June 2011
56 posts
2 tags
Charles Ives starts beef with Wagner, finishes it
Richy Wagner did get away occasionally from doh-me-soh, which was more than some others did. He had more or less of a good brain for technical progress, but he seems to put it to such weak uses - exulting, like a nice lady’s purple silk dress, in fake nobility and heroism, but afraid to jump in a mill pond and be a hero. He liked instead to dress up in purple and sing about heroism - (a...
1 tag
1 tag
“My advice to media consumers is to take responsibility for your behavior....”
– Brooke Gladstone, host of On The Media and author of The Influencing Machine, on PBS Art Beat. (via cmonstah)
1 tag
Turbulence
There’ll be turbulence. You’ll drop your book to hold your water bottle steady. Your mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall may who ne’er hung there let him watch the movie. The plane’s supposed to shudder, shoulder on like this. It’s built to do that. You’re designed to tremble too. Else break Higher you climb, trouble in mind lungs labor, heights hurl vistas Oxygen...
1 tag
What
What starts things
are the accidents behind the eyes touched off by, say, the missing cheekbone of a woman who might have been beautiful
it is thinking about your transplanted life-line going places in someone else’s palm, or the suicidal games your mind plays with the edge of old wounds, or something you couldn’t share with your lover
there are no endings
people die between...
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
Poll: Which P.G. Wodehouse character would be best suited to be in charge of something important, like a major university or midsized country?
1 tag
First Lines from New Books Out Today: June 27,...
“Chastened by her stint in the tabloid spotlight following Bird’s death, Nica retreated into the shadows. Though she would periodically emerge to address the jazz press on behalf of one of her favorite musicians, she shunned the media, rejecting virtually all requests for interviews.” Nica’s Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness by David Kastin
“To most...
The American public, as you know, is almost hopeless: the so-called intelligentsia could be gathered together in the smallest theatre. If for some reason or other an author of real worth reaches an audience of from three to ten thousand people over here, it is because the would-be intellectuals have been practically beaten into the frame of mind where they are ashamed not to read him. For...
“When we had all the answers, they changed the questions.”
– Eduardo Galeano
1 tag
Led Zep Lit →
Prime Locations on the Queer Street Map
From Queer Street by James McCourt:
“It doesn’t start anywhere; it doesn’t end there, either. Any attempt to suggest a beginning is necessarily arbitrary, and, as Yogi Berra famously decreed, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.
Instead, a congeries of argument, such as could be heard in those days at any hour of the day or night in clusters incessantly forming,...
2 tags
The Apparition
True to his word, our vet comes in late afternoon and kneels in a slant of sun. A pat, a needle stick stills the failing heart.
We lower the ancient form to the hemlock-shrouded grave and before the hole is brimmed set a layer of chicken wire to guard against predators
so that the earth we broke re-forms, a mild mound. The rock we place on top common glacial granite is mica-flecked and flat.
...
1 tag
Happy Birthday, Alan Turing!
Alan Turing, the English mathematician widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence, would have been 99 years old today. If there could be a mathematician for the literary set, Turing would surely be it. Exhibit A: this passage from David Leavitt’s The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer:
“Before we look at an...
1 tag
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon’s eyelid
later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere
Tonight I think no poetry will serve
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on...
4 tags
Norton to relaunch Liveright, one of the most... →
Horace Liveright
“A hard-drinking philanderer who handed out book advances the way Babe Ruth handed out autographed baseballs, Liveright squandered most of the rest of his firm’s profits buying bathtub gin and backing Broadway shows. Had he been as good at picking plays as he was at selling books, he would have become a millionaire: Liveright published “The Waste Land,” “An...
1 tag
“I mourned for Paul, and I also mourned for myself, and for the loss of the...”
– Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing
1 tag
“There is a particular sort of toughness of mind to be found in American women...”
– Gerald Howard, 2001 - a quote unearthed by Maud Newton from an article on Paula Fox in The Nation.
1 tag
First Lines from New Books Out Today: June 20,...
“Hermann Goering, the designated successor to Adolf Hitler, was awaiting to be executed for crimes against humanity when he learned about the pleasure that had been stolen from him. At that moment, according to one observer, Goering looked ‘as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world.’” How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We...
