the point of waking every morning with a full thatch, which is then ripped out in frustration over the course of the day, the last strands vanishing in the early evening, during a fruitless hunt for a word that rhymes with 'tulip' or 'Kalashnikov.'"

~ Anthony Lane