November 2009
56 posts
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Methods To The Madness
The WSJ Online asks eleven (why eleven?) novelists a question I’d never ask: how do you write?
The answers will not tell you, as the headline states, “how to write a great novel.” The answers are endearingly mundane: font size, preferred brand of pen, location, time of day, background music.
The novelists? Nicholson Baker, Orhan Pamuk, Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje,...
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Avast, The White Whale!
WNYC’s Studio 360 reprizes its Peabody Award-winning exploration of Meville’s epic and its influence on writers and artists including Led Zeppelin, Tony Kushner and Laurie Anderson, whose opera Songs And Stories From Moby-Dick contains this brilliance:
The Pequod vs. The Enterprise
(Tumblrers, click on the post; the audio player doesn’t show up in the Tumblr dashboard)
...
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Ode to Interstate 84
A text message poem composed at eighty sixty-five miles an hour*
*not really
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icanseenewyorkcityfrommyhouse:
Arlo Guthrie -...
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“There are political consequences to remembering things that never happened and...”
– Ariel Levy, reviewing histories of feminism by Gail Collins and Leslie Sanchez in The New Yorker
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Caught In Translation →
The Wall Street Journal (!) interviews translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I read their wonderful edition of Chekhov’s Stories this fall; nice to read about their method:
Ms. Volokhonsky provides the first translation of each work, with running commentary on the author’s style; her husband works from that draft to render his own version. They then confer and work on...
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If You Pay For Our Aspirational Package
Small Beer Press satirizes Harlequin’s new imprint vanity press by announcing Easymark Books:
We’re not interested in monetizing the slushpile, we’re interested in getting you to pay to publish it for our profit!*
* This is an example of an unproofed sentence with a comma splice. If you pay for our Aspirational package (Usually $5,999, for this month only $1,995!) we will proof your book....
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Woolf, Austen, Palin, Abrams, Gaga And Me
Champagne Candy posted this page from the manuscript of Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s handwriting is thin, tight and slanty, somewhat as I imagine the “spidery hand” Tolkien gives to Bilbo Baggins.
The page is one of several in the British Library’s marvelous online manuscript exhibition, which includes drafts by Pope, Blake, Dickens, Wilfred Owens, and this delightful History of England by a...
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Primary Sources
Bill Moyers—whose excellent Journal ends its run on April 30—traces the escalation of the war in Vietnam through phone conversations between LBJ, his advisors and members of Congress.
What strikes me most in listening is how frequently, especially in 1964-65, when the die was being cast, the Wise Men and former Best and Brightest explain recommendations in terms of a need to show: to show the...
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Who Calls From Ohio?
Finally she tweezed out the worst of them. Eyebrows—why did one side go gray—not even gray; white—before the other, and why were the white hairs twice as long? In her bathroom you had to stand bent with your head tilted even to seem them. But if you bent you saw them all right.
The phone rang. Her ringer sounded like a doctor’s office. Like she was getting called into a doctor’s office. The...
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The Trouble With Tribbles...
…is that apparently they’re sold out:
The Post would’ve run with the pun for its headline, but the Times uncorks some fine snark with the lede—not “plush” hamsters, or “stuffed,” but “fake.” And is anything improved out of context and inside spheres?
It gets better:
The five different battery-operated hamsters—Chunk, PipSqueak, Mr....
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"A Bad Generation Of Men"
I’m reading Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From at the moment, so this is 180-proof bliss: Stephen King gives Carol Sklenicka’s new biography one of those reviews that’s more like a summary. The review also covers a new, “sublimely portable and long-overdue Raymond Carver: Collected Stories.”
Pour yourself a drink and kick back for an alcohol-soaked read,...
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Deconstruction Of The Fable
The Awl points out this from The Washington Independent, in which Sarah Palin seems be forecasting—or urging—the Apocalypse:
“I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama...
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“You may not feel a magical reduction of stress after your first jog… But...”
– Gretchen Reynolds reports on new research showing how exercise decreases anxiety.
Go read, then get outside and run!
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Please Hold The Shamans
It’s evidently BSD White Male Novelist day here at Sarah Wrote That.
From a shortlist including John Banville, Nick Cave, Amos Oz, and Sanjida O’Connell (the only woman of the ten shortlisted writers), Philip Roth has won the Literary Review’s 2009 Bad Sex Award for The Humbling, “a story of the seduction of a lesbian by an aging stage actor, which includes an eye-watering...
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Cybersteampunk... by E.M. Forster
io9:
This year is the 100th anniversary of the first story about the Internet going wrong. E.M. Forster (better known for A Passage To India) wrote “The Machine Stops” in 1909, and you can read it online.
In “The Machine Stops,” almost everybody lives underground, and… all of your needs are met by the Machine, which is a kind of master computer that supplies beds,...
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“[Fitzgerald] had started out thinking he had genius and a special destiny…...”
– Arthur Krystal, on F. Scott Fitzgerald in The New Yorker (abstract available here; subscription required to view the whole article)
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The Bechdel Test
girlsbooksfoodartlove:
“Slumdog Millionaire? Fail. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button? Fail. Juno passes. Terminator Salvation fails. Coraline ? Pass. The Dark Knight ? Epic fail. Watchmen fails (although the original graphic novel doesn’t). Star Trek passes, but only just. In fact, very few films pass the Bechdel test. Which is depressing, because the standards of the test are not...
