January 2012
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The Winter Edition of the Georgia Review contains... →
derasso:
Via Maud!
Plagued by a number of ailments in recent years, he continues to plug away at the keyboard, when his health allows.
“The best book I got is half finished,” Crews said recently. “It’s called ‘The Wrong Affair,’ and, it’s a kick-a— book.”
Crews said he hopes to spend 2012 doing what he’s devoted his life to: writing.
“I don’t know when I’m going to stop,” he said. “I guess...
W. W. Norton: The Obligation to Be Happy →
wwnorton:
It is more onerous than the rites of beauty or housework, harder than love. But you expect it of me casually, the way you expect the sun to come up, not in spite of rain or clouds but because of them.
And so I smile, as if my own fidelity to sadness were a hidden vice— that downward tug…
November 2011
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October 2011
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“Slang talk gets exciting when people start arguing—not so much in the “we don’t...”
– Local Twitter Slang, And All That Jawn | The Awl
So, um, Maud be like my jawn, yo? Am I doing this right?
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August 2011
1 post
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Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster... →
In the weekend’s New York Times Magazine, my Riff on the rhetorical gambits of David Foster Wallace and the Internet.
skibinskipedia:
Qualifications are necessary sometimes. Anticipating and defusing opposing arguments has been a vital rhetorical strategy since at least the days of Aristotle. Satire and ridicule, when done well, are high art. But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not...
July 2011
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opal and the idiot: That's Sic →
oati:
From a list of words included in the fourteen-page copy-editing style guide for Nicholson Baker’s novel House of Holes, out this month from Simon & Schuster.
asswood ball-hankie beardwater bonky boobosity boycone brimmingness britneys cockbrisket cockitude crotchal cuntatious dickybird …
Typically I tear through Nicholson Baker’s sexy books, but I’ve been reading...
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June 2011
3 posts
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May 2011
4 posts
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May 21: The Rapture Meets My 40th Birthday →
As lead-ups to fortieth birthdays go, I recommend steering clear of subway preachers who forecast the Rapture for the very day you’re most dreading. For 18 months now, End-Timers have been gathering daily, at the top of the stairway to the train I take home from work, to press “Judgment Day” tracts on unsuspecting commuters. I’m sure someone else, someone who lacked my ...
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What happens when your psychiatrist dies and then... →
April 2011
4 posts
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Paris Review – Philip Connors on ‘Fire Season’,... →
I tended bar, fried donuts, unloaded semi-trailers at UPS, worked nights as a janitor at Kmart. The hours at those jobs tended to be terrible. I became estranged from the normal circadian rhythm. To have found a job that allows me to sit around looking at mountains, and even occasionally take a nap, seems to me an incredible piece of good fortune. There’s a line I like from Gertrude Stein: “It...
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March 2011
1 post
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February 2011
9 posts
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Tingle Alley: Nicht Kunts →
tinglealley:
I’m glad Vida and their pie charts have temporarily made counting vaginas acceptable again. As a long-time vagina-counter, I’ve never done charts but I do have my own term for publications/ institutions that rarely include women. A few years ago I was at a modern art museum in Germany — the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, an immense hangar-like museum, very shiny, very new — and was enjoying...
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too sweet to die: What's Happening to My Body* →
derasso:
irunfrombears:
When I was 4, I explained in great detail to my cousins how people had sex and how babies were made. They weren’t allowed to talk to me for years.
I think it is safe to say that some people are just…prude. I mean, I turned out alright. Right? Right?!
I’ll never forget the delight I felt at age 10 when I was able to graphically describe the machinations of gay sex to...
January 2011
12 posts
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“Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.”
– Gotta love that E.B. White. (via libraryland)
See also White on procrastination — “I have no warm-up exercises other than to take an occasional drink” — and the tricky valuation of a writer’s time.
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Cost is no object
derasso:
I want to create an online fundraising service, like Kickstarter, that would allow you to raise money to prevent other people from unleashing their spectacularly awful artistic abortions on the world. (And to also crush your enemies.)
Hey, look who’s Tumblring!
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nprfreshair:
Terry Gross’ interview with...
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WatchFrom greasy-suited guys with bottles in the lower left-hand drawer to nerds on the bus: Calvin Trillin on why journalists don’t drink like they used to.
December 2010
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WatchEight minutes with Alison Bechdel on her motivations, insecurities, and more:
What motivates me? Deep insecurity. I do think to some extent it is an incompleteness or a neurosis on my part… [H]onestly that’s why anyone pursues any avenue of creativity — it’s because they’re trying to get something that they’re missing.
See also Bechdel’s feelings on...
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WatchJust discovered this Fermata-era interview with Nicholson Baker (and Erica Jong, et al.) and am looking forward to watching it in the lead-up to publication of his next sex novel, which is due out in August and already traumatizing Young Manhattanite.
I love The Fermata, a book about a guy who stops time to undress women, but at least a couple good friends of mine hate it and/or think it’s...
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