Six-word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak was featured on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today. Listen here.

“Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.”
–Aleksander Pushkin

Lovers & Heartbreakers,

Six-word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak is back in New York after a couple weeks touring around the country. For those of you in the city this week, here’s what’s going down between now and the grand finale on Valentine’s Day:

• February 9, NYC, McNally Jackson, 52 Prince St., 7pm. Reading and Slam.
• February 11, NYC, Borders Columbus Circle, 7pm. Reading and Slam.
• February 14, NYC, Housing Works Bookstore, 8pm. The Valentine’s Day Personal Media Mixer & Confessional Culture Variety Show: PostSecret, Found Magazine, Mortified, and Cassette From My Ex join with SMITH Magazine for a very special evening to benefit Housing Works. Buy tickets here.

If you can, catch Larry and Rachel on NPR’s Talk of the Nation Wednesday afternoon and CBS’s The Early Show on Friday morning.

I’ll be including the Saturday gig in my own much-needed NYC bender this weekend, so perhaps we’ll run into each other. I’ll be the dude slurring his words six at a time.

Love, heartbreak, and everything in between,

=j

If this doesn’t make you smile, I’ve got nothing for you. [click to continue…]

“If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.”
–Ray Bradbury

I can’t believe I sat through this whole thing, so I figure it’d be best if you do too. It’s probably even better with the volume off. How did they not pick Black Dog for the music?

Anyway, if I hooked Vive up to this thing, we’d probably both be killed within the first forty-five seconds. [click to continue…]

“[It is not] enough to pay attention to words only when you face the task of writing. That is like playing the violin only on the night of the concert. You must attend to words when you read, when you speak, when others speak. Words must become ever present in your waking life, an incessant concern, like color and design if the graphic arts matter to you, or pitch and rhythm if it is music, or speed and form if it is athletics. Words, in short, must be there, not unseen and unheard, as they probably are and have been up to now. It is proper for the ordinary reader to absorb the meaning of a story or description as if the words were a transparent sheet of glass. But he can do so only because the writer has taken pains to choose and adjust them with care. They were not glass to him, but mere lumps of potential meaning. He had to weigh and assemble and fuse them before his purposed meaning could shine through.”
–Jacques Barzun