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Incompetence and Mendacity
The Awl:
This, from the Times review of John Farmer’s The Ground Truth:The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11, should be repeated as many times as necessary: “…both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, Farmer says, provided palpably false versions that touted the military’s readiness to shoot down United 93 before it could hit...
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Upside of knowing CSS: you will be invaluable to your employer.
Downside of knowing CSS: you will be invaluable for knowing CSS.
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Sales Pitch
We took the idea to Cleveland, and we took it to Saint Louis. In Chicago Ken said he had to take me to Millennium Park—no one could leave Chicago without going to Millennium Park.
At the corner of Michigan Avenue, five or six men had set up folding chairs. It was windy; across the street to our right was a bridge, and two stories down, a river. Office towers rippled in the water, green and...
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The Best Euro-thriller Music Ever...
…adapted by an Australian composer to sell a Ford Lincoln. Ironic concept for an ad, concocting a glossily Euro confection and tagging it as “American luxury.” But it sure is purty. Go, global capitalism! (Tumblrers, click to see the video).
If anyone finds this version of Rob D’s “Clubbed To Death” as a single, without Dylan McDermott’s...
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Reimagined Quaintness →
The Times Streetscapes column is unfailingly fascinating, and I always marvel at how little I know areas where I’ve lived and worked for years. Sunday the column looks at Greenwich Village houses fancifully renovated in the early 1900s:
[T]he most striking makeover is surely that at 114 Waverly, a brownstone rebuilt in 1920 by a portrait painter, Murray Bewley, for himself.
Bewley’s...
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Mary HK Choi Is Comic-Writing Genius →
Read her 2012 review or this and try to keep a straight face.
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“Glock Nines,” Ratatat feat. T.I. and...
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“It was kind of a ‘you stuck your chocolate in my peanut butter!’ moment…”
– John Bemelmans Marciano
The origin of ‘frisbee,’ and other linguistic fortuities.
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A Message from the Gyre →
icanseenewyorkcityfrommyhouse: nybooks:
An albatross chick on Midway Atoll, raised on plastic that its parents mistook for food from the polluted Pacific Ocean, September 2009; photographs by Chris Jordan
Read More
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The Eleventh Hour Of The Eleventh Day
In the United States we have Veteran’s rather than Armistice Day. According to Wikipedia:
In 1953, an Emporia, Kansas shoe store owner named Al King had the idea to expand Armistice Day to celebrate all veterans, not just those who served in World War I. King had been actively involved with the American War Dads during World War II. He began a campaign to turn Armistice Day into...
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Color Me 1977
Why, New York State, why would you hearken back to the colors of the 1970s/early 80s? This was not a good time for you. Yes, it brought the birth of rap and disco, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” A Chorus Line, the Ramones, Lou Reed, CBGB, Governor Carey saying he’d drink a glass of PCBs; an urban night crawler’s playground of derelict piers along the West side,...
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“I begin by producing a simple neither/nor sentence. “Neither his age nor his...”
– Stanley Fish
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Elliott Smith – The Complete Live Covers →
booksarebetterthanboys:
51 tracks of Elliott Smith playing covers.
My ears are smiling.
(via heymikewaskom:gloriaj)
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Huh.
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“So Gentle Your Arms,” Shannon...
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Now We’re All On Facebook
They sat with Moira in the Croton-Harmon station, across from an escalator down to the platform. The train from Albany was forty minutes late.
“Amtrak.” Bill rolled his eyes.
But it was still better than putting Moira on one of the two locals that came and went while they were waiting. The locals would have taken her to Grand Central, and from there she would have had to schlep all her...
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Who Did Tear Down That Wall?
Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, talks with NPR’s Melissa Block about secret documents concerning the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the months leading up and just after it.
Amazing stuff. Margaret Thatcher pleads with Gorbachev off the record to assist in keeping Germany divided—“You’ve got all those soldiers.” Brent Scowcroft muses that it might be better to keep two...
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The Ph.D. Problem →
Louis Menand:
if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about 30 years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since.
via Laura
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New Yiyun Li: "Alone" →
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Snow Leopards In Central Park
And not from the Apple Store.
I would always forget about the Central Park Zoo. Then I’d be out running during the day—I probably got less spare time as a freelancer than with my staff jobs, but I could choose when to take it—and I’d happen into long lines of excited school children.
Now the zoo is getting three snow leopards: Chocolate, Zoe and Bo.
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Ch-changes
Paul Krugman replies to commenters who think he underestimates the impact of technological advances such as mobile phones and the Internet:
If I had to make a guess, [I’d say] the fastest progress in the technology of daily life—the biggest changes—probably came between the 1880s and the 1920s.
Sounds right—widespread rail networks, indoor plumbing, telephones, motorcars, nitrogen-fixing...
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Moe On Malcolm
Maureen Tkacik takes a fine knife to the Malcolm Gladwell phenomenon:
Gladwell’s signature style… projects the expertise of a scientist and the easy helpfulness of the guy who delivers the local television station’s “news you can use” segment at 6:25.
In searching for an anecdote or image with which to convey the ultra-absorbency of Gladwell’s book as...
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Band Names
Noise Patrol
The Secret Monks
Dromedary Effect
Belvedere Aphasia
The Shown Up Grown-ups
Drone Behavior
The Prodding Cattle
Dan Brown’s Syntax
Indecent November
More?
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“Hell,” Tegan & Sara
via...