February 2012
18 posts
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“My writing isn’t experimental. When I’ve nodded to the reportoire of...”
– - a quote from Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence that I like in spite of being so thoroughly “ill-informed about a century including Oulipo” that I don’t think I’d ever seen the word?/surname?/floor wax?/dessert topping? “Oulipo.”
Wikipedia’s list...
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Book pitch I may have made here before and/or may...
I will spend one year reading nothing but books written by people who wrung a book deal out of their decision to do a particular thing for one year.
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“We’ve gone many months, and once nearly a decade, in the dark, not knowing...”
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- from Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence
The whole setup to that passage is also great. Here’s part of it:
I’m still looking for the crazy wherever I can find it. It’s hard enough to kick against the plastic Victorianisms of our culture, the social sarcophagus...
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“… if you want to drive a person mad in a fame culture, offer him only a little...”
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- from Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence
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“Your parents are the first memo to come across your desk, on a page so large you...”
– - from Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence
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My restraint and good taste will now prevent me...
More from Rilke’s Letters To A Young Poet:
So, dear Mr. Kappus, you shouldn’t be dismayed if your sadness rises up in front of you, greater than any you have ever seen before; or if a disquiet plays over your hands and over all your doings like light and cloud-shadow. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand;...
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“Affenlight didn’t hate David, not anymore. Not that he had much regard for...”
– - from Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding
I wrote a paragraph explaining why this passage speaks to me during this phase of my life, but it’s clumsily, uncomfortably personal. So I followed the advice you’ll read later in this post: I axed it.
Meanwhile, to distract you from my...
January 2012
25 posts
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“Part of Affenlight felt peeved at Owen for interrupting or dismissing his bliss....”
– - from Chad Harbach’s novel, The Art of Fielding
I’m with Affenlight. Whether or not you’re hiding behind someone else’s words, reading to a loved one is bliss. So is being read to.
And when I say “a loved one,” I mean that broadly, to include everyone from your...
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““You shouldn’t eat so much flour,” Owen said, taking a single...”
– - from Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding
A little like Owen, I have nothing but maybes to explain why I like this passage. Maybe it’s because I’ve stubbed my toe more than once on those “In practice, if not in theory” tree roots that lurk just below the tips of the...
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“OKAY, BACK UP, WE CAN’T LET THIS PASS. YOU LIVED IN A TREE HOUSE?
The...”
– - from an interview with Jennifer Brook, who I nominate to succeed the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man In The World” guy.
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“It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there...”
– - from “So Much Happiness” by Naomi Shihab Nye
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“Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are...”
– - Nabokov, writing as John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., in the foreword to Lolita
I love this sentence. There’s an Updike quote that often shows up on the covers of Nabokov books: “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.”
John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. does not write...
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“A new report on why children in day care are sedentary suggests that it’s not...”
– Parents are the biggest obstacle to letting kids play, says study in Pediatrics - On Parenting - The Washington Post (via npr)
This is why I just let Bean crawl around. If he wants to eat the rocking chair legs, who am I to say he shouldn’t? He’s learning about those legs!
(via italicsmine)
...
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“So my notion of poking fun at (Ayn Rand) evolved into an idea for a more...”
– - from Seattle novelist Matt Ruff’s 2010 speech at the Calvin College Festival of Faith & Writing, which I found tonight by a strange route.
Ruff’s words fit well with my favorite bit of that Camus quote I blogged in December: “true artists scorn nothing; they oblige...
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“The Passage of Power by Robert Caro: The much-anticipated fourth volume of...”
– - from themillions.com’s “Most Anticipated: The Great 2012 Book Preview”
Both hands shot up to the sides of my head when I read this. Amazement. Joy.
Caro has shouldered such a monumental task. Sometimes I worry that no single human can complete it. Considering that I...
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"unshackle the hardworking majority"
There’s an obvious and reasonable objection to my push for reporters to stay out of the newsroom and phone their sources while strolling around town: Some reporters might make the calls from bed or from a barstool. This is both literally true and functionally false. Cheaters will game any system, but honest people can’t thrive while handcuffed.
I like Daniel Pink on this subject. Here...
“When I think back to my old self, I think of an entirely different person, not...”
– - Alina Simone in the NYT
(via Austin Kleon)
Until five minutes ago, I knew nothing of Simone’s music. I found this, though, and like it, which would tend to suggest that songs in Russian still exert a mysterious gravitational pull on me.
If I’m wrong about it being Russian,...
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“Later, reporting for the Wall Street Journal, I had an editor named Paul...”
– - from guest editor Geraldine Brooks’ introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011
1) It’s Nexis; not Nexus.
2) Sometimes the story is on Nexis.
3) George Strait’s “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” is just sitting there waiting for some newsroom troubadour to...
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“I couldn’t put it down, and when someone advertised the other seven titles...”
– - from guest editor Geraldine Brooks’ introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2011
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“Little makes me more uncomfortable than watching a new writer attempt a...”
– - Heidi Pitlor, series editor for The Best American Short Stories
The best part of trusting your readers to guess that a barista is in a café is that you can write “the leggy barista with luminous cleavage” instead of “the leggy barista in a café with luminous cleavage,”...
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“I first met Montaigne when, some twenty years ago in Budapest, I was so...”
– - from the acknowledgments section of Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
I owe my own awareness — and unlikely devouring — of Bakewell’s book to this episode of the BBC’s “Great Lives”...
December 2011
46 posts
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“Perhaps no story from the New Yorker this year was more under-recognized than...”
– - from Smithsonian associate web editor Brian Wolly’s “My Top 5 Longreads of 2011”
Can’t believe I forgot about this story.
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“It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the...”
– - John Updike in the 10/22/1960 New Yorker*, witnessing Ted Williams’ final at-bat
A bit further on, Updike writes something that Aaron Carroll’s post about endings surely primed me to notice:
Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have...