As people who know me know, I love bricks. They are the simplest letters of the architectural alphabet and they also serve as a metaphor for focused and confining writing. This and the book Zen and the Art of Maintaining a Motorcycle are the subject of my new blog post « Writing is about seeing ». Pirsig's parable about a student who fails at a task and who manages to overcome her writer's block by focusing and looking closely was worth writing down.