January 2012
26 posts
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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
45 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...
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“My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling...”
– - Janet Malcolm interviewed in The Paris Review
It’s only because I respect the guy who recommended this interview that I kept reading after that last sentence with its “I would immediately start composing a satiric portrait …” claptrap. I never say “claptrap.” But I...
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WatchWhen I linked last night to that New Yorker piece on Portlandia, I’d only ever seen the original teaser for the show. Thanks to the IFC website I’ve now seen more.
There is a scream in the video above. Or maybe a yell. I hope you find the yellscream as funny and apt as I did. Do. Present tense. It’s been making me smile all day. Intermittently.
If you’ve got 24 minutes...
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“In 2002, in Portland, Brownstein and her friend Miranda July, the writer,...”
– - from “Stumptown Girl,” Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker piece on Portlandia
(via Jesse Thorn)
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“I am not looking for a quota. I do not have a checklist. But I do want more. I...”
– - Roxane Gay, who adds “There are always so many prescriptions for writers about what they should or shouldn’t write about, about what they’re failing to write about, and about what they’re writing too much about. … Perhaps, we should offer prescriptions for readers, editors, and critics to...
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“Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with...”
– - from Amy Harmon’s “Navigating Love and Autism” on the front page of Monday’s NYT
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We tell strangers stories in order to fit.*
From Sheila Heti’s “The special duty of a Jewish Christmas baby” in The Globe and Mail:
“Oh! You’re a Christmas baby! You must get ripped off when it comes to presents, right?” Their eyes light up.
It’s a hard question to answer. The honest answer is, “I’m a Jew, I don’t celebrate Christmas,” but saying this always seems chastising, and the person who...
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Michael Lewis names an Icelandic architectural...
I’ve delighted in Michael Lewis’ journalism ever since encountering his blunt, funny, observant book about the roadkill candidates of the 1996 presidential election. If he’s written a mediocre book before or since, I haven’t found it. Today, I started Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. There’s so much I’d like to quote, but I’ll limit myself to...
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finance and flames and Lewis and Maclean
Today, while reading “California and Bust” by Michael Lewis, I reached a passage that felt familiar, a kind of echo that at first I couldn’t place but eventually traced back to 1992’s Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean. The echo amounts to this idea: If a big thing is incomprehensible, try to get much much closer and look for small things that explain it.
...
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“Many defenders of bookstores countered that by focusing on dollars and cents,...”
– - Farhad Manjoo
Slate ran this eight days after Manjoo’s “Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller,” which triggered many smart critiques like this one at towirr.tumblr.com. So I read the follow-up and wondered if Manjoo needed to go sleepless during all eight of those days and nights...
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the Too Many Books In The Kitchen year-end list is...
On Saturday, I praised the Too Many Books In The Kitchen year-end list but left myself the option of stomping back to the Internet and denouncing the list if the second half of The Fates Will Find Their Way turned to crap. The novel finished as strong as it started. So no stomping, no denunciations. I’ve now read two of the five books on the list. Both were terrific.
I’ve been talking...
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Murakami dialogue or especially icky porn script?...
“Grandfather says the first man I sleep with should be over thirty. He also says if sex drive builds up to a particular point, it affects your mental stability.”
“Yes, I heard this from your grandfather.”
“Do you think it’s true?”
“I’m afraid I’m not a biologist.”
“Are you well endowed?”
Answer revealed here....
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“… my visits chez Hitch were never quite as rollicking as they might have been -...”
– - Andrew Sullivan
The post, which is strong for several reasons, is essential for writers or aspiring writers who found themselves thirsty after reading this passage by Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter:
Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal...
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“And in Paris, I read so many great ones. Pitch Dark by Renata Adler, which I...”
– - from a year-in-reading post by Kelsey Ford, who had me at pain au chocolat.
And Paris.
And Gatsby.
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North Korea in Literature →
offonatangent:
I’ve had something of a latent obsession with North Korea for a while and feel compelled, in light of the death of Kim Jong-Il, to assemble a list of novels and nonfiction works that help further understand this oppressive dictatorship that was often stranger than satire. There isn’t a lot; feel…
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“… celui qui, souvent, a choisi son destin d’artiste parce qu’il se...”
– - Albert Camus, accepting his Nobel Prize on 12/10/1957
Hear part of his speech here.
Translation, as provided by nobelprize.org:
… often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless...
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“And so this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed...”
