February 2012
1 post
I prefer to be made of mud.
“This is a very good question. There are several important things you need to do:
“First, you need a round hole in your chest that goes all the way through you. I can never stress enough to the kids, it has to be a perfect circle, about the diameter of a drinking glass rim, it has to be in the absolute center of your chest—like where a heart would go on a plumber or a woman—and it...
August 2011
6 posts
6 tags
The glut
Fifteen years ago, the main problem a lover of music— or film, or television, or other varieties of pop culture— would experience was scarcity. It took money to get hold of the stuff, and if you liked anything weird, it took effort, too. As a result, the default mode was to like what you could. In fact, the best way to demonstrate to others that you cared and were discerning...
Mowing the lawn
This bit struck me from today’s New Yorker hagiography of the Bin Laden raid:
In the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the “Black Hawk Down” incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that “this was not one of three missions. This was one of almost two thousand...
July 2011
2 posts
“Florida alone accounts for one-third of the fresh tomatoes raised in the United States, and from October to June, virtually all the fresh-market, field-grown tomatoes in the country come from the Sunshine State, which ships more than one billion pounds every year. It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial scale farming, so most Florida tomatoes are bred...
June 2011
11 posts
Pack the suitcase.
Pack the suitcase. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: typewriter (Hermes Baby), passport (SA 323273), ticket, airport, stairs, airplanes, fasten seatbelt, take off, unfasten seatbelt, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, fasten seatbelt, descent, circling, landing, earth, unfasten seatbelts, stairs, airport, immunization...
A darkness beyond this.
When the sky’s dark face catches your eye again, let memory write of a darkness beyond this:
days self-blinded, nights of searching untaught, thinking your own thought, light.
from “Octonaires on the World’s Vanity and Inconstancy,” by the Reformation pastor & theologian Antoine de Chandieu, who studied under Calvin and died at the end of the 16th century. Translated...
“Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
— That is God.
Hooray!...”
– For Bloomsday. (via evanfleischer)
“A scandal, a scandal, to let so much time slip and I leaning on the Bridge...”
– Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 27 October 1928 (via proustitute)
Flimsiest
Part of the charm of this poem, if you’re charmed by it, is the flimsiness of the conceit — the whole thing is spun around the tiny, silly homophony of bough and bow, as though Morley is trying to see just how much he can squeeze out of this pip of an idea.
I often pass a gracious tree Whose name I can’t identify, But still I bow, in courtesy It waves a bough, in kind reply. I do...
Bricolage, ii
‘The landscape is both lush and barren. Profuse vegetation everywhere (palm trees, rubber plants, a hundred varieties of wildflowers), but the volcanic earth is strewn with boulders. Land crabs plod through his garden (he describes them as small armored tanks, prehistoric creatures who look as if they belong on the moon) … ‘
Invisible, Paul Auster
‘What have you done...
May 2011
28 posts
“It sounded like a chorus of high-pitched voices shouting the word...”
– Ian Frazier, “On the Floor” (1994). The first use of the word motherfucker in the New Yorker.
Via The Awl.
Findings
“Excessive burger consumption was correlated with wheezing in children. Herpes continued to ravage France’s baby oysters. Sixty-one percent of African Americans, 40 percent of Hispanic Americans, and only 23 percent of white Americans use lubricants during anal sex. Pond snails on crystal meth are better at remembering pokes from a sharp stick. Scientists created crash helmets that...
“Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us...”
– Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner (via bryanmckay)
A frank man to the universe
Herman Melville to Evert Duyckinck:
I would to God Shakespeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of fine Duyckinck punch; but that the muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakespeare’s full articulations. For...
Graduation speeches
“And while the entire thrust of this discourse is to convince us that the choices made by college students is what determines their future — thus, both internalizing success and failure and encouraging government and universities to continue de-emphasizing everything but STEM subjects — the stark reality is that the best “choice” a college graduate could possibly make would be to have...
Fine physical specimens.
“The vast majority of inmates most generously rewarded by the release order—the 46,000 whose incarceration will be ended—do not form part of any aggrieved class even under the Court’s expansive notion of constitutional violation. Most of them will not be prisoners with medical conditions or severe mental illness; and many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed...
Bricolage, i
‘… when I open a book I feel the shape of another human being’s brain. To me, Nabokov’s brain is shaped like a helter-skelter. George Eliot’s is like one of those pans for sifting gold. Austen’s resembles one of the glass flowers you find in Harvard’s Natural History Museum. Each has strengths and weaknesses, as I apply them to the test of my own sensibility. I can slide down Nabokov, but...
Sing — and singing — remember
There are no handles upon a language Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance. It is a river, this language, Once in a thousand years Breaking a new course Changing its way to the ocean. It is mountain effluvia Moving to valleys And from nation to nation Crossing borders and mixing. Languages die like rivers. Words wrapped round your tongue today And broken to shape...
“We enter books as if into a conspiracy: for company, of course, and narrative,...”
– John Leonard, in the introduction to the 1994 reprinting of Tell Me A Riddle, by Tillie Olsen.
Two epigraphs
Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without so much a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
Jacob Riis
&
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth Descend, ourselves to make a Couch — for whom?
Omar Khayyám
_____________________
...
Comfort
Somewhere a man wastes away his life, covered in coal dust, in the stifling depths of a mine; another man rests warmly, clothed in alpaca, buried in a good book in an armchair, without ever thinking whence or how this armchair, this book, this alpaca, this warmth reach him. National Socialism wanted every German, in the future, to be able to have his modest share of the good things in life; but...
Memory, i
Bought Roddy Doyle’s The Dead Republic in an airport bookstore in Vienna, his capper to the saga of Henry Smart (and Ireland, by extension) that he began with A Star Called Henry in ‘99. Unavoidably lumpy — long stretches of it feel saggy, like Doyle’s chewing through plot and shoving characters around the board to get to the next part he’s interested in writing — but those...
November 2010
3 posts
