October 2009
50 posts
The New Yorker: Last-Minute Costume Ideas
Halloween is tomorrow, but you don’t have a costume? Here are some classy, simple ideas you can whip up in a jiffy.
A bug: Cover yourself in dead bugs.
Scary dog: Get a scary dog from the pound and let it loose in a party. The next day, tell everyone that the dog was you.
A fireman: Light yourself on fire. Ta-da! It is Fire Man! (Or Fire Woman, depending on you.)
Your twin brother or sister:...
“Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular...”
– Adam Kirsch on Ayn Rand
“There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion,...”
– Linus (via krzywonos)
Rock and Roll Suicide →
JM Harper on Kanye West’s We Were Once a Fairytale
Stockholm's bunnies burned to keep Swedes warm →
Sounds like it should be an onion article.
Heaven or Hell?
Being confined confined to a country chateau for ten days with seventy-five academics who are obsessed with deconstruction is some people’s idea of heaven and other people’s idea of hell.
[Mark C. Taylor in Field Notes from Elsewhere]
Free Douthat →
3 tags
Writers as Readers
Underlying the series’ preference for writers appears to be…the belief that someone’s being a good writer makes her eo ipso a good reader—which is the same reasoning that undergirds most blurbs and MFA programs, and is both logically invalid and empirically false (trust me).
[David Foster Wallace in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007]
“i just threw out the love of my...
1 tag
“Some sort of personal quota was exceeded at around age thirty-five.I now...”
– David Foster Wallace
Summer Account
They spent the summer days applying for jobs and writing reviews, the nights drinking bourbon at the pub under a picture of James Joyce, listening to Wilco b-sides and trying to figure out their failed relationships.
"The most revolutionary new musical instrument of... →
“If I argue that football is simply a game, you might say that I am failing to...”
– Slavoj Zizek
“I knew I’d really licked the drug-habit one morning when I couldn’t...”
– Billy Holiday
4 tags
Auden on Reviewing
“To write about a poet, for others who have not read him is not criticism but reviewing, and reviewing is not really a respectable occupation. When a critic examines the work of a well-known poet, he may, if he is lucky, succeed revealing something about it which readers had failed to see for themselves; if, on the other hand, what he says is commonplace or false or half-true, readers have...
Douthat, Salam, n+1
n+1 in conversation with Reihan Salam and the NY Times’s Ross Douthat
The New School’s Tishman Auditorium 66 W. 12th St. Tuesday, October 20 at 8:00pm Free and open to the public
Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic and a blogger for TheAtlantic.com.
Reihan Salam is a fellow at the New America...
The Value of Reticence
Not everything that can be said should be said. Reticence is a particularly important virtue, especially in a time when everything as well as everybody is overexposed. Obscenity, we have learned, is the loss of interiority that occurs when the private becomes public and the public invades the private. All too often people become complicit in the colonization of their own inwardness by...
Dangerdoom featuring Talib Kweli - Old School...
1 tag
If you're in Chicago tomorrow, you should come to... →
We can hang out. Drinks are on me.
WatchWunderkammer Artist Series: Louis & The Hunt
Polaroid will re-launch the legendary Polaroid One... →
Interracial couple denied marriage license in La. →
“I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”
I’m…speechless.
“This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone...”
– Michael Chabon [via ayjay]
Dracula and the "lesser art"
Suppose you’re smart enough to do the interesting things (well, I find them interesting) with different kinds of writing and narrators that Stoker does in Dracula. Suppose you are imaginative enough, and with a wide enough range of reference, to take (as I gather Stoker has done) a wide array of literary references, myths, and so on and tell your own story so that it becomes (as, without a doubt,...
The political use of Hell
Indeed only the fear of being ruled by the majority could induce the few to fulfill their political duties. The few cannot persuade the multitude of truth because the truth cannot become the object of persuasion and persuasion is the only way to deal with the multitude. But while the multitude cannot be instructed in the doctrine of the truth it can be persuaded to believe an opinion as...
1 tag
WatchSandy Koufax pitching.
Adopt a Liberal Home Page →
I wish this was a joke.
“What have Elfriede Jelinek, Imre Kertész and Wislawa Szymborska in common, pray?...”
– Herta Müller? Who she? -Times Online
"The Whore of Mensa," Woody Allen →
….”Oh, in that case, go on back.” he said. He pressed a button. A wall of books opened, and I walked like a lamb into that bustling pleasure palace known as Flossie’s. Red flocked wallpaper and a Victorian decor set the tone. Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics ...
I hope these guys get the market value for sulfur... →
(via richarddreyfuss)
Regretsy →
Crafts gone wrong
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past →
Time do some research to see if I’m related to him.
Why Capitalism Fails →
Boston Globe article on Hyman Minsky. Worth the read.
1 tag
how to run a literary estate →
Alan Jacobs on working with Edward Mendelson, Auden’s Literary Executor
“Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,” Bob...
“The ancients hardly saw themselves. Today we see ourselves in all positions....”
– Fernando Pessoa
The Museum Culture
So vital is the part played by the art museum in our approach to works of art to-day that we find it difficult to realize that no museums exist, none has ever existed, in lands where the civilization of modern Europe is, or was, unknown; and that, even amongst us, they have existed for barely two hundred years. They bulked so large in the nineteenth century and are so much part of our lives...
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
– Robert Frost (via krzywonos)
My Fridge Food - Recipes you already have in your... →
[via Wes]
