January 2012
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December 2011
58 posts
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I made a public version of my Tumblr theme →
It’s still awaiting moderator approval (and for all I know may need to be renamed… there are 1200+ themes out there)… but meanwhile:
Features I’m especially pleased with:
toggle-able drop shadows for images
margin-setting for left/right aligned images
individually customizable fonts for blog title, post titles, body text, and widgets
Guide and examples here. Let me...
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Situations for Young Ladies →
trainwrite:
by Sarah Malone
On the twenty-eighth floor of a building now long demolished, Dorothy Zimmer returned to her desk and found a girl with the new puffed sleeves and white lace all around the base of her high collar. She was fixing her hair at Dorothy’s hand-mirror. She had the scent of the El on a summer afternoon.
“What are you doing here?” Dorothy said.
“I type,” the girl said....
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Outtakes and Orphans 2011
I like looking over discarded drafts at the end of the year: am I making the same mistakes? New ones? What did I find fantastic that petered out, and how many versions did I need to clue in? I had fewer false starts this year; I’m not sure how much of that reflects improvement and how much is because of less time noodling. I scrapped 20,000 words of a novel, but most of my short stories...
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What's Next For Literary Studies? →
Stanley Fish surveys offerings at next week’s MLA convention:
Once again, as in the early theory days, a new language is confidently and prophetically spoken by those in the know, while those who are not are made to feel ignorant, passed by, left behind, old. If you see a session on “Digital Humanities versus New Media” and you’re not quite sure what either term means you might think...
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“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to...”
– Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby [previously]
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End of Semester Favorites
I asked my creative writing students (who, damn, I’m going to miss next semester) to chose paragraphs or stanzas from pieces we read that they thought would particularly stay with them. Here are some of them:
Heather Christle, “The Whole Thing Is The Hard Part”:
you have to live where the house lands on you what else can you do your bones are all broken and somebody loves...
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Advent
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow pp. 127-136:
She was remembering other Advents, and hedges snowy as sheep from her window, and the Star ready to be pasted up on the sky again… …So this pickup group, these exiles and horny kids, sullen civilians called up in their middle age, men fattening despite their hunger, flatulent because of it, pre-ulcerous, hoarse, runny-nosed, red-eyed,...
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Imperfect Recall
Christopher Hitchens, in the April 2005 issue of Poetry magazine, on the Poetry Foundation website:
…the first true poet I ever met was James Fenton, who was my contemporary at Oxford. He had won early fame and a prize for a sonnet sequence, but he was forever composing bits of blues, along with parodies and what he sometimes called “rude songs.” This proved to be equally...
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“You’re at a party, which has, in the way of some parties, sorted itself...”
– Sabina Murray
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Let Us Now Bro-Hug Famous Men
It’s always interesting browsing between magazines pitched to similar audiences for differences in intent. Among the upper brow, the LRB can exude a sense that maybe the system needs blowing up in some finely-tuned, non-physical way (we’ve all read enough philosophy to rebuild it better from memory, haven’t we?)
In The New Yorker Elizabeth Kolbert’s climate change pieces...
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"We’re Friends, Lou and I. Even if I Hate Him,... →
veblenesquegorge:
Sometime not too recently nor too far past I read a short story that I didn’t think about much as I was reading, but I thought about a lot after. The problem was that once I realized how much I was thinking about it, I couldn’t remember where I’d read it or who had written it.
It was about a teenage girl with so many freckles she almost just had one big freckle, across her...
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Because Paul Krugman Didn't Keep His Calm →
in New York’s “Reasons to <3 N.Y. 2011” via wwnorton:
“The most remarkable attribute Paul Krugman has brought to the New York Times is rudeness. The social niceties that accompany his exalted position are utterly lost on him. He does not seek out the company of famous politicians and cannot be courted with flattery or access. He understands that you can’t arrive at...
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irisblasi:
Tom Perrotta as quoted today in Richard Russo’s NYT op-ed “Amazon’s Jungle Logic”:
“People have to understand that their short-term decision to save a couple bucks undermines their long-term interest in their community and vital, real-life literary culture.”
It’s one the things I feel most frustrated by and powerless to affect except on a personal scale,...
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в мире: Saturday in Moscow, or How I Lost My... →
katharineholt:
I started this tumblr page back in September as a repository for travel photos. I knew I would be out of the US for awhile, and I figured that this would be the best way to keep friends abreast of what I was encountering abroad. Plus, since I was aiming to create a visual record of my thought…
This is wonderful.
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“a huge, irrational, metaphysical Canada”
– Russian blogger Aleksei Navalny, describing his hope for a future Russia (tens of thousands protested today).
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Watchbmichael:felixsalmon:
I can look at this NYC income map for hours. Fascinating stuff.
This is hell of fascinating or interesting. It’s not a video; if you click play, you get an interactive map.
Wow DUMBO and the Bloomberg waterfront.
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andrewgraham:
“NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview. So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to.”
— GOP Objects...
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@BeijingAir →
NYT:
Since Sunday, the air has consistently been rated “hazardous,” meaning that people should avoid any outdoor activity; on Sunday, the particulate measurement exceeded the scale’s maximum of 500, a reading that the embassy once called “crazy bad” on its @BeijingAir Twitter feed.
The fine particles, called PM 2.5 because they are 2.5 microns in diameter or smaller, make up much of the...
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The Politics of Narrative →
John Reed’s barrage in The Rumpus is far-ranging and unsparing of establishment and alternative alike. He’s incisive—and for fiction writers, practical—on theories of narrative:
Max Brand (Frederick Schiller Faust), a prolific pulp western writer of the 1920s and 30s, maintained that there were two types of stories: coming home, or leaving home. The assertion neatly correlates to...
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Watchlifeaquatic:
Here’s the video of those guys running Noccalula Falls.
One day later, their footage was appropriated by The Weather Channel.
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“To my surprise, after all that paging, she had no plans for dinner. Sure, I...”
– Sarah Malone, Finite + Flammable (more) Wednesday! I will be reading more from this! (Remember when pagers were status symbols? And we didn’t have web sites, we had to print our pages out all by ourselves? In the snow.) There will be wine and amazing other readers!