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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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The conceit of Lemmings is that we’re watching live footage of the Woodchuck Festival, Three Days of Peace, Love, and Death, where people have amassed on a farm in upstate New York to listen to music and kill themselves. It stars very young (and alive) versions of Christopher Guest, John Belushi, and Chevey [sic] Chase. [...]
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Another one. It still exists. For a time, the most popular post was about Roger Scruton’s “A Carnivore’s Credo”, which you are welcome to Google. Now, this most popular post, by which I mean the post that is read based on the greatest number of Google searches, by which I mean the relevant thing on [...]
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Watching the Ruth Powers episode of The Simpsons. When she picks Marge up for their night out, Marge says Ruth looks “Nice,” and Ruth insists that nothing about this night is going to be nice. Then she pops a tape into the stereo: it’s Lesley Gore’s “Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows”. Maybe the nicest song ever [...]
“And … if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time.” David Foster Wallace says this early on in the road trip David Lipsky took with [...]
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There’s time now that graduation is over and my grades have been turned in to begin reading in earnest again, and I’ve done so, with Michael Martone’s Michael Martone (a collection of quasi-fictive/quasi-nonfictive contributor’s notes about which I take back everything I’ve said over the past week regarding the demand for factual purity in writing; [...]
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Maybe this is all why I like taxidermy so much. No one would ever mistake a mounted animal for a live one, no matter how intently the taxidermist tucks his eyelids and paints his nostrils. No matter how lifelike the pose. I mean, which—to borrow a phrase—is the authentic animal? This: Or this?
I’ve been a fan of pro wrestling for a long time. Not the inspiredly named NES game pictured at right (about which I can only recall that The Amazon, part-snake, part-man, was unstoppable—at least when wielded by my friend Darrell), but the spectacle that’s now marketed as Sports Entertainment. I shouldn’t be a fan of [...]
There are more than two ways to look at falseness. One of my favorite documentary films is The Cruise made in 1998 by Bennett Miller, who went on in 2005 to make Capote. The Cruise is made perpetually watchable by its perpetually listenable subject: Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch, who guides Grey Line Bus Tours of Manhattan [...]
The current issue of Creative Nonfiction (a magazine out of Pittsburgh; I used to walk past its Walnut Street offices in the days I lived with girls in Shadyside) is in a new magazine format—laid out, graphically rich, pull-quote-heavy, 8ish” x 11ish”—that is welcome and good. I think the days of serial publications looking like [...]
There’s a new book I want. Well, it’s two books, the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. I like very much my Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, which has smart little editorials on words and their usage from Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Stephin Merritt, and other smart people whose opinions I don’t just [...]
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Given this holiday-break’s scheduling mayhems, I’m finding the art of Michael Johansson very alluring.
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C.B.’s own bad example of superimposing the past on the present was bad, he said, because it didn’t involve any kind of superimposition at all, merely an interjection. A “flash back” if you will: Ramona was bored by Baxter’s presentation in the Little Theater. What was he talking about? Lushness, or something. Outside, the grass [...]
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Has anyone seen the new Miller High Life ad campaign? Well: “new”. The one where some distributor/deliveryman wiseacre crashes upper-crust fetes at the horse track and I think a yacht? and kidnaps their untouched cases of Miller High Life to then redistribute / -deliver said cases to “common sense” folk? Putting aside the whole general [...]
It’s in the Nov 09 Harper’s (pictured, right). The pizzicato paragraph structure, the prose itself, the density of its Bay Area history. It’s incredible: In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers [...]
Does anyone remember how the original U.K. Office came to lead TV comedy in new directions through the force of its genius and novelty? And then the U.S. Office surprised everyone by actually being good through the strength of its performances and the idiosyncrasies of its secondary characters?* What happened? Jim Loves Pam swelled into [...]
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Did anyone catch the Magazine’s On Language column? Maybe you heard last week that its longtime columnist, William Safire, died. This week’s is written by Ammon Shea, who recently achieved fame in that newly named genre of annualist nonfiction by reading the OED over the course of a year. I didn’t make it a habit [...]
N & I have been ill-ish and have wanted these past few evenings to do nothing but lie on the sofa with chicken soup and the DVR, and so last night despite a backlog that built up while we were in N.C., and despite NBC’s Thursday night of premieres (shame on you, NBC, for holding [...]
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