There’s a thing in me that wants in writing essays to make every possible connection and to trace things to their deepest roots. It rarely ends well. The standard result is that I take a whole morning tracking leads on library databases and newspaper archives only to discover some old, repeated truth: There Is No [...]
in boardwalk empire, we see all kimds of Nucky situations. he,s getting people jobs, he,s romanicng women, he,s at parties, he,s getting work done. rothstein, our villain, is only seen in his offices working to cinvince lesser men of hi importance. it works very well. rothstein is spared the humanity of being a person with [...]
(From the Washington [Pa.] Observer-Reporter.) Raymond E. Myers, 93, of Coal Center, Clover Hill, died Saturday, January 14, 2012, in Consulate Health Care of North Strabane, Canonsburg. He was born June 5, 1918, in Claysville, son of the late H. Edwin and Gladys Fonner Myers. Mr. Myers retired as a truck driver for Peoples Natural [...]
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Doing some research on flowers, I found this: “The Marigold is emblematical of pain; place it on the head and it signifies trouble of mind; on the heart, the pangs of love; on the bosom, the disgusts of ennui.” How the heart is differentiated from the bosom is nothing I can figure out. Is it [...]
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Okay so it’s not an interview with Tiger Beat, but it felt like an interview with Tiger Beat, and it was very fun to do. Ani Smith over at the litblog We Who Are About To Die asked me a whole bunch of questions that I tried to answer in a way that was entertaining [...]
Peter Taylor has a story titled “A Wife of Nashville” where on the second page its narrator reveals this about her relationship with what she in the Depression-era South calls “Negroes”: “I don’t care anything about them any more than you do.” It’s such an amazing thing to say, about anything really. First is the [...]
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Here’s a classic one, from Didion’s “On Self Respect”, that I’m finding it important to reread these days: I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought [...]
I don’t know what it is that I do well, But whatever it may be, I know there is a libertarian who does it better than I do. I know there is a fraternity member who does it better than I do. I know there is a straight person who does it better than I [...]
Looking up “echt” today to see whether or not we’d assimilated it from the German, and thus whether or not I needed to, in my clunky plain text writing window, surround the word with asterisks. Mac’s built-in New Oxford American’s textual examples have been written by some kind of mad poet: echt |ekt| adjective authentic [...]
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You have no incentive to believe me, but as per my recent resolution to work on memorization here’s where I am so far with the Cheever passage. From memory: We admire decency and we despise death, but even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night, and perhaps the exhibitionist at the [...]
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Does Ben Marcus, educated at NYU and Brown, employed by Columbia, and published by Anchor, Vintage, and Harper’s, truly believe that he is an excluded experimentalist? Does he honestly believe that Jonathan Franzen, educated at Swarthmore, once employed by Harvard, and published by FSG and Harper’s, is somehow more elitist? Or is Franzen the populist? [...]
Yesterday, over on Facebook, I linked to a couple stories about corruption among the Republicans’ ranks. It was (is) the usual thing: state governor decides to weaken the collective strength that makes union workers work in unions, does this in the name of budget deficits, then gives an $80K+ job to a campaign donor’s son [...]
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From Vollman’s “Homeless in Sacramento” in the March ’11 Harper’s: I sometimes seek to categorize whatever freedom it is these people have that I do not, a freedom that I also do not want. I don’t know whether they wanted to work and couldn’t, or chose not to work, or needed or expected anything. For [...]
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Fun fact about vampires: their joints are made of socks full of quarters.
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Oh, good! No sex before marriage girls. It’s the Edwardian way.
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Amid all this senioritis, it’s nice to see Bella and Edward take a whole weekend to bone up for the big Econ final, and kudos to the producers for having the courage to set it unironically to a music montage. That’s just the sort of thing that’s going to help you excel in that science [...]
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All this white makeup. The near-nude boys of color. Paging Dr. Said.
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Some kids get all the best men’s wear. (From the pretty-great Fuck Yeah Men’s Wear blog.)
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