June 15, 2008
I no longer plan to write. So, for the time being, I have no further reason to maintain this site.
Whatever I once had as a writer appears irretrievably lost. Maybe it was all an illusion. Regardless, everyone I grew up with and everyone I met when I was younger and first considering what it meant to write has given art up. They all appear happier after doing so.
I’m tired of toiling alone. I’m tired of being the invisible man. It’s time for television and happy hour. It’s time to figure out what to do "after." The path I’ve been on has brought me nothing but loneliness and disconnection from other writers and other people. I fit into no group. The only people I feel a connection to prefer someone else. One from the past who moved on and away, one from the present who continues to choose an admittedly loveless relationship. So be it.
I’m not in danger. Something in my head has always been broken. I’m just finally accepting it and moving on.
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June 7, 2008
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June 7, 2008
- Poets, put up your fists and fight — A writers’ spat is not the sole preserve of the big names - the most exciting and vicious scraps are to be found in the poetry blogosphere
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June 6, 2008
No one will ever talk me out of my love for the Big American triad of Faulkner, Fitzgerald and (yes) Hemingway. By now I’ve probably heard all the criticisms and they are irrelevant in the face of the work itself.
Anyway, anyone who has spent much time with either of the latter two will have come across the remarkable scholarship of Matthew Bruccoli, who died a few days ago. When it came to Fitzgerald, Bruccoli had no equal… and his writing about Hemingway was very influential on my thinking as well. He was also– and I didn’t know this until today despite using it all my life– a founder of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
An amazing scholar and, by all accounts, a generous man. I wish I’d written him a note of thanks while he was still alive.
Tags:
obit
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June 5, 2008
mmmm, simple and tasty. Just ordered a set– and a few of the others.
Tags:
merchants, notecards, paper
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June 5, 2008
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June 5, 2008
Remove Garfield from the picture (literally) and you turn a bland comic into one that is strange, delusional, desperate, lonely, and often hilarious.
Kudos to Jon Davis, creator of Garfield, for being cool with the idea and saying so.
[subconscious linktribution: CogDogBlog]
Tags:
Art, comics, Humor
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June 4, 2008
Some photographers
have just got
the eye. Kenny Weng is one.
Check out more from his wide variety of photographs… these little bite-sized versions don’t do them justice.
Tags:
Photography
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June 4, 2008
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June 4, 2008
[photo by Steve Rhodes]
David Foster Wallace’s essay on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign is being re-issued as a book called McCain’s Promise. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, DFW responded to the question of whether he had changed his mind about his assessment of McCain:
"The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February, 2000, and the situation of both McCain [and] national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It’s all understandable, of course—he’s the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing."
Some other good stuff there about the book (and about signing a bazillion advance copies of Infinite Jest).
Tags:
dfw, essays, john mccain, politics
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June 4, 2008
- Put a Little Science in Your Life (Brian Greene) — ‘Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension.’ I know, I’m all about the NYT tonight…
- The Science of Sarcasm — If there is a region of the brain devoted to effecting sarcasm, mine has to be inordinately large…
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June 3, 2008
It’s not just that the invisible man will never see what he looks like in sunglasses and that he knows everything better than the back of his own hand and that his invisible skin can sting with the indignity of sunburn.
It’s that every room he is in remains empty. It’s that closing his eyes is nothing of the sort and all of his seeing is a kind of peeping. The rules of invisibility are unclear and maddening. Why do his clothes disappear but not the walls he leans against to listen to slow breathing of each apartment’s occupants? Why invisible glasses but not the random car he sits in singing softly along with the radio? What if he wore a suit of armor?
It’s that his origins are as invisible as he is, as is his eventual end. Did he come from nothing and will he return there? Did he have invisible parents? A translucent dog whose barking took the shape of memory?
Once the invisible man excitedly stalked a set of wet footprints on the sidewalk until they disappeared, imagining they belonged to one of his kind, also wandering, but they came to nothing. Then he fell in love with a girl who roller-bladed to the park every day and sat at the table right by the bushes he dozed within, her crazy ringlet curls stuffed partially, awkwardly in her helmet. He read her journal silently over her shoulder and whispered in her ear exactly what she wished to hear until she started shaking her head, saying "no. no. no." and committed herself to a locked ward and regimented medications that even the invisible man couldn’t sneak through.
When the invisible man dances even he can’t be sure that his feet touch the ground. When he runs he is taken for the wind. When he stomps in a puddle everyone around instinctively looks up at the sky. In the water he is a hollow splash.
The invisible man is alone and loneliness, by its nature, walks unseen suffering no light from sun or star.
Tags:
AtRandom
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June 3, 2008
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June 2, 2008
- Air dry washing - TipThePlanet — Via Darren Barefoot comes the Air Dry Wash wiki, what has to be the most comprehensive site dedicated to ways to air dry your clothes ever.
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June 2, 2008
Pentagram has published a series of 14 fun cryptograms. I would pay good money to have these on correspondence/greeting cards. Here’s one example, though each in the set is quite different:
Tags:
cryptograms
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June 2, 2008
Testing ScribeFire and WP native tags. Pls ignore.
Tags:
tags, test
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June 2, 2008
In "The Book Collection that Devoured My Life" Luc Sante ponders the obsession of book collecting (it strikes a bit close to home for me as well) and concludes:
"Many books are screwy, a great many are dull, some are irredeemable, and there are way too many of them, probably, in the world. I hate all the fetishistic twaddle about books promoted by the chain stores and the book clubs, which make books seem as cozy and unthreatening as teacups, instead of the often disputatious and sometimes frightening things they are. I recognize that we now have many ways to convey, store, and reproduce the sorts of matter that formerly were monopolized by books. I like to think that I’m no bookworm, egghead, four-eyed paleface library rat. I often engage in activities that have no reference to the printed words. I realize that books are not the entire world, even if they sometimes seem to contain it. But I need the stupid things."
[linktribution: Bryan Alexander on Twitter]
Tags:
books, collecting, reading
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June 2, 2008
Do you know your Andouillete from your French Andouille? Your Kishke from your Grutzwurst? If you do, I’m sorry. If not, you need the Cook’s Thesaurus of Sausage as much as I did.
[linktribution: NBR Tweet]
Tags:
food, reference
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May 30, 2008
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All me-stream all the time.
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