A single that might be on Ben Folds’ new album, due out at the end of the month: “You Don’t Know Me At All”

While not necessarily a track I’d recommend as representative to someone who’s never heard Ben Folds before (he is one of the few artists who can, in the space of a [...]

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“Breughel’s Two Monkeys”
This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:
two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking a bath.
The exam is History of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.
One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away–
but when it’s clear [...]

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A favorite author of mine has some sage advice for bloggers and people participating in social networks and why it can be a valuable activity:
[An account of a trivial event] would be rather pointless were it not for the instruction that I derived from it for myself [...] Now as Pliny says, each man is [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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mmmm, simple and tasty. Just ordered a set– and a few of the others.

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[from the New Yorker]

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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]

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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.

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[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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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:

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Testing ScribeFire and WP native tags. Pls ignore.

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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 [...]

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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]

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My favorite Fairbanks blogger (actually, a favorite in general, though others might compete for the regional crown if they posted more than once a millennium) linked to Ishkur’s motivational posters and I highly recommend you go there and check them all out. I couldn’t resist sharing the same example. It has monkeys!

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Poem by poem in the order given
Ordered by the name of the journal in which the poems first appeared… and then the rest
In alphabetical order, by title
Poems that begin on even numbered pages first
Grouped by title and presumed theme: animal, mineral, vegetable; fire, water, earth, air; people, place, thing, event
Randomly, marking your progress carefully with [...]

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Another comic I forget because I can’t subscribe to it (though that is supposedly going to change real soon) is the almost always amusing– and often scary– Get Your War On. A pair from late last month:

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Actually, Drew Dee’s own comics are also pretty funny:
toothpastefordinner.com

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Two of the funnier comics I discovered recently have two things in common… both are at least partly the creation of Natalie Dee and neither have RSS feeds. The samples I’ve chosen here are pretty mild. Most of the entries I prefer are a bit more biting– but I’ll let you find those for yourself!
First, [...]

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