July 2010
50 posts
5 tags
“I will roar argon into chlorine, xenon into fluorine, all the noble gases into...”
– Jessica Stern Profiled today. Her book Denial: A Memoir Of Terror came out last week.
June 2010
39 posts
3 tags
3 tags
"Tuna then are both a real thing and a metaphor.... →
2 tags
Would You Like To Know More? →
My piece on Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is up on A Bright Wall In A Dark Room:
Does satire destabilize if we empathize with characters whose values we’re supposed to critique? War makes us regard our enemies as bugs, Verheuven is saying, as less than human… but what if our enemies really are bugs?
Also check out the super smart analysis by Nicholas Rombes on The Rumpus.
4 tags
6 tags
Gabe Durham—U Mass MFA alum, fiction writer, musician—is the new editor of Keyhole Magazine. Congratulations, Gabe, and lucky us. I’ve been lucky to have Gabe in workshop and he has an insightful and generous editorial sensibility. Excited for upcoming issues (maybe including you? including me?)
Amy Whipple interviews Ander Monson for Bomb. Monson’s new “not a...
4 tags
4 tags
2 tags
4 tags
3 tags
Amelia Atlas reviews three newish Berlin novels:
It is easy, in Berlin, to find oneself in the grip of an uncommon inertia. The city’s topography, at once absorbing and alienating, makes for a distracting plaything. It’s hard to capture the physical strangeness of Berlin, but I’m confident that it’s the only cosmopolitan European capital where you can get lost in a sandpit for several blocks...
4 tags
3 tags
"Now Turkish screenwriters have learned to adapt... →
4 tags
“It is bad enough that we as a nation have been so long subjected to this...”
– Annie Dillard An upside to Facebook: apparently you don’t need to “like” The Massachusetts Review (though why wouldn’t you?) to view Annie Dillard’s 1980 letter to the editor.
3 tags
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose →
French makes everything sound…. French:
andrearosen:
“Contacté par Le Post, Chris Menning, community manager du site KnowYourMeme, rappelle que la fascination pour les chats n’est pas nouvelle : ‘Les Egyptiens de l’Antiquité momifiaient leurs chats et faisaient des statues d’eux. Aujourd’hui, on fait à peu près la même chose, mais de manière moins figée dans le temps.”’
4 tags
The End of Eternity →
In the summer Threepenny Review, Wendy Lesser reviews a reissue of Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity:
For Asimov, super-civilization and technological achievement always go hand-in-hand with a general softening or attenuation of the human spirit, and it is only by getting back to basics (or intuition, or felt sensation) that people can continue to move ahead.
The summer I was...
4 tags
3 tags
“The driver of the island’s only taxi was a tall, thin man, with almost...”
– Renata Adler, Speedboat I am moving this week, and I successfully made it through packing my books with only two stops to read: one for a Poets & Writer’s article about online literary magazines, the other for the copy of Speedboat I picked up in The Strand last summer. I love the...
3 tags
3 tags
3 tags
WatchMark Ronson and the Business Int’l feat. Q-tip and MNDR “Bang Bang Bang”
(if video shows up as “not currently available in your country” watch here)
3 tags
"There is too much talk about the literary...
- Jed Perl
This week I was revising (i.e.: re-writing) a story I began under the influence of my first workshops, before realizing how much better workshops are at locating what may not be fully realized than at suggesting how to “fix” it. Even if your workshop-mates are sharp readers drawing on a wide background, their suggestions are, of course, theirs and (most likely)...
2 tags
2 tags
3 tags
Young vs. Olds →
Friend of this blog and onetime classmate Mike Young:
Hi, reader. Writer of things to be read, probably. You, writer/reader, might have read, as I did, that interview between Jonathan Lethem and David Gates where they get anxious about “putting” the internet in their fiction. Or you might have read things about how brand names shouldn’t be “used” in fiction. Now I invite you to read a...
5 tags
In Which We Continue Hearting Maile Meloy →
From The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” Q & A with Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman:
QUESTION FROM DRIEDCHAR: Maile Meloy (b. January 1, 1972) is in my opinion the magazine’s best short story writer. I’m disappointed she’s not on the list.
DEBORAH TREISMAN: Me, too. She was working on young-adult fiction and wasn’t able to get a story to us. We’ve published her several...
2 tags
Blog Evolution →
Laura writes:
Political blogging has changed a lot since I first started blogging six years ago. I first wrote about the changes in the blogosphere last July and received a lot of attention from that post. I rewrote that post into an essay, but I’m not sure what to do with it. So, here it is: Download Blog Evolution - McKenna
Speaking of evolution, I hadn’t noticed: Typepad...
4 tags
3 tags
3 tags
Stay Tuned →
My piece on sequels, serials, adaptations and reboots is up on A Bright Wall:
Franchises train us how to watch them. Each week new patients were wheeled into ER, but we knew what to do—stat!—when they arrived.
3 tags
Five On The New Yorker's 20 Under 40
newyorker: NY Times:
“The New Yorker has chosen its “20 Under 40” list of fiction writers worth watching[…]:
They are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer,...
4 tags
3 tags
"Hard cases are hard" →
E.J. Dionne on former Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s speech at last week’s Harvard graduation:
Souter notes that “the members of the court in the Plessy [v. Ferguson] case remembered the day when human slavery was the law in much of the land. To that generation, the formal equality of an identical railroad car meant enormous progress. But the generation in power in 1954...
3 tags
“Goofy experiments that would not work in any other format, such as deciding to...”
– The New Yorker’s Steve Coll, saying farewell to his blog, for now.
2 tags
Closing the Hole in the Gulf →
Robert Reich:
A petroleum engineer who’s worked in the oil industry tells me BP is doing the minimum to clean up the oil and everything it can to protect its bottom line. According to the engineer, here’s what BP should be doing right now to mitigate the damage. If the President were to put BP into temporary receivership…
3 tags
al fresco
There’s a little pavilion halfway through the route I run when I’m at my parents’ house. The light poles in their neighborhood development are wooden, flat-topped, convenient bird rest-stops. Yesterday a sharp-shinned hawk was by the pavilion. At first the hawk was completely still, but as I did my stretches and caught my breath I saw feathers falling lightly to the street. ...
1 tag
Want mixtapes? →
Mondo Salvo makes terrific selections from a diverse range of music and he has a great design sense so your library will look preeeetty. Now he’s archived all his mixtapes in one place.
5 tags
2 tags
version 3.0 →
I made a new blog layout! Hopefully easier to navigate, more fun to read. I lifted elements from a couple of Tumblr themes, added a bunch of my own, and tweaked (and tweaked) CSS. CSS control is one of my favorite aspects of Tumbr (ironic, since if you’re on Tumblr once you start ‘following’ a tumblelog and have it in your dashboard you can go a long time without looking at...