1 tag
I kept looking at the coffin sitting over on the...
this last project for our father. I stood and brushed the crumbs and sawdust off of my legs. I walked up, opened the lid, climbed onto the table, then stepped inside and lay down. I asked Jeb to close it, told him I wanted to make sure there was enough room for a body inside. These are the words I said, and part of me was thinking that, but another part of me had to feel what our father would not,...
2 tags
2 tags
“I was a father now. All day and all night of every week of every month of every...”
– Andre Dubus III, Townie
1 tag
1 tag
Connubial
Because with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of — this tic, that tendency, like the way that I’ve mastered intimacy in order to conceal how I felt —
I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.
Stephen Dunn, from Here and Now
“Whiskey is a religion, a spirit in a bottle. Take a swallow, feel it move...”
– Bonnie Jo Campbell, Once Upon A River (via booksandbrews)
Awesome Things We Just Learned About 'Uncle Tom's...
Thanks to David Reynolds, author of Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America (just published yesterday), we now know that:
1. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails did not come up with the multiple formats idea.
“On March 20, 1852, the Boston publisher John P. Jewett issued a then-substantial 5,000 copies of the two-volume novel. The first printing was available...
1 tag
Best of #hiphopnovels
Some of the best from this weekend’s hashtag game on twitter #hiphopnovels
@robspill: “I, Cladius, Like Big Butts”
@ncroal: “Do Gangstas Dream of Electric Beef?”
@rubthemtogether: “Are You There U-God, It’s Me, Margaret”
@NorthshireBooks: “I Got Slaughterhouse Five On It”
@SPBVIP: “Notes From the Digital Underground”
...
1 tag
First Lines from New Books Out Today: June 13,...
“Pain is difficult to express. Language and pain seem as far apart as the opposite poles of an electric current. While language can capture much of the diverse range of human experience, it fails us in the case of pain.” Listening to Pain: Finding Words, Compassion, and Relief by David Biro, MD
“Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha carrying...
2 tags
Despite the uncertainty of its dates of composition, “Illuminations” is quite clearly written after Rimbaud’s most defiant and scurrilous phase had passed. It does not contain the explicit playful or lyrical obscenity of earlier times, but rather a subtler incandescent or ecstatic range of congruous and incongruous, urban and pastoral imagery, and historical and mythological reference often...
“McMurtry, a big man whose eyes, behind dark-rimmed glasses, sometimes glint with...”
2 tags
War
In childhood, certain skies focused my seeing: all char- acters modulated my features. Phenomena were set in motion.—Now, the eternal inflection of moments and the infinity of mathematics chase me across the world where I undergo every civil success, respected by strange childhood and abnormally large affections.—I dream of a War of righteousness or force, whose logic will be quite unexpected.
...
BLAST FROM THE PAST: Irvine Welsh by Jenifer... →
Jenifer Berman Drug culture is present in all your books: the escapism, stigmatization, group dynamics, the adhesive that drugs provide among groups of people. Do you think that you’ll exhaust drugs as a primary underlying plot?
Irvine Welsh Only when society becomes more relaxed about drugs. Because it’s always been a drug society, people have always wanted to get off their face since...
“We will have to evolve a better world order than the one we have now, which I...”
– E. O. Wilson, author of Anthill, from his commencement address at the University of North Carolina on May 8th (Tip of the hat to The New Yorker).
1 tag
Map
My love, I opened my dresser drawer this morning & there was your heart
stored flat in glistening film, slick black & white, with all its enigmatic
shadows mapped by the Centre d’Imagerie Medicale Bastille: such a major guide we carried it
from continent to continent, a talisman to keep our coupledom intact (though just eight months ago
the three dimensions of your real true...
1 tag
We Real Cool
THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.
We real cool. We Left school. We
Lurk late. We Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We Die soon.
Gwendolyn Brooks, Born June 7, 1917
From An Invitation To Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology
Get on my lawn, kids
I’ve always been suspicious of those who seek to describe the effects of digital media in generational terms, drawing sharp contrasts between young “Internet natives” and old “Internet immigrants.” Such distinctions strike me as misleading, if not specious. If you look at statistics on Web use over the past two decades, you see that the average adult has spent more time online than the...
1 tag
First Lines from New Books Out Today: June 6, 2011
“‘Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop?’ So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.” The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
“I was born in 1960 on Taiwan, the island of my...
1 tag
#sitcomnovels →
