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 was [...]
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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 dumb [...]
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 that [...]
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 this [...]
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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 of [...]
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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This weekend N & I were in Oak Island, N.C., where my sister got married. I did the ceremony. You may as well prepare for a long post on all this. It was, maybe, a once-in-a-lifetime event: getting to the write the words that people listen to while they watch a couple ceremonially join their [...]
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Far be it from me to hate on a movie filmed not just in Pittsburgh, but mostly in ever-beloved Pgh theme park Kennywood (that’s the Steel Phantom, above, which is now I think called something else, which for a time had either the longest drop or the most vertical drop or the fastest maximum speed [...]
Have you heard of this movie? One of Malkovich’s recent low-budget choices that seem not to get much pre-video-release attention despite his always great performances therein. This one stars Tom Hanks’s son as a guy who decides for no clear reason (he was unhappy; I guess it’s enough) to leave law school and get a [...]
A few things I love:
I. Fred Armisen
I confess to liking him ever since Fericito started showing up on SNL’s Weekend Update, because while the whole “Ay, Dios mio!” thing may be overly simplistic it just about killed me every time. Now I just like him because of how smart his stuff is. Like Nicholas Fehn, [...]
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I know it’s gauche to gush, as a small-press publisher, about the books you publish; best to let their brilliance stand representatively alone. But I want to take a minute to talk about how excited we were when Hagel’s story came to The Cupboard’s inbox, and to try to get you to understand why you [...]
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I. Phillip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass
First, the significance of the titular object in this book is unclear, compared to the total mind-blowing weight of the Golden Compass and the Subtle Knife in the first two books. So this object enables the woman who is meant, in theory, to be the serpent of this revisionistic Eden [...]
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Everyone knows allegorical readings of anything written after 1500 are dull and limiting. They do the opposite of what reading is all about doing, which is to answer questions about a text with further questions, and with mental and associative play. Allegorical readings try to answer every question and they can’t help but look foolish [...]
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Some things:
I. His Dark Materials
It’s a trilogy that turns Harry-Potter grads into atheists, have you heard? The overarc(h)ing narrative is the quest to kill God. Here’s the thing: it’s so much more godly and Christian than any other book I’ve written. Even if God dies (spoiler alert) in a terribly anticlimactic scene, all three books [...]
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It’s called “Summer Thrillers” and I think it just launched today. Maybe last week. For about a year now I’ve paid for (at a reduced introductory rate that lasted 13 weeks, at which time I had to call the Times up to pretend to cancel my subscription so that they’d offer me the reduce rate [...]
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Q: Why was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button so dull?
A (with spoilers): I can’t quite figure it out. It has to have had something to do with B.B.’s growing younger and not older, and that like while we know it won’t be easy for him, it makes his life get progressively easier, right? So [...]
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Favorite questions from last night’s all-edition Trivial Pursuit Game:
From All-Star Sports: “Which of baseball’s Niekro brothers sported the higher uniform number in 1983?”
From Young Players: “What TV game show gives away dream houses?
Answers after the jump.
Son of Rambow!
Boy on the left is Will, the only son in a family that’s part of some fundamentalist “Brethren” that disables him from movies, TV, breathing, etc. Will’s dad died some years back. He draws all over his Bible, like even over all the words, and he also works on a mural that runs [...]
