May 2013
5 posts
April 2013
5 posts
““The man in the cowboy hat — he saved Jeff’s life,” Ms. Bauman said. Mr....”
– www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/us/in-grisly-image-a-father-sees-his-son.html?smid=tw-share
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March 2013
2 posts
“I think my answer might be a little bit controversial — I think almost nothing...”
– Emma Straub on first drafts, from The Millions. (via thepenguinpress)
9 tags
using shoelaces to tie F. Scott Fitzgerald and...
During a recent lunchtime run, roughly 15/16th of my brain was properly intent on my Kindle’s text-to-speech voice, which was reading me F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. The other 1/16th ran loose, free-associating, stringing three beads together to make a weird, little necklace:
Bead 1: Fitzgerald’s description of his main character’s Princeton days.
Bead 2:...
February 2013
3 posts
January 2013
5 posts
4 tags
WatchAlmost nothing makes me love the place I live more than the times when I find people coming together to do something both unnecessary and entirely worthwhile. I had that experience yesterday while watching singers rehearse at Frye Art Museum. See my shaky video above.
The actual performance is today from 1:30 to 2.
What will they be singing? This is from the Frye’s website:
The...
December 2012
9 posts
8 tags
"appetite, experience, memory"
Thomas Beller, in what I’m coming to recognize as his characteristically companionable and elegant way, has written a new post for newyorker.com called “Saying Goodbye to Now.” He confesses to a strange parental urge I recognize in myself — “as she was airborne, my hand twitched and slapped my pocket, in the dim hope that I could locate my camera, pull it out, and shoot...
November 2012
16 posts
2 tags
I continue to time-waste on ancient Latrell...
I didn’t manage to sleep away my overnight fascination with this week’s marriage-equality decision in Nevada, specifically District Judge Robert C. Jones invoking the precedent of the Ninth Circuit’s 2001 decision in the case that followed Latrell Sprewell’s punishment for choking his NBA coach. Having now bothered to read Sprewell v. Golden State Warriors, I’m even...
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Jessica Valenti just reminded me of Jennifer Egan
Sometimes ideas, without being identical, can essentially rhyme.
Jessica Valenti posted this today:
When Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg gave a TED talk in 2010, one of the issues she talked about—and later expounded on in her 2011 commencement speech at Barnard—was likability. “Success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women,” she said. This isn’t news...
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Niccolò Tucci, futurist
I am here tonight to (not so very dogmatically) assert that this particular webcam trained on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris is predicted by the little-boy narrator in “Terror and Grief,” Niccolò Tucci’s short story in the 11/15/1958 New Yorker. The relevant sentences:
Just as we always looked for our parents in the post cards they sent us, so we looked for them in the picture...
8 tags
remembering the other woman and her family
During his first press conference since winning reelection, President Obama said this:
By his own assessment, (Petraeus) did not meet the standards that he felt were necessary as the director of CIA with respect to this personal matter that he is now dealing with with his family and with his wife. And it’s on that basis that he tendered his resignation, and it’s on that basis that I accepted it....
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“Four years ago, (Philip Roth) told me that he was interested in trying to break...”
– - from David Remnick’s “Philip Roth Says Enough.”
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“Looking as if he’d just eaten a urinal cake, and bearing a striking resemblance...”
– - from Andrew O’Hehir’s “Fox News’ dark night of the soul”
New policy: I will blog any reference to someone looking as if he’s “just eaten a urinal cake.” The policy will be revoked if I see an actual person eat an actual urinal cake and that person proves...
10 tags
“M: Haha I was reading your book intensely for days and people started asking,...”
– - Mary Borkowski interviews Kate Zambreno about Heroines in The New Inquiry.
Zambreno, whose work and ideas I only know since reading a Believer interview this morning, also told Borkowski this:
… when Henry James or Scott Fitzgerald writes their Daisies, it’s not taboo. They are not judged for...
October 2012
25 posts
8 tags
"urinating in a beer glass and dropping it on the...
Sarah Lyall’s “John Terry: Chelsea’s Dark Knight” in the Sunday NYT leaves me wondering how one of “the canniest, toughest and best defenders in English soccer” would answer a prospective employer’s what-are-your-biggest-weaknesses question:
There was the time he was fined £60 (about $97) after leaving his Bentley in a parking spot for the disabled while he...
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“Writing (sex scenes) feels like a test to see how well I know the characters....”
– - Saeed Jones
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fathers and vanished sons
Here’s the passage of Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue that made me tweet this and get the deep and near-instant satisfaction of this:
“Distractions.”
“Yeah.”
“Getting off your main focus.”
“That’s right.”
“Which is what, again?”
“Huh,” Archy said. “Hey, Mr. Jones? What’s wrong?”
...
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“He’s attractive enough, in a small-market weatherman kind of way.”
– - Elizabeth Crane reading from the opening of her novel on the Skylight Books podcast. 