February 2011
92 posts
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January 2011
82 posts
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Suggested edits for "The Problem With Memoirs" in...
A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.
There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was...
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“‘I am wonderful to talk to. I’m a consummate professional. People...”
– - David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
I’m re-reading Infinite Jest, concurrent with more books than really makes sense, after listening to the 1996 KCRW interview with Wallace that I mentioned here a few days ago. Many things from the interview are worth thinking about and blogging...
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Julian Barnes reads Hemingway’s...
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“Smith, who is from Albuquerque and moved to New York in 2000, loves what he...”
– - Ben McGrath, from “Shoe Leather” in the 1/3/05 New Yorker
Finding this was an accident. McGrath’s current piece about the NFL’s “concussion crisis” made me want his e-mail or Twitter to ask him a question, so I Googled his name and found a Gawker post,...
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That Ian McEwan “Desert Island Discs” thing, whose very existence struck me as borderline implausible earlier, turns out to be a terrific interview with a smart, well-prepared BBC host. And there’s music. Listen here.
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In which a grown man with better things to do...
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Ian McEwan on BBC's "Desert Island Discs"... →
Google gave me this link after I read the end of Dawn Chan’s Paris Review Daily post about pianist Simone Dinnerstein:
… after recently reading Ian McEwan’s Saturday, she arrived at the theory that McEwan wrote his book in the form of the Goldberg Variations. “I was, like, counting the sections,” she says. “There are the episodes, and there’s a kind of peak, and then there’s a return...
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“My love affair with France began when Bob quit his job on Newsday to write his...”
– - Ina Caro, from her Tumblr Paris to the Past, marking the birthday of The Power Broker, a book that has never gone out of print in 37 years.
It’s worth remembering the rest of the slog to publication. This is from The Paris Review:
ROBERT CARO
When I first handed in the manuscript of The...
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“I had forgotten how thrilling a snow day is until my son started school, and as...”
– - Susan Orlean, from a 1/12/11 post that I missed until a few minutes ago.
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“… though I used to suffer greatly from the five bad Internet emotions...”
– - Macy Halford of newyorker.com’s The Book Bench blog
Her full post is here.
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KUOW — one of our local NPR stations —...
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I’m not interested in pitting books or writers against one another. Still, three-quarters of my way through A Visit From the Goon Squad, I’m having trouble understanding why Jennifer Egan did not appear on the cover of TIME last year.
Before anyone mistakes me for one of the evil ones who hate us because they hate our Freedom, please go read my 9/23/10 post, which (I’d...
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"the filial light under their banter"
Immediately after finishing Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence earlier this month, I wrote that the novel “kind of wrecked me.” Setting aside whether a person can be wrecked in a “kind of” kind of way, I’m glad to say that I’ve found a way to be much less wrecked.
Let’s pause. If you haven’t read The Age of Innocence, go read it. I hope it...
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Our spaniel barks when we tie him up outside shops. Our Lab mutt sometimes chews through her leash. Because of this, I rarely wait in the long weekend line that stands between me and my favorite pastry. I lucked out this afternoon. We walked by Cafe Besalu a bit after closing time. They were still selling pastries, and somehow they hadn’t run out of the almond croissants that usually...
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“A lot of my critics said: ‘Couldn’t put it down. You’ll read it in three hours!’...”
– - from James Ryerson’s new NYTBR essay, “The Philosophical Novel”
(via The Second Pass)
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“At the table, many glasses of wine were put in front of us. Then someone who had...”
– - Calvin Trillin in “The Red and the White”
The sly arrival of the last 14 words of that last sentence delivered the first out-loud laughter of my morning. Let’s just go ahead and give Trillin credit for what has been a great day.
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“She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce—the mere thought...”
– - Edith Wharton in House of Mirth
Snap.
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“Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise...”
– Reynolds Price (February 1, 1933 – January 20, 2011)
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halsf:
Telegraph Blogs
“Spare us the insufferable onslaught of Bob Dylan academia”
The seething of dyspeptic Brits never gets old.
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Wow. A taste:
The real fear must be that these new pages will be yet more diesel for the insufferable engine of Bob Dylan academia. English departments up and down the land already groan under the weight of students who, having noticed that...
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suicide, DFW, and my view from "down on the...
An old friend just told me that somebody we used to know committed suicide.
Every suicide I hear about sends me back to a passage from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It helps with what is, frankly, a struggle not to judge people who seem to have fled life and everyone who tried, however ineptly, to love them. Here, in case it can help anyone else, is what Wallace wrote a dozen years...
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P.J. O’Rourke, Amy Tan, Elizabeth Spencer,...
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