"I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done."

The life of a writer — in this case, David Eggers — is not easy:

... I used to write in the middle of the night. I suppose I was surprised by the sedentary nature of writing: like, wow, most of this is sitting down and typing! So I used to add a bit of adventure by starting at midnight and working until five. That was excitement! But now I have two kids... So it's bankers hours for me.

... Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year....

Eggers denies himself internet access. That's what I would do if I really wanted to write a book. Which I guess I don't. I mean, I'm at the level where I (mostly) cut myself off from Twitter because I want to have a blog. What if I cut myself off from the internet for — let's say — the 4 months of summer break? The deep-sea dive. It would probably take me all 4 months just to get into into it.

Oddly, Eggers is motivated by his sense of how short life is. All that time getting going and thinking about how short life is? Oh, the pain. Blogging, by contrast, is the continual relief from that pain.

"Lots of Things Like This."

You've got only 2 more days to see "Lots of Things Like This," an exhibition of artworks that satisfy 3 criteria devised by David Eggers:

1. An image
2. Some words (usually referring to the image)
3. A sense of humor

If you don't like anything pretentious, this is the show for you. Check out some of the drawings and little paintings — reproduced in this PDF. Eggers says he just wanted "to put an enjoyable exhibit together, to cover the walls with strange and funny things." Or skip the show, get out a pencil and paper and draw your own image with some words and make it strange and funny. Eggers wrote a little brochure to go with the show, which you can read at the link. It contains many pointedly undeep thoughts like:

Why is it that so many of these artists aren’t so great at spelling? And why is it that when they screw up one of their words, instead of starting over, they just cross the word out and write it again? Many people would choose to start over.

Or maybe you think this is pretentious. Stealth pretentious.