October 2011
1 post
Madison Avenue’s Vision of Love →
During regular season, baseball fans endured a summer full of extreme close-ups of a big-eyed girl demanding constant cute-isms of a weary boyfriend; she looks panicked when nauseating terms of endearment are not tripping off his tongue. In a voiceover, the anxious male—trying to avoid what we must understand will be an inevitable “scene” if he does not cough up a coo—nimbly saves himself by...
June 2011
2 posts
NPR on Alan Jacobs' "The Pleasures of Reading in... →
Look for my review in Comment later this summer!
Oh technology
When I was a teenager and had first discovered the Internet (I am not that old, but I grew up in a very rural area and we had dial-up till I graduated from college and moved away - and yes, I earned an entire technology degree on dial-up! Good times), the warm weather seasons were a time of guilt because I had things I had to / wanted to be doing indoors, but I continually felt as if I should be...
May 2011
9 posts
Tonight's Observation
“Better Off Ted”: surprisingly funny show. Surprisingly poorly named.
A Declaration
It’s decided: I love summer break. I am working just as much as I do during the semester, and I have just as many projects, but I get to camp out in a Brooklyn cafe three blocks from Home and let Australian baristas make my coffee and watch people walk by as I pound out my thousands of words, and I won’t lie: that definitely beats a cramped, noisy shared office on the fifteenth floor...
Get Over Where You're From
“I am from the San Fernando Valley. For many years, I was ashamed of this fact, thinking if I was not from the big city of New York or the farm fields of Iowa that I had nothing to say. Once I got over who I was and where I was from, I found my love for Los Angeles.” — P.T. Anderson, in the introduction to the shooting script for Magnolia
Turns out
It does.
I am testing Posterous
Posterous has long intrigued me as a web service that has the potential to save me time, but I haven’t had much time to fiddle with it until recently. So I’m testing my first post, which should show up on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and my blog. Let’s see if it works.
Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World →
Words →
Extras →
Over there →
April 2011
5 posts
Descending Theology: The Resurrection →
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-04-17 →
On the road again →
“[Martin] Sheen, who is still married to Templeton, has been sober for 20 years...”
– From “Apocalypse Sheen: The Sheen clan and The Way to redemption” at Independent Woman.
Awesome.
(via pejohnston)
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-04-03 →
March 2011
3 posts
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-03-27 →
“Borders ended up caught between the variety of the Internet and the intimacy of...”
– More at How Borders lost its soul
February 2011
8 posts
10 Greatest Essays Ever →
salon:
mcnallyjackson:
A whole slew of greats—Eula Biss! Ander Monson! Luc Sante! Lawrence Weschler!—pick their 10 favorite essays.
We love long reads!
“The older I get the more suspicious I am of spirituality as something ethereal,...”
– Gregory Wolfe, Religious but Not Spiritual
Heck, just read the whole thing.
(via triadic)
Story's End: Grief and Writing a Mother's Death →
longreads:
It was my mother who had long ago planted in me the habit of writing things down in order to understand them. When I was five, she gave me a red corduroy-covered notebook for Christmas. I sat in my floral nightgown turning the blank pages, puzzled.
“What do I do with it?” I wanted to know.
“You write down things that happened to you that day.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
...
Brooklyn - 36 Hours - NYTimes.com →
Living on the Edge (of the City) →
utnereader:
Humanity will continue to move toward city centers where the population, empowered by technological advances, will create societies in which everything necessary will be within everyone’s reach. Civilization is entering the utopian age of the megacity. Or maybe not.
Writing for Foreign Policy, Joel Kotkin suggests that cities may not be all they’re cracked up to be.
“Charles Baxter: A good review suggests why your soul might be altered if you...”
– twitter.com/LAReviewofBooks
The Roots of Overheated Rhetoric - NYTimes.com →
January 2011
33 posts
A Hurried Linkdump →
“But the number of religious-theme American selections this year suggests that a...”
– Turns Out Sundance Thrives on More Than Just Money, Manohla Dargis, NYTimes
Entertainment Weekly likes Over the Rhine's "The... →
The Seduction →
After years of favoring the endurance-test approach to teaching literature, a professor focuses on how to make books spark to life for her students
FT.com / Life & Arts - The art of good writing →
“To paraphrase O’Connor, you know what you are and what you believe by what you...”
– A.G. Harmon in today’s Good Letters
Quidditch
Dad: twitter? thats the same thing as quidditch right?
“But he [John Henry Newman] also saw that a love of truth and therefore of...”
– From “The Reasons the Heart Wants,” by David Mills.
“Is this really fair? Certainly some students will succeed in writing wonderful...”
– From The Almighty Essay
Hey, Ladies: Check Out My Faculty ID. →
Hey ladies, want a drink? Oh, yeah, that’s my university ID. Sure, here, check it out. That’s right, I’m part of the faculty.
Two spaces after a period: Why you should never,... →
Please, friends. Save your friendly neighborhood editor some angst.
“Where you invest your love / you invest your life”
– Mumford & Sons, “Awake My Soul”
Jonathan Lethem on Wikipedia's 10th Anniversary →
I’m always being informed that if I find something wrong on Wikipedia I’m supposed to “fix” it. Good god. How bullying, really. Let me free up my Mort Sahl indignation at the contemporary world here, for an instant. Why on earth should anyone have to fix and re-fix this bland-but-irregular, passive-aggressively smug, endlessly fallible, super-grudge-sensitive...
“We don’t have a flight simulator for stock markets where we can run a whole...”
– Financial journalist Felix Salmon on the unpredictable nature of high-frequency computerized transactions on Wall Street. (via nprfreshair)
“But why do you give it to Sofia Coppola? Why? Because you want to encourage her,...”
– Bill Murray, in his speech about Sofia Coppola at the National Board of Review last night.
“This bountiful and lovely thought that all creatures are pleasing to...”
– Wendell Berry, “Economy and Pleasure” (1988)
Food That Sounds Delicious →
utnereader:
A dish at London’s Fat Duck restaurant called “Sound of the Sea” looks a little unconventional right out of the kitchen. It’s a plate filled with shellfish, seaweed, foam, and “sand” made from fine-ground ice cream cone, eel, and vegetable powder—molecular gastronomy fare, designed to separate flavor from form and texture. The pièce de résistance is even more ethereal: Alongside...
“If you’re no stranger to such soul-paralyzing mind states as the poem...”
– Mary Karr, in her introduction to the Modern Library edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
“I’m not naïve about the business of writing. It’s hard to write alone. But I’m...”
– http://imagejournal.org/page/blog/art-and-positive-outcomes