February 2012
1 post
The Chimerist: dwell in possibility →
maudnewton:
thechimerist:
I probably wouldn’t have bought it if I’d known two years ago what I know now about the conditions for workers who make it, but I wake up with my iPad and go to sleep with it. It’s my alarm clock, my nighttime and commuting library, my dictionary, my hand-held radio, my portable…
A new site about art, stories, and technology that I’m doing with Laura Miller.
January 2012
7 posts
2 tags
Happy Lord Byron’s Birthday! The 224th this year. The book I’m working on is about him, which is how I know; but even if you haven’t been spending an inordinate amount of time thinking/writing about a long-dead Romantic poet, his birthday would make a great, wider holiday. I wish it’d catch on, possibly in lieu of some other winter holiday that’s either dull...
2 tags
Quasi-related to Muhammad Ali’s birthday: This bit from Remnick’s bio of Ali, about Floyd Patterson’s preparations for his title fight with Sonny Liston, is so quietly horrific:
A fake beard and mustache! Poor Floyd.
Out to dinner with my friends L. and W. They told a story about going to attend a meeting of the Rationalists Society of East Tennessee, walking into a room crowded with people swaying back and forth, hands in the air, music playing, and slowly, slowly realizing they were in the wrong room.
I didn’t know this: When Angela Carter died she was working ”on a novel about Jane Eyre’s stepdaughter for which she’d submitted a synopsis: Adele was going to fall in love with a schoolteacher, seduce her own father and watch her mother being guillotined; it was going to play ‘some tricks with history … But then it is a novel.’”
December 2011
7 posts
1 tag
“Perhaps another family scandal—Reverend Sayers’s elderly brother Cecil had recently separated from his second wife after he had been caught in flagrante with a much younger woman in the potting shed—took the sting out of Dorothy’s announcement.” My goodness!
“Ludwig II of Bavaria is said to have honoured certain particularly impressive trees in his park by having them saluted.” Random factoid tossed into paragraph of Carl Jung’s Alchemical Studies: So many questions! How saluted? Twice daily, or just occasionally?
Susan Miller’s description of her Parrot Fever in this month’s Gemini horoscope is the best bit of authorial intrusion I’ve seen in a while. If I ever survived Parrot Fever I probably would be working it into everyone’s horoscopes too.
BONKING BORIS MADE ME PREGNANT, exclaimed the News of the World; BORIS SACKED FOR LYING OVER AFFAIR, gloated the Mail on Sunday; TORIES SACK JOHNSON OVER SEX CLAIM, dourly divulged The Scotsman.
I love Emma’s column. Also might have (appalling) new crush on Boris Johnson? Terrible politics, serial philandering, lack of physical attraction aside.
So what's it like in Ceylon? I'd much rather go to...
Near the end of Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer mentions a D.H. Lawrence letter that he describes as Lawrence’s “grouchiest letter ever - the grouchiest letter ever?” and a “masterpiece” of irritability. Dyer quotes choice bits from the letter; but if you were ever curious about how the whole thing read, here it is. I hunted it up at the library a while back. It was...
Today was the second anniversary of my dad’s death. I made an agreement with my mom early on that we weren’t going to mark this day, but instead his birthday (which falls in January), but nevertheless I’ve been counting down the past few weeks, and I can tell she has been too. My dad was a really funny person; I wish, if my memory was going to turn out so faulty, I’d...
Longreads: The Awl's Choire Sicha, Carrie Frye,... →
longreads:
November 2011
4 posts
2 tags
There’s this little moment in Ted Hughes’ collected letters when, shortly after he and Sylvia Plath got married, he’s writing to his sister and he says, Sylvia’s “had some good fortune lately. She sold a long rather bad poem to The Atlantic Monthly, which is one of the Mags in America, for $50. Then, last week, Poetry Chicago accepted six of her poems - one or two of...
July 2011
1 post
May 2011
1 post
February 2011
4 posts
Pretty thrilled and over the moon about this! →
Nicht Kunts
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...
derasso:
“She took a dim view of a society figure who became depressed and threw himself out of the window at his host’s chateau, landing in the moat (so that it was a long time before his body was found). Declaring this to be bad manners because lunch had been delayed, she added: “Listen. If you want to die, there are plenty of places in the world where you can go . You go to Dubrovnik, you put...