From “Statements and Poems” in the collection of poet William Stafford’s writing on writing, Crossing Unmarked Snow Each [essay] is a miracle that has been invited to happen. But these words, after they come, you look at what’s there. Why these? Why not some calculated careful contenders? Because these chosen ones must survive as they [...]
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From Sam Anderson’s email profile of Anne Carson in the Times: I was e-mailing with Carson on the occasion of the publication of her new book, “Red Doc >” (that angle-bracket is, yes, a part of the title: “Red Doc >” was the default name Carson’s word-processing program gave to the file, and she stuck [...]
From this piece in the Guardian on the joys of anthropological writing, written by Will Self, who is becoming every time I read or read about him my total literary crush. I probably reread Lopez’s book about every couple of years. Arctic Dreams is a more or less perfect example of a tendency in my [...]
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From Parul Sehgal’s New York Times review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s recent essay collection, among others’: Susan Sontag suffers from the same hamartia [as Julie Taymor, whose Spider-Man musical was a success, Mendelsohn apparently argues, not despite her own aesthetic betrayal, but because of it], according to Mendelsohn, who is endlessly fascinated by how the lack [...]
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From this psychology textbook I’m waist deep in right now[1], itself citing Bransford, J.D. and Johnson, M.K.’s 1972 paper on contextual prerequisites for understanding: The procedure is actually quite simple. First arrange things into different bundles depending on makeup. Don’t do too much at once. In the short run this may not seem important, however, [...]
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Hot damn it’s a big night for good reading. From Garry Wills’s excoriation of loser Mitt Romney in the New York Review of Books: Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to condemn 47 percent of Americans less [...]
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This one’s three paragraphs, the ones that end Dan Chiasson‘s great review in the Novermber 2012 Harper’s of the Dictionary of American Regional English, and of slang more generally. It’s a classic approach to an ending—find a way to sub-/invert the fundamental idea lying beneath your subject—but what makes these grafs very good is how [...]
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This one’s from Acocella’s review of Banville’s new one in the 8 October 2012 New Yorker. The paragraph turns to Banville’s ickiness in terms of personality, which isn’t why I think it’s very good. Banville can be whoever the hell he wants if he continues writing such sentences as “Remember what April was like when [...]
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Yes, Harper’s, while edited by a woman, will never win any VIDA-based gender-balance-on-the-contents-page awards. Really, probably never. It’s maybe worse than the New Yorker in this regard. Of 23 credited names in the October 2012 issue, 3 are women’s. Even the Cox-Rathvons, 50 percent female, seem to have been absent from the Puzzle page. But [...]
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From David Samuels’s profile of Obama in this month’s Harper’s: He is living rent-free in an building historically occupied strictly by whites, fighting his battles and taking their money, yet in all this he is invisible—and he knows it. He is invisible because people refuse to see him. What they see is a reflection, in [...]
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This is a standalone section from Claire Hoffman’s outstanding profile of Seth MacFarlane in the June 18 2012 New Yorker: On a Monday night last summer, MacFarlane jogged onto the stage of a jazz club called Vibrato, in Bel-Air. He had on a slim-cut Gucci suit and clutched a highball glass full of whiskey. Without [...]
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From John Seabrook’s “The Song Machine”, an excellent dissection of contemporary pop’s songwriting process in the 26 March 2012 New Yorker: Top Forty radio was invented by Todd Storz and Bill Stewart, the operator and program director, respectively, of KOWH, an AM station in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early fifties. Like most music programmers of [...]
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From Peter Schjeldahl’s* review of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings currently on exhibit at Gagosian galleries around the world, in the 23 January New Yorker: Duchamp remarked that art is created partly by its maker and partly by its audience. Hirst dumps pretty much the entire transaction into the audience’s lap. The result is art in [...]
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From Alan Hollinghurst’s new one, The Stranger’s Child: She could really play, couldn’t she?—that was Paul [Bryant (!!!)]‘s first feeling. He looked around hastily at the others, with a bashful grin on his face. Was it Chopin? He saw them all deciding, staring at each other, frowning or nodding, some leaning to whisper. There was [...]
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From Elif Batuman’s piece in the 19/26 Dec 2011 New Yorker on Göbekli Tepe, the oldest man-made thing in the world: After my last afternoon at Göbekli Tepe, I decided to devote the rest of the day to the other Urfa pilgrimage—the Abraham one [Urfa claims to house a cave where Abraham was born]. I [...]
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From Adam Kirsch’s review of recent books on H.G. Wells in the 17 October 2011 New Yorker: Wells, who was in the audience at [Henry] James’s fiasco [with Guy Domville] and learned from the experience, had his own, considerably more chipper approach to the literary life. “It scarcely needs criticism to bring home to me [...]
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From Peter Hessler’s bit on a small-town druggist in the 26 September 2011 New Yorker: In his will, [former customer] Mr. Brick left more than half a million dollars in cash and stock to the local druggist[, Don]. After taxes and other expenses, it came to more than three hundred thousand dollars, which was almost [...]
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Two of them, this time. Pretend there’s no paragraph break. From Adam Gopnik’s review of declinist literature in the 12 September 2011 New Yorker: Despite their title [of That Used to Be Us], the authors [Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum] seem, for instance, determined to avoid the obvious point that one American who shares their [...]
“‘Getting kind of’?” (This is you talking back at me.) “Try ‘always has been’.” I know, right? It’s like an advertisement for my own dull self-importance. I should spend more time dishing, or endorsing products and various artworks. But I consume artworks years after the Internet does, because I am cheap. Did you see Source [...]
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From Mike Hale’s review of “Friends with Benefits”—not the movie everyone’s heard of, but the Friday-evening NBC sitcom that just premiered and has a shelf life of most leafy greens (my emphasis): Focusing on a five-member ensemble — three bumbling, grating men and the two attractive, relentlessly energetic, sexually pliable women, who mysteriously choose to [...]
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