– - from Ian McEwan’s “Christopher Hitchens, Consummate Writer, Brilliant Friend” in the NYT
(via Hal Espen)
Also this:
Talking and dozing were all very well, but Christopher had only a few days to produce 3,000 words on Ian Ker’s biography of Chesterton.
Whenever people talk...
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“Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon...”
– - Glenn Greenwald in a worthwhile salon.com post built around this idea: “To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a...
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“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of...”
– - Christopher Hitchens, who died today at 62.
Those words echoed back when I read Christopher Buckley’s remembrance just now:
During the last hour I spent with Christopher, in the Critical Care Unit at M. D. Anderson, he struggled to read a thick volume of P. G. Wodehouse letters. He...
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LOLed to sleep by Nabokov
This passage from Speak, Memory caught me so completely off guard just now:
All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber …
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“This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding...”
– - Ta-Nehisi Coates in a post that soars above the mire of the material he’s critiquing — a Forbes piece called “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” by a self-described “middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background.”
I just noticed that this same...
“I’m not begrudging Alice Walton her inherited wealth. What I am begrudging are...”
– -from “Wal-Mart Heiress’s Art Museum a Moral Blight” by Jeffrey Goldberg, whose sleuthing has uncovered the world’s first cultural institution bankrolled by wealth gained at the expense of working people.
To me, it’s a perennial truth that Wal-Mart should treat workers much...
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how to hand your bank a sack of manure
From James Surowiecki’s “Financial Page” column in the current New Yorker:
Paying your debts is, as a rule, a good thing. But the double standard here is obvious and offensive. Homeowners are getting lambasted for doing what companies do on a regular basis. Walking away from real-estate obligations in particular is common in the corporate world, and real-estate developers are...
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“Tomorrow, we can expect to see not only the obvious faces—civil-society...”
– - Julia Ioffe reporting from Moscow for newyorker.com
I can’t be sure that my pulse actually spiked as I read Ioffe’s latest dispatch, but I did catch myself breathing far faster than makes sense for a person at rest.
One way or another, this is history happening. Ioffe is...
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“(Bookseller Philippe) Leconte is happy to criticise French President Nicolas...”
– - from “Booksellers cry foul at VAT hike on literature”
The French version of the same article inches us closer to knowing the correct pronunciation of “Barthes” by giving us one example of how to pronounce it wrong — Sarkozy’s way, which was...
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“The drawback of this form is that it basically requires plotlessness. It’s...”
– - Chris Bachelder on Abbott Awaits, which I enjoyed so so so so much and blogged about here and here.
I relate to interview Michael Hingston, who told Bachelder “I’m almost embarrassed to admit to how often, and how intensely, I related to Abbott’s struggles.”
- David Quigg, 12/7/2011
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“I would see him there with his friends and bodyguards. He wouldn’t notice...”
– - from Miranda July’s “Majesty” in No One Belongs Here More Than You
Same story: “His sons will all be beautiful and strapping royalty, and my daughters will all be middle-aged women working for a local nonprofit and spearheading their neighborhood earthquake-preparedness...
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“Unarmed men of fighting age were interrogated on the spot, and more than a...”
– - Mattathias Schwartz in a piece from the current New Yorker that’s, unfortunately, behind the magazine’s paywall.
To summarize, my government is sitting on a copy of a video that “could corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the Jamaican security forces massacred...
“Observers will not experience the blinding flashes, awesome fireballs and...”
– - from the astonishing time capsule that is “Citizens May View Atom-Bomb Tests” in the 2/9/1969 NYT (behind the paywall, sadly)
(via a reference to the article in WIlliam Zinsser’s Writing Places)
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“A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas does to the conventional Christmas movie...”
– Someone wrote this lede. Presumably, a Guardian editor read it, maybe swept away a superfluous comma.
Full disclosure, before I get too revved up here: I’ve been diagnosed as “not having a sense of humor.” Maybe it’s a function of my humorlessness that I don’t even...
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“Yesterday I was biking home from work and a woman opened her door into me. I...”
– - Nina MacLaughlin
Check your mirrors, people. Twice.
And while I’m being preachy, please please please wear a helmet. If you’ve read Nina’s blog or her journalism, you know how thankful we need to be that this is about a broken wrist instead of a broken brain.
Finally, four...
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“This was a shopping center that embodied the future for which El Salvador was...”
– - Joan Didion in 1983’s Salvador, describing a sickened epiphany from her reporting trip during El Salvador’s civil war.
“Terror,” as she wrote earlier in the book, “is the given of the place.” She elaborated:
A mother and her two sons hacked to death in their...