May 2012
14 posts
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New Project: iPad E-Book Featuring William H. Gass...
I am happy to announce that a personal project I’ve been working on for a few months is ready to meet the public: Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time (iTunes link), an iPad-only book pairing a previously unpublished 15,000-word essay by William H. Gass with a series of abstract photographs by Michael Eastman. I am the book’s editor and publisher, and I’m honored...
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"Not His Riches, But Ours"
A member of the Wallace-L listserv posted this Pascal quote this morning, commenting (insightfully) on how it brings to mind many statements DFW made about reading and indeed love:
When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel...
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"A Different Puff Than Yours" →
Barack Obama, writing in his early twenties with confidence and style to girlfriend Genevieve Cook, as published in Vanity Fair:
Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at...
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"Dilemma Protests" →
From “Protesters in Moscow Try New Tactics to Avoid Arrests,” in the NYT:
The evolving tactics in Moscow are not novel. In a primer on nonviolent protest, “Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle,” Gene Sharp, an American intellectual, described a “dilemma protest” as a performance of an action so inchoate and unorthodox that police are trapped. If they let it happen, they are...
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"Why Obama Couldn't Wait" →
Richard Socarides, writing at newyorker.com:
That is not to take anything away from the courage exhibited by President Obama today. His willingness to share with the American people his thinking, indeed his struggle, around this issue will help build a national consensus. Everyone is entitled to a journey on this issue.
I suspect that at the end of this national conversation the result will be...
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Gary Wills: "The Myth About Marriage" →
The Catholic writer, in a post at the New York Review of Books blog:
Those who do not want to let gay partners have the sacredness of sacramental marriage are relying on a Scholastic fiction of the thirteenth century to play with people’s lives, as the church has done ever since the time of Aquinas. The myth of the sacrament should not let people deprive gays of the right to natural marriage,...
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"Obama and the Passage of the North Carolina... →
A strong post from Amy Davidson, start to finish.
If there is a lesson in the North Carolina vote, it is that complacency on this issue is not a victimless stance.
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"Postscript: Adam Yauch" →
Terrific piece by Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker’s website. Yauch’s transition from celebrated youthful knucklehead to enlightened (and hugely productive) grown-up was admirable.
I can still remember listening to “Licensed to Ill” in 1987 for the first time, on a tape my 8th-grade classmate Chris made me. My parents were away at the time, and I was staying at my...
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April 2012
7 posts
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Michael Silverblatt Interviews William H. Gass →
The Bookworm host has previously referred to Gass as “our greatest living writer of prose in America.” Here, he calls him “one of my true living heroes.”
Speaking of admiration, I love this interview bit from Gass about Henry James:
James’ world is not to be found anywhere in the world. It’s too wonderful for that.
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Paul Ford on Facebook and Instagram →
At NYMag.com:
First, to understand this deal it’s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life.
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Skepticism in Montaigne's Day
A surprising and interesting passage from Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which I’m reading now:
There was only one exception to [Montaigne’s] “question everything” rule: he was careful to state that he considered his religious faith beyond doubt. He adhered to the received dogma of the Catholic...
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March 2012
21 posts
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Craig Mod on Building an App (and a Book) →
As thoughtful and personal as his previous pieces.
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"Codename: Svbtle" →
Dustin Curtis talks through his new blogging platform. Love this kind of thing.
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"Good Things About Twitter" →
I was actually in the early stages of writing a post about this same subject — that, contrary to what intelligent people like Jonathan Franzen and Tyler Brûlé have been saying or implying about Twitter (which they don’t use, and therefore don’t really know), it’s often not a replacement for reading, say, long-form journalism or high-quality fiction. It’s an enabler of it. I...
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Gruber on Daisey →
A strong piece, as expected.
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"The Man Who Sold the World" →
Ruaridh Nicoll profiles Tyler Brûlé for The Observer.
