January 2012
12 posts
4 tags
2 tags
2 tags
W. W. Norton: Lifespan of a Coffee Drinker →
wwnorton:
condalmo:
(from the forthcoming The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal)
The text in bold is a sentence from John D’Agata’s essay “What Happens There” published in The Believer in January 2010 and later published in the book-length work About a Mountain….
I love the fact check.
“First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing —...”
– John Steinbeck on falling in love, in a 1958 letter to his son, via Maria Popova
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Tolstoy's 10 Rules for... →
fsgbooks:
Get up early (five o’clock).
Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock).
Eat little and avoid sweets.
Try to do everything by yourself.
Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and ...
“If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You...”
– Charles Bukowski, Factotum
“‘Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,’...”
– The Joy of Quiet
December 2011
15 posts
What is really real.
“People hate these shows, but their hatred smacks of denial. It’s all there, all the old American grotesques, the test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe, a great gauntlet of doubtless eyes, big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase fountains of impenetrable self-justification, muttering dark prayers, calling on God to strike down those who would fuck with their money, their cash, and...
4 tags
“In half the stops police cite the vague ‘furtive movements’ as the...”
– Young, Black and Frisked by the N.Y.P.D., an Op-ed in today’s New York Times.
1 tag
Jennifer Aniston beat every single famous lady... →
joshsternberg:
This cannot be correct. It was some kind of joke, right? Like when Tumblr goes to Fox News to fix opinion polls?
“Funny is sexy, and Jennifer Aniston is funny,” explains the site of Aniston’s coup. “Her down-to-earth persona makes her seem attainable… And her all-too-human love life off screen inspires sympathy that not even a string of bland romantic comedies can diminish....
How to transition between paragraphs.
“ I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, I cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor, he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and that I should see a “specialist.” He wrote...
November 2011
18 posts
“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to...”
– - a striking and (who knows?) possibly specious notion in Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness
(via davidquigg)
Joan Didion will not yet be defined. →
“The human scenes that you were seeing were so vivid that they were almost...”
– John Jeremiah Sullivan, who calls his one-year-old daughter “The Meatball,” on reporting after Katrina, in this Room 220 interview.
But, as an addendum to the Jay-Z curriculum...
Here is Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic on the Ocuppy t-shirts that would have profited the 1% (a.k.a. Jay-Z) if they weren’t pulled first.
I’m not the type to mix musical affinity and politics, nor to let the substance of lyrics get in the way of my enjoying a good song. “Under My Thumb” by The Rolling Stones? Fantastic. The Beatles singing “I’d rather...
“Before any guy ever threw a ball through a circle or hit a ball with a stick,...”
– Regardless of how you feel about UFC, this is beautiful piece of writing. Ultimate Fighting Dips a Toe in the Mainstream, Barry Bearak, the New York Times. Sent to me by the venerable Shane D. Kavanaugh.
My friend Peter gave me a copy of Telling Times, a book of collected non-fiction by Nadine Godimer. He pointed me, specifically, to the essay “Questions Journalists Don’t Ask.”
Godimer asks herself fourteen questions she was never asked in interviews, and then answers them.
Even though I disagree with her about virtually everything (she thinks, for example, that specific prizes...
WatchNot only had I not seen the high work of art that is Tremors until last night, I hadn’t even heard of it. This is my own Trent-Reznor-doesn’t-know-what-an-iPod-is moment. My entire worldview has changed.
"Her most important insight might be that being...
“Myles’s distinctly lower-class guilt around doing intellectual work instead of being useful makes her so trustworthy. Of course, she’s also a woman, and a lesbian; those two factors alone keep her from resembling the popular, Springsteenian image of the blue-collar everyman. Her thoughts on money, art, and class mobility are sharp precisely because she never descends into sappy...
“Trouble in Mind” - Nina Simone (live)...
October 2011
39 posts
“His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that...”
– Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night
“I think redemption is too much of a complete word. I get a sense that this saved...”
– Lori Waselchuk in a Room220 interview about Grace Before Dying, a collection of photos and interview excerpts taken inside the Louisiana State Penitiary at Angola’s hospice program. Intense.
“She responds to things like she’s in an opium dream. I’m more of a...”
– Tom Waits on collaborating with his wife, in Sasha Frere-Jones’ pitch-perfect album review (which you can read in full on the New Yorker’s website).
