- Village Voice — Seven Questions For John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats:
I go through times when I don’t write much, but I think “writers block” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t believe in it. I think the times when you’re “blocked” are transitional times when your inspiration is sort of trying to re-direct you toward the place where you’ll eventually end up. Thinking of this state as a “block” is really counterproductive, pernicious even: you’re not “blocked,” you’re on a detour, and maybe the sights aren’t as pretty, but they’re still really valuable. That’s my take, anyway. I mean, if you couldn’t actually move your hands to make the pen go across the page, that’s a legitimate block. Otherwise, sit down and work!
- Largehearted Boy: Sam Means Interviews John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats:
…The new means of distribution aren’t things we as writers or singers or whatever (“content providers” UGH ICK GROSS) ought to be having dumbass discussions about at the level of “shall we? or shall we not?” Because yes, we shall, and no, we don’t have any choice in the matter, and yes, actually, it’s all to the good. You can whine about spilled milk, or about the horse leaving the barn, but these are negative ways of talking about it. I mean, in a sense, you might as well ask “how do you feel about people having conversations?” – how I feel about it is beside the point. The only question that big corporations ought to be asking themselves are, in this order: one, how can we do something with this that our customers/audience/whatever will enjoy, and, two, how can we make money off it so everybody gets paid and we can keep the ball rolling? For me the sticking point is mainly the moronic sort of talk that the whole new paradigm inspires on both sides of the discussion – people thinking of labels as The People In Suits!! t3h ev1L v1LLa1nz!! and labels imagining that they’re going to be able to control the marketplace, which is a weird delusion anyway, because the customer has always controlled the marketplace. It’s in the nature of marketplaces to be controlled by customers, unless there’s some heavy monopoly culture, which there isn’t….
Bottom line is that you can’t tell your audience how to enjoy what you do; our job as entertainers is just to do what we do as best as we can, and if there are corporations whose job it is to turn what we do into money, their job is to do that without being gross and embarrassing about it, and then to fairly share the profits. As a rule, the bigger corporations are 0-for-2 on these last couple of points though.
- Why Is Software Development So Hard?: James Maguire of Datamation interviewed me.
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