December 2010
33 posts
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“The next year, when she was not liking me at all, she suggested I go to Mexico,...”
– Paul Bowles, on Gertrude Stein’s suggestion to move to Tangier. I once spent a great Bowlesian night at the Tanger Inn. http://www.paulbowles.org/danielhalpern.html
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All I want in the New Year is for you not to kill...
It’s been three years now and you likely would’ve assumed yourself forgotten by now. Sorry to disappoint.
The shit’s largely the same — worse in a lot of ways, actually — though there are some things you missed that redeem it all. I know you didn’t know about Carol Emshwiller, Bragi Ólaffson, Tove Jansson & Stanley Crawford, but you would have, had you...
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seedy: Susan Sontag - On Photography (1977) →
c-d:
On Photography, 1977 (OCR’d PDF, 1.6mb)
In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Sontag discusses many examples of modern photography. Among these, she contrasts Diane Arbus’s work with that of…
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I write sentences. They comport themselves in any...
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The role of the writer being is to write. This should happen while listening. To the extent that writing and listening are happening simultaneously, there will be critique, difficult and pleasurable and getting larger.
Rob Mclennan’s 12...
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It's all in the growl.
I may know how to convey a mostly cogent thought. But I’ll never be able to growl.
shitmystudentswrite:
Deathcore bands, and fans, do not know how to growl like a death metal band. They think it is cool to scream and make pig noises when it actually makes them look like a poser. Metal heads know how to growl well, and they sound good when they growl.
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Sharks, by Oliver
At some point I inherited a nice hardcover first edition of EL Doctorow’s Loon Lake. Rifling through it today while packing (haven’t read it) to discover this story tucked into page 140, an exercise in penmanship, from the looks of it:
Sharks
Sarks are very scarey to some people. The movie Jaws I, II, and III is a movie about a great white. That shark was very rare. So it was very...
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It was agreed that since the meaning of the...
Just Do It
That’s my problem. I’ve been wearing the wrong brand of sneakers.
shitmystudentswrite:
In Heaven’s Gate, after you put on your Nikes, you leave the earth and your body gets abducted by aliens and I don’t really know what happens after that but it looked like they knew where they were going.
Weekly Chasing of My Own Tale:
iambikaudio:
via...
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“Gee you’re easy to interview.”...
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Lapham's Quarterly: Something's different around... →
laphamsquarterly:
We came to a realization a few months ago.
Tumblr and LQ, it just makes sense.
Here’s what we do all day at LQ: we read and research and fact check and read and Twitter and read and eat a sandwich and read and read and read. We read a lot, and this Tumblr is where we can share all of our strange…
Lapham's Quarterly: Something's different around... →
laphamsquarterly:
We came to a realization a few months ago.
Tumblr and LQ, it just makes sense.
Here’s what we do all day at LQ: we read and research and fact check and read and Twitter and read and eat a sandwich and read and read and read. We read a lot, and this Tumblr is where we can share all of our strange…
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"I know I'm supposed to have a human response, but...
@thisrecording has excerpted and photo-illustrated the text of Leonard Michaels’ Journal. It should be beheld, as Michaels’ pen didn’t leak a faulty word, as far as I know.
I read The Deal at the ‘Cast a few years ago. Also fine.
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Josipovici:
… they [Rabelais, Cervantes,...
Have nothing to say, but use a great many words,...
Wait, is retumblring something I posted on iambikaudio weird, in an own-tail-chasing sort of way?
iambikaudio:
@thisrecording has Langston Hughes’ nine other easy lessons for how to be a bad writer. As well as Orwell, Sontag, Maugham, Duras, Creeley, Steinbeck, Ashbery, in an incredible series: Why, How to Write.
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From the story your ears may catch later...
lazenby:
The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward all one night, while people were sleeping, until it reached the Park. There, I stopped it; at dawn the northernmost edges lay over the Plaza; the free-hanging motion was frivolous and gentle. But experiencing a faint irritation at stopping, even to protect...
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“in no particular order, just read them.”
Donald Barthelme syllabus, dusted off from the archives.
From the Believer
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McNally Jackson Bookmongers: On Amazon →
mcnallyjackson:
Today Amazon is getting a lot of good press for donating $44,000 to Words Without Borders. As my co-monger Dustin pointed out on Twitter, “Amazon does not, does not, care about the written word,” and that “Amazon is a very real reason publishers and booksellers cannot afford to…
Intelligence, facility, resourcefulness are not...
Jack Vance magazine scans, via @sfsignal
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