March 2012
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Why do you think “consumed” is an ugly term?
I think it’s an ugly term when applied to information. When you talk about consuming information you are talking about information as a commodity, rather than information as the substance of our thoughts and our communications with other people. To talk about consuming it, I think you lose a deeper sense of information as a carrier of meaning and emotion – the matter of intimate intellectual and...
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The eagle you should know, American, Is a sublime and bloody bird, A living dynamo Capable of spiritualizing and senusalizing.
-Jean Toomer, from the poem “Blue Meridian”
“The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over...”
– Barry Hannah: April 23, 1942 – March 1, 2010
February 2012
84 posts
“Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never...”
– A Dialogue with Christopher Lasch
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Heft Author Liz Moore Signing at the PLA...
Wednesday 3/14, 4:00-5:00 pm Norton Booth # 444
Nancy Pearl : “Really, really enjoyed Liz Moore’s Heft-definitely my kind of novel: lovely writing, fully fleshed out characters, fluid plot. Check it out.”
Jennifer Weiner: “Heft is a wonderful oddball of a book. I loved it.”
O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE: ”…This is a beautiful novel about...
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“My racial composition and my position in the world are realities that I alone...”
– Jean Toomer to his publisher Horace Liveright
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“It is hard not to wonder whether we use the small sadnesses in life to avoid or...”
– Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted
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Her Lips Are Copper Wire
whisper of yellow globes gleaming on lamp-posts that sway like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog and let your breath be moist against me like bright beads on yellow globes telephone the power-house that the main wires are insulate (her words play softly up and down dewy corridors of billboards) then with your tongue remove the tape and press your lips to mine till they are incandescent
Jean...
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“Ahab’s ivory leg > Angelina’s right leg”
– Us
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As a writer, how did your experience writing...
A lot of what’s in my “accidental memoir”, I’ve tried to write as a novel three separate times over nearly thirty years: growing up in the shadow of the Vietnam war; living with a single mother in poverty; having sex way too young (13), and the drugs, the alcohol, the violence and very few men around, especially my father. But every time I tried to capture all this as fiction, it was just too...
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Los Angeles Review of Books Podcast #4: Maggie... →
lareviewofbooks:
MAGGIE NELSON talks to ARNE DE BOEVER about The Art of Cruelty. Click here for the fourth episode of the new Los Angeles Review of Books podcast series (also available on iTunes; click here to subscribe).
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Grudges That Lie Deep
Incidentally, it sheds light on why Adolf Hitler—who was born in Austria—is what he is. Radetzky himself has a hankering for Anschluss. And the Germanic people in the “Radetzky March” fear the Slavs and dislike the Jews. Hitler has merely inherited an old “earth hunger” which bids now to upset the peace of Europe, as it did in 1914. The old grudges lie centuries deep.
...
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Sunday Morning
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Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding...
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“Upon beginning Liz Moore’s engaging, quirky novel “Heft,” it’s a relief to see...”
– Washington Post Book Review
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“Writing is gratitude. It is like writing a thank you note to the world.”
– Pam Houston read the full interview at full-stop.net
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“I thought so many times that I had to throw it out the window—it felt more like...”
– Inspirational words on writing from Liz Moore as she discusses her novel Heft in an interview with Tottenville Review.
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Interview with Pam Houston
In many of your stories, your characters come close to dying. Why do your characters get in such near proximity to death?
I think it’s playing out issues from my father, an abusive alcoholic — it’s very Psych 101, but I put myself in extreme situations where I can have control; get control back. And I write very autobiographically. In my real life, I’m always making things hard on myself. I...
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Charlotte Brontë on Jane Austen
I have likewise read one of Miss Austen’s works—Emma—read it with interest and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable. Anything like warmth or enthusiasm—anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstration the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have...
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WatchDr. Norbert Yankielun, author of How to Build an Igloo (and Other Snow Shelters), explains to Huffington Post senior science correspondent Cara Santa Maria how the snow actually helped the Swedish man Peter Skyllberg who was trapped in his snow-covered car for two months. Now you know.
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“‘In the name of the law!’ cried the tipstaff again, making a most desperate...”
– Post Captain by Patrick O’Brian
Barrett Bonden’s got your back.
(via tuulikki)
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Demeter, Waiting
No. Who can bear it. Only someone who hates herself, who believes to pull a hand back from a daughter’s cheek is to put love into her pocket— like one of those ashen Christian philosophers, or a war-bound soldier. She is gone again and I will not bear it. I will drag my grief through a winter of my own making, refuse any meadow that recycles itself into hope. Shit on the cicadas, dry meteor flash,...
Preaching with Sacred Fire
The phrase sacred fire is representative of the fact that ministers and those to whom they minister know for that souls to be fed, healed, and liberated, the Holy Spirit in Christian churches, the spirit of beneficence and mercy in Muslim mosques, and the ever-abiding spirit of the ancestors in African Traditional Religion must be present. The phrase acknowledges that something more than the...
“The future of books is the future.”
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WatchLast night, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Larry Wilmore shared his theory that the success of basketball phenom Jeremy Lin has a nefarious connection to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Larry Wilmore: I’m pretty sure this whole asian basketball invasion might be revenge for Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Jon Stewart: The astrophysicist?
Larry Wilmore: Exactly. What was he thinking?...
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WatchHere’s an exclusive clip from Being Flynn (based on Nick Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City) which opens in limited release on March 2nd. Nice shout out to Viking Press near the end.
There’s still time to read the book before you see the movie.
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None Of The Above
“When she first began teaching, Alma promised herself she would never wear a sweater with an apple on it. In her most uncompromising moods, appliqués were altogether banned. There were other things she swore never to do: talk about her husband in front of the class; praise the girl students for their docility and her boy students for assertiveness; shake her index finger at anyone; and, most...
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Feynman's letter to his wife
condalmo:
Read this and then go hug the one you love. You may want to have some tissues at hand.
“Well the two best things about him,” she said, ” is that he calls up to read me Alice Munro over the phone, and he knows how to use a trapeze.”
“You mean, like during sex?” I say.
“Anytime,” she says, shrugging.
-From Contents May Have Shifted by Pam Houston
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Slate Reviews 'The Lifespan of a Fact', Then...
“Whether you will be delighted or disgusted by The Lifespan of a Fact depends on what kind of reader you are. Are my misquotes, misrepresentations, and lies OK because, though I’ve never met John D’Agata or Jim Fingal, after reading this enraging, fascinating, singular book, I feel as though I know them? Is this review a clever trick or a cheat, a critique or an appreciation? Is it a...
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Love Poem
I want to write you a love poem as headlong as our creek after thaw when we stand on its dangerous banks and watch it carry with it every twig every dry leaf and branch in its path every scruple when we see it so swollen with runoff that even as we watch we must grab each other and step back we must grab each other or get our shoes soaked we must grab each other
Linda Pastan, from The Imperfect...
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