Progress Report on Korzybski Biography

Just to let the curious know—I'm continuing to plug away at the Korzybski biography. Am now dealing with issues and events of 1947. (Korzybski died in early 1950.) It looks like I will have a completed, in-fairly-good-shape manuscript in a few months time. When I first decided to get started on this project, in mid-2004, I had no notion of the amount of work I would have to do nor an inkling of the difficulty, even pain, sometimes involved, the pain of 'thinking' perhaps most of all.

Some quotations on writing that resonate to the bone for me*:

There ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't agoing to no more.— S. L. Clemons (Mark Twain): Huckleberry Finn, XLIII, 1885

The business of writing has altogether become contemptible to me; and I am become confirmed in the notion that nobody ought to write, —unless sheer fate force him to do it; —and then he ought (if not of the mountebank genus) to beg to be shot rather. — Thomas Carlyle: Letter to R. W. Emerson, June 2, 1858

This writing is an unnatural business. It makes your head hot and your feet cold, and it stops the digesting of your food. — John Burroughs (1837-1931)

* All quotations from H.L. Mencken's A New Dictionary of Quotations. under "Writing," p. 1341.