Friday 3 September
Did I Not Blog about This Blog about Blogs?

Filed under Reviews

Another blog endorsement, this one apparently defunct, alas. Look at This Fucking Idea for a Blog-to-Book Deal is the smartest satire on hip blogs/memes you’ll find.

You can read the entirety of it in a half hour, and it’s a worthwhile half-hour to spend. My favorite entry is a late one, called Road Signs for Carol. Behold:

This is the part of the post in which I was going to suggest other entries to look for, but then I realized I’d just list every entry in order.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-09-03  ::  dave

Thursday 2 September
Free Mac Solitaire: Avoid Boredom!

Filed under Announcements

Most Popular Solitaire is a collection of only the best and most popular solitaire games.

We have looked through all the hundreds and hundreds of solitaire games and chosen only the thirty best games, the thirty games that people like to play the most.

These are the games that solitaire players from around the world keep coming back to play more often than any others. There are just enough games to keep you from getting bored, but few enough to keep it simple.

With beautiful playing cards, full undo and redo of all your moves, automatic game saving, and complete statistics, Most Popular Solitaire is solitaire the way it ought to be.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-09-02  ::  dave

Thursday 2 September
Free Mac Solitaire: It’s as Simple as That!

Filed under Announcements

Computer solitaire is one of most popular games, ever. Solitaire games have been played for hundreds of years and remain to attract millions of card game players and we wanted to continue the tradition with Simply Solitaire. We hope you enjoy Simply Solitaire for Mac, the Apple computer, (Macintosh) as much as we enjoyed making it. Our aspiration is that you have a good time playing our classic mac solitaire games. If you’re here to find out about the specific rules for solitaire games, click above or click here: solitaire rules. It’s as simple as that.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-09-02  ::  dave

Sunday 29 August
Found Scholarship: Louis O. Mink’s “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument”

Filed under Reviews

Upgrading my office iMac’s Ubuntu boot to 10.4 took so long I had to get up and walk through the library. I grabbed at books under the LOC subject headings “Prose – Technique” and “Nonfiction – Technique”. Mink’s essay comes at the tail end of an anthology on the writing of history called, creatively, The Writing of History. He begins by setting narrative on a kind of continuum.

Even though narrative form may be, for most people, associated with fairy tales, myths, and the entertainments of the novel, it remains true that narrative is a primary cognitive instrument—an instrument rivaled, in fact, only by theory and by metaphor as irreducible ways of making the flux of experience comprehensible.

Narrative, to Mink (pictured above?), is the iconic union between theory and experience, much as comics, to McCloud, are the iconic union between language-signs and the things they signify.
(more…)

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-29  ::  dave

Wednesday 25 August
Is Louie C.K. the Zach Schomburg of Comedy?

Filed under Announcements

No, probably not. This answer is why I’ve been avoiding this post I’ve been threatening myself to write since C.K.’s Louie premiered on FX, which if you’re not watching you’re missing out on one of the most incredible shows ever. And why I mean incredible is here is a show written, directed, edited, and acted by a comedian that is mostly unfunny, and which show’s unfunny moments are its most watchable and interesting. Its existence is incredible as in not credible.

And it just got renewed for a second season of 13 episodes!

But, like, look:
(more…)

6 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-25  ::  dave

Tuesday 24 August
Blog Endorsement

Filed under Announcements

Some people, believe it or not, like semantic arguments.

My friend Cara is one of these people, whose brains sort of open up a little more from semantic dickering, or like who see semantic dickering not as idiotic quests at being Right but rather as quick and fun investigations that yield certain small truths.

Behold: (more…)

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-24  ::  dave

Monday 23 August
TV News Interview Subject Romance Showdown

Filed under 3rd-person blogging

Sorry, Becky. May I suggest new bedsheets?

(More great photographed TV on Mike Sacks’s Web site.)

