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Amazon Catches Fire

June 18, 2014 By Mark 1 Comment

While the world’s landfills can always use more toxic waste, Amazon’s introduction of the Fire phone strikes me as particularly problematic for people in airplanes, airports, hospitals, restaurants, foxholes, firing squads, artillery batteries and crowded theaters.

It wouldn’t surprise me if someone gets tossed off a plane for saying the wrong word at the wrong time. I would also like to believe that Amazon simply didn’t game out the possible implications beforehand, but given the amount of free publicity such an incident would generate I think it’s more likely that they did. Fire indeed.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Non Sequiturs Tagged With: fire

Burning Desire

October 4, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

I had occasion over the weekend to dig through some old boxes of scripts and stories I wrote years ago. I found some duplicate copies and stuff I no longer cared about and decided to get right of the dead weight.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard about writers burning their early works, but it seems to have been a fairly common occurrence. And I can understand the appeal. Fire as metaphor and ritual seems to be a human constant, signaling everything from death to purification to rebirth.

I had about five thousand pages to dispose of, and believe me, I wanted to burn them. I wanted the act, the warmth of the fire, and the ashes. Particularly the ashes.

Because we live in a world dying from greenhouses gasses, such things are frowned upon these days, and recycling is the norm. So I recycled.

But I wanted to look into that fire.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: ~ Tangents, Fiction Tagged With: fire, writing