February 2012
60 posts
4 tags
According to a new study …
There is now anecdotal evidence to suggest that the final five words of this passage from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, when read aloud to an 8-year-old boy, will cause the boy to experience smoothie-snarfing, booger-expelling laughter:
The reason twenty-nine feet is such a common length for RVs, I presume, is that once a vehicle gets much longer, you need a special permit to drive...
4 tags
4 tags
2 tags
“The creepy thing to call this is networking, but I much prefer to call it...”
– - from Jesse Thorn’s “Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success”
“Make Your Thing” would be the greatest thing I’d read all day if I hadn’t read it yesterday.
Public radio legend Jay Allison wrote the...
5 tags
8 tags
“THIS SHOULD BE A QUOTE — SPECIFICALLY, THE MOST MEMORABLE PASSAGE I HEARD...”
–
- Me
8 tags
2 tags
8 tags
“If you ever think you’re about to get murdered—like seriously...”
– - Brad Listi, concluding a story he told as part of the introduction to his interview with Cheryl Strayed.
Strayed, a novelist and memoirist who recently revealed herself to be the “Dear Sugar” advice columnist, said something during the interview that I agree with completely:
I just...
5 tags
5 tags
"if they can't talk, they're out"
I borrowed an Elmore Leonard novel from the library. This edition includes a transcript of the time in 1998 when Martin Amis interviewed Leonard onstage in Beverly Hills. I’ve had the experience Leonard described in the second italicized paragraph below.
Once.
It might be the best thing that’s ever happened to me while writing. To Leonard’s quote:
… I begin writing it and one...
4 tags
“In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper,...”
– - from “The myth of the eight-hour sleep”
(via Andrew Sullivan)
2 tags
7 tags
"music that toyed with feelings of claustrophobic...
Another terrific Motherless Brooklyn passage:
I don’t know whether The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is Tourettic or obsessive-compulsive in his human life, but I know for certain he is deeply so in the life of his work. Music had never made much of an impression on me until the day in 1986 when, sitting in the passenger seat of Minna’s Cadillac, I first heard the single...
4 tags
3 tags
“In response, French forwarded me his essay, “Tinkerty-Tonk!” from the October...”
– - from Paul Wachter’s “The Tyranny of Footnotes” on the Paris Review blog
As the sort of guy who (under rare circumstances) might get curious enough to spend hours trying to wrangle an inter-library loan of the Spring 1977 issue of the presumably nonexistent Bishkek Dot, I find...
4 tags
"the waking brain races"
Until last month, I assumed — pretty reasonably, I think — that fatigue obviously would be the worst part of insomnia. It isn’t; not for me, at least. Having now made it to the other side of my life’s first real plague of sleeplessness, I’ve learned insomnia’s worst toll: It sandblasted my sanity. Only temporarily. But still. Enough. Enough to torment. Enough to...
5 tags
"forever wincing, reconsidering"
From the same John Jeremiah Sullivan essay I reblogged last night:
It’s this quality, of being inwardly divided, that risks getting flattened and written out of (David Foster) Wallace’s story by his postmortem idolization, which would make of him a dispenser of wisdom. We should guard against that. We’ll lose the most essential Wallace, the one that is forever wincing,...
4 tags
“Imagine walking into a place, say a mega-chain copy shop in a strip mall. It’s...”
– John Jeremiah Sullivan, on David Foster Wallace (via sometimesagreatnotion)
3 tags
10 tags
General Tso and The Good Soldier
Today my friend Charlie read me a review he posted on Yelp. Two things made the review notable:
1) Charlie used the words “wasn’t real chicken, though none of us could determine exactly what it was.”
2) Charlie steered diners to his three favorite Chinese restaurants in Seattle. One is right here in Ballard. I’ve never been to it. I haven’t considered going....
1 tag
Watch
5 tags
5 tags
8 tags
6 tags
playing catch with ideas
One of my best childhood memories comes from just a minute or so after our Cubs managed to miss the World Series by losing their third straight game to Steve Garvey and the San Diego Padres. Twelve years old and mute with dejection, I grabbed my mitt and walked down our driveway to the cul-de-sac. My friend Tim, by no prior arrangement, did the same. He had a baseball. Or I had a baseball. We said...
5 tags
“As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion—whether...”
– - some solid advice from Rules Of Civility by Amor Towles.
I finished listening to an excellent audiobook version of the novel tonight.
(Note: For now, at least, I’ve stopped posting any links that put money in my pocket. I’m squeamish about the appearance of a conflict of interest....
2 tags
“Mean as much as you can in the fewest syllables; that is the art of writing.”
– - Mark Tredinnick
9 tags
“—Ugh. Tinker brought home all these novels by women as if that’s what I...”
– - from Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
It’s intriguing, this idea that we can see writing fresh — maybe even see it more truly for what it is — by reading it out of context. In Googling my way to find out which Hemingway novel the character of Katey is reading, I ended up reading...
3 tags
WatchEye-catching sight from yesterday: fire-truck lights playing on an exterior wall of the Green Lake Community Center here in Seattle.
4 tags
“—But I’m here for an interview.
I fumbled and dropped my book. Mr....”
– - from Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
Do real, unrehearsed human beings say stuff like that last bit of dialogue? I don’t know, and I confess that I don’t care. I nod along with what’s expressed: this notion that “the way we’ve thought about something, or...
3 tags
7 tags
1 tag
2 tags
6 tags
“I’ve been advised to employ tropes or devices of “women’s ways of knowing” that...”
– - Lidia Yuknavitch, talking with Vanessa Veselka as part of “a conversation for The Believer on the subject of writing violent female characters.”
5 tags
“I finished my own graduation exams a year later and went to see for myself the...”
– - Nell Boeschenstein
2 tags
“WAITER: Would you guys like to double down on your meal?
FRED: I don’t...”
– - from a Portlandia skit that, while not exactly being the actual highlight of my weekend, has played a role in several of this weekend’s better moments.
3 tags
2 tags
12 tags
Here, by my laptop, I had what I can only describe...
This morning my dad sent me a link to these photos of people skating on Amsterdam’s frozen canals yesterday, and my mind flashed to this passage from Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland:
There, by the Hudson, I had what I can only describe as a flashback. What came to me was a water-filled ditch near my childhood home covered in new ice, which is black. The ditch—a sloot, as we...
3 tags
4 tags
“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...
3 tags
1 tag
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.
4 tags
7 tags
“We’ve gone many months, and once nearly a decade, in the dark, not knowing...”
–
- 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...
6 tags
“… if you want to drive a person mad in a fame culture, offer him only a little...”
–
- from Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence
7 tags
“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