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-23  ::  dave

Sunday 22 August
One Moment of Unwanted Falseness in Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle

Filed under Reviews

Walls’s book is a memoir about her nomadic childhood with well-meaning but narcissistic parents. At one house in gold-mining country they live with many stray animals, including an injured buzzard her father brought home one day. His name was Buster. Just before the moment in question, young Jeanette has encouraged her father to drive the car as fast as possible on the highway, causing it to overheat and break down.

We sat there for a long time. I could see buzzards circling high in the distance, which reminded me of that ingrate Buster. Maybe I should have cut him some slack. With his broken wing and lifetime of eating roadkill, he probably had a lot to be ungrateful about. Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.

I hate this paragraph and all the lies it tries to tell. It’s like: just about every memoir I read would be so much better as a novel. Please, book industry, recover from your true-story addiction.

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-22  ::  dave

Saturday 21 August
“Mega Secrets” – Family Portrait

Filed under tabulature

Gone are the days that I discover new bands on my own. Here’s yet another new love found on a mix made by my good friend Steve. I don’t know anything about them. This track is from a split 7″, which indie rock bands, which still apparently exist, still do together, which makes me happy.

Tune down half a step, which all good guitar players do as a matter of course, right? I mean how else are you going to play a simple Eb chord…barred on the sixth fret?

BASS INTRO:
A-------------|---------2-----:||
E-0---0-0---0-|-0---0-4---4-2-:||

(This is often doubled an octave up on the guitar.)

LEAD INTRO:
G---9-----9-----9-|---8-----8-----8-|
D-----6-----6-----|-----6-----6-----|
A-7-----7-----7---|-7-----7-----7---|

B---6-----6-----6-|---8-----8-----8-|
G-----6-----6-----|-----6-----6-----|
D-7-----7-----7---|-7-----7-----7---|

(This, too, gets run up an octave later in the song;
mini-barre e, B, and G on fret 9 for ease in playing.)

CHORDS:
E
I can't do anything right, uh-uh-oh
E
When she says that we're going under.
E
It takes over, over and over,
E
Again, again, again, uh-ah-oh-uh-oh
C#m                                E
And then, she really wants to give in
                                   C#m
And then, she really wants to give in

And then, uh-oh, uh-oh.
E
Thenthenthenthenthen....

Repeat three times. The song is so elementary! And so worthy of repeat listenings!

 ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-21  ::  dave

Sunday 15 August
Stolen Idea

Filed under Announcements

I’ve finished revisions on the taxidermy book, coming in at 87,226 words in 283 pages, plus end notes. So now what? Well, to fill the writing time in the mornings until another longer project came up, I’d planned to write missed-connections ads and post them to Craigslist. These would be mini essays, nonfiction in every way, based on real people I’d encounter in my day as a new southerner negotiating a new landscape.

I’d figured such a thing had probably been done before: lyric missed connections, it’s such an obvious romantic form. But who would have thought such a thing would be going on in Tuscaloosa?

We’ve got a top-ten MFA program here, so I should have thought. And I would have taken tacks different from this writer:

In your first life, you were foolish–running where you shouldn’t be running, crashing into trees, touching everything you saw. In your next life, you were more cautious–ducking when things were thrown your way, jumping over crevasses. In the lives after that you began to understand the world that you were placed in: that things, terrible things, can come at you from behind, from underneath. To be swept off one’s feet only to fall again from the sky, curled up in a ball, rotating. When I saw you, surrounded, you were aware of the names of things–you knew that when you jumped you could move back and forth in mid-air like a balloon, like wings, like spiraling.

Like, I would have tried to be more concrete and honest. But now? I’ll try nothing. The excitement of the project is all gone.

Or maybe not. Maybe I can help turn the otherwise negligible tuscaloosa.craigslist.org into a literary thunderdome. Game on, wistful connection-misser! We’ll see whose inbox fills more quickly with desperation.

UPDATE: Some of these are actually quite awesome.

3 comments  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2010-08-15  ::  dave