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Dwight Garner: "The Way We Read Now" →
Great piece in The New York Times, with clear-eyed (and entertaining) commentary from a writer and book critic about how technology has improved his reading life. This bit comes from his section on the smartphone:
Keep an audio book or two on your iPhone. Periodically I take the largest of my family’s dogs on long walks, and I stick my iPhone in my shirt pocket, its tiny speaker facing up. I’ve...
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"Witless Innuendo" →
I’ve always liked those end-of-review warnings in the NYT movie reviews — many seem carefully, satisfyingly phrased. The above links to a Tumbelog I started for the better examples.
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Ezra Klein: "The Unpersuaded" →
A fascinating New Yorker piece — subtitled “Who listens to a President?” — about the limits, and even potential drawbacks, of even the most finely shaped rhetoric amid our two-party system.
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A Reminder
A brief note, to myself as much as anyone, to say that increasingly my Let’s Absorb This mind is being met far too early by my How Could I Share This mind. So that, for instance, three sentences into reading an article or essay, a shift takes place and my mind’s job is now to decide how this interesting, attention-worthy material just might be shared — here on this or another blog, or...
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"Tips for Blago in Prison" →
Jeff Smith, about whose fall Jeannette Cooperman wrote during my St. Louis Magazine days, offers Blago a thorough, thoughtful, and memorable list of tips as the man heads off to prison. Among them:
You will have a nickname. It will probably be “Governor.” Accept that, but do so with deep humility….
Don’t change the TV channel, especially if women’s track is on, or...
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"Which Cover Would You Choose?" →
A behind-the-scenes post about how The New York Times Magazine chooses its covers (which are exceptional).
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"Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs" →
Greg Smith’s damning resignation letter, published in The New York Times:
What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients...
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"Radiohead’s Runaway Guitarist" →
Great profile of Jonny Greenwood in today’s New York Times Magazine. Greenwood’s soundtrack for “There Will Be Blood” has been a favorite of mine on Rdio for the past year.
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Joe Pollack Has Died
The hard-working, well-known, and friendly St. Louis dining, theater, and movie critic died Friday at age 81. The Post-Dipatch has an appropriately detailed obituary, and my friend George Mahe has a very nice post at his Relish blog, noting that Joe was at work the night before on five — five — movie reviews. I met Joe and his wife (and writing partner) Ann during my St. Louis Magazine days, when...
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"Tony Judt: A Final Victory" →
By Jennifer Homans, Judt’s widow, and published in The New York Review of Books. Lovely and sad.
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"Instapaper Placebo" →
Brilliant.
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Radiolab: Escape! →
I can’t say enough about this episode of Radiolab:
We kick things off with a true escape artist — a man who’s broken out of jail more times than anyone alive. We try to figure out why he keeps running… and whether he will ever stop. Then, the ingeniously simple question that led Isaac Newton to an enormous intellectual breakthrough: why doesn’t the moon fall out of the sky? In the...
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H-Omer Design Featured on the Goodsie Blog →
Hey, that’s my father-in-law. Well done, Omer!
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The Ryan Lizza Diet →
Part of The Atlantic’s “What I Read” series, which I’m always interested in. Two notable bits: His props for Twitter as the go-to, pre-any-kind-of-publication morning media spot (he’s taken to it in a big way) and his description of Newsweek as “very underrated.” That second bit surprised me — will have to look again.
February 2012
25 posts
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Mandy Brown: "Deploy" →
Really like this post:
Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or...
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Aleksander Hemon: "National Subjects" →
Another very good (and very dispiriting) non-fiction piece from the Bosnian-American writer, published in Guernica’s January 2012 issue.
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5 Highlights from Germany & Spain →
My post for the “Artful Travels” series at the TOKY Blog.
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WatchKara Swisher’s technology-focused interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick at D: Dive Into Media last month. I admire Remnick a tremendous amount, not just for his editorial and writing muscle but for his sharp humor and candor. (Enjoyed his comment during this interview about the “evangelical smugness” of those younger dinner-party companions who would tell him his...
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Tim Parks Defends E-Books →
At the New York Review of Books blog, a refreshingly contrarian post:
The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the...
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