Early on in his new book, Alex Ross identifies one thing that separates music from other arts: “At a performance, listeners experience a new work collectively, at the same rate and approximately from the same distance. They cannot stop to consider the implications of a half-lovely chord or concealed waltz rhythm. They are a crowd, […]
“I remember saying once, I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. Whoever I was talking to said, They’d do that too, if their agents could fix it.” Phillip Larkin in the Paris Review.
From Nathan Ihara’s review of the Paris Review Interviews, II: “the art of the interview requires something very different from a mere investigation of the mechanics of fiction. Leave theory and technique to the essay or manual. An interview is a wonderful art form, similar to a one-act play, with an unswerving goal: to expose […]
A plea for more anthropology of ideology: “I’d like to propose a new research convention. Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset thereof) really wants or means, I’d like them to list their personal anthropological experience with the subjects under consideration.”
A profile of William Langewiesche. I’d never heard of him before today, but now I’m curious to see what he’s been writing. “This is the golden age of nonfiction, now. It’s not in the future sometime. It’s not in the past. It’s better now. This is the time.” [via bookslut and vqr]
In the NYT, a reflection on the newly-discovered photos of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg:
What would the photographic record show if it reached back, say 500 years, instead of 180?
One answer is that it would show us this same structure over and over again: a fiercely concentrated knot of people hanging on the words of someone […]
The Cassini spacecraft has recently taken some fantastic photographs of Saturn. [via seat 1a]
An excellent essay on John Updike and the work of book reviewing. [via tim walker]
I’d never thought to look for it before, but I wish I had: interviewer Charlie Rose has an amazing online archive.
I have a small area map that I keep handy for plotting new running routes. My ongoing arbitrary goal is to run every road on the map, interstate excepted. So I was out in some new neighborhoods the other night (I run almost exclusively after dark), and some areas were a little sketchy. Graffiti, trash, […]
I first heard about A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age when Joshua Blankenship posted this excellent quote from author Daniel Pink. Great stuff, so I found the book, which isn’t as great.
The premise is that the Information Age was led by left-brained, linear-thinkers. Now, as we enter the […]
E.M. Forster: “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then queen died of grief’ is a plot.”
Ray Bradbury’s latest, Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan ‘99, gathers a pair of unpublished novellas that he’s been brewing for a couple decades. The first story, “Somewhere a Band Is Playing,” revisits the usual Bradburyan perfect-yet-eery small-town America, in the form of a writer’s colony where there are no children. […]
“Reader and writer are in jail together. And the more they cooperate, the more easily they can move together through the complex masses of verbal symbols and levels of grammar that we call writing.” Arn Tibbetts, Ten Rules for Writing Readably (pdf)
Holy crap. I just noticed that there’s a LibX plug-in for Emory University libraries. There are a couple hundred other schools that use LibX. From the comfort of my own Firefox toolbar, I can search Emory’s catalog, journals, and databases, as well as Google Scholar and WorldCat. This makes me unreasonably happy.
A video of lions vs. crocodile vs. water buffalo. Really cool multi-species rivalry. [via dooce]
How clean is the electricity I use? Mine is about 64% coal, 20% nuclear, 10% natural gas, and a smattering of renewable and non-renewable sources. Yeah, that coal bad news.
I enjoyed reading Moneyball last month, so I got the notion to explore some other baseball books. The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed is pretty good, and a surprisingly quick read. The author/ economist JC Bradbury runs Sabernomics, a baseball nerd blog that’s well worth your time.
As you might expect, Bradbury applies some statistical […]
There’s going to be a movie version of The Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis (see my review of The Surrogates). I really, really liked the comics, especially because I haven’t found a lot of decent scifi. Very cool book—I hope those Hollywood folks treat it kindly.
By the by, the publishers of The Surrogates, Top Shelf Productions, […]
I’m really fascinated with this idea of coworking. The trend has gotten some press in NPR, Business Week, Wired, and the New York Post, among others. Folks like Jelly, Citizen Space, and Independents Hall are all doing really cool things, making a business of it. Looks like there’s a coworking group just getting started in […]
“I’ve never found a girl at a museum… but I do look because the kind of girls I like theoretically should show up there.” -Woody Allen
Is it me, or is there subversive body language in this Apple promo video? I was watching the iPod Touch guided tour, and I noticed that our friendly host keeps moving his head left and right, as if to express disagreement. It’s incredibly distracting.
Oboiler has a little picket fence for your baseboards to hide wires and cords. A picket fence isn’t really in my aesthetic, but I like the concept. I might go for something that looked like a bridge or an aqueduct or something. [via unclutterer]
I like books, and therefore tend to like books about books and the bookly experience. Enter Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. An excerpt from the first chapter from the book, “Marrying Libraries,” is available online.
Fadiman has a somewhat unique experience, growing up in a family that is pretty much insane when […]
Advice to keep in mind while ring-shopping:
Just be aware that - much like kisses and “I love yous” - you can’t take ring shopping back. It can mean as little or as much as either of those things can, but it can’t ever be meaningless.
Man, The Rest Is Noise was a great book. Review coming soon-ish, after I go through all my dog-ears.
I, too, wonder why famous musicians don’t put out as much music. “I’d feel a bit cheated if they couldn’t put together more than three or four decent new tunes a year. These people are musicians, this is their job. In the mid-’60s, Bob Dylan was probably putting down three or four great new songs […]
A couple weeks ago, NPR hosted an awful interview with Sigur Ros. Incredibly painful to watch. They recently followed up, bringing in music writer Jancee Dunn to help with a director’s commentary to find out where all the suckage came from.
I finished this one a couple weeks ago, but never wrote anything. In Reading Comics, Douglas Wolk writes with an eye to the reader’s experience of comics. He avoids a lot of comics theory (”You already pretty much know what they are, and ‘pretty much’ is good enough”), focusing instead on loving criticism.
It was […]
Brian Sacawa on playing unfettered, taking classical music out of the grand halls and into alternative venues. A lot of the talk focuses on music groups reaching new audiences, but like he says, it can be great for the performers, too. It’s liberating.
Since I moved a couple weeks ago from sub-suburban Atlanta to closer to the heart of town, my walk score went from 3 to 77. And what’s more, there’s the x-factor of actually having sidewalks.
Just got back from the local Helvetica screening (presented by AIGA-Atlanta, sponsored by the Art Institute of Atlanta). It was good, but not great. Pretty cool for a relative noob like myself to see Helvetica’s role in design over the past half-century. But I wish there was a little more nitty-gritty talk about how it […]
Oh, I just noticed that after a year and a half or so, my number of posts broke into 4 digits. This is number 1003. The number itself isn’t that important, it’s that I’m enjoying it enough to reach it and keep going. Time flies when you’re having fun.
A long and awesome article about the Self-Transcendence 3100, a 3100-mile race run on a half-mile loop. In Queens, of all places.
Here was a kind of living koan, a race of invisible miles across a phantom plain wider than the continental United States. For fifty days, breathing miasmal exhaust from the Grand Central Parkway, the […]
“I saw the girl of my dreams on the subway tonight.” A New York success story. Well, maybe not a success yet, but they’re off to a good start through the miracle of interwebbedness. [via funkaoshi]
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