April 2011
33 posts
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"I Have News for You" - Tony Hoagland
There are people who do not see a broken playground swing as a symbol of ruined childhood
and there are people who don’t interpret the behavior of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.
There are people who don’t walk past an empty swimming pool and think about past pleasures unrecoverable
and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians. I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings
do not send their sinuous feeder roots deep into the potting soil of others’ emotional lives
as if they were greedy six-year-olds sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;
and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.
Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon? There are some people, unlike me and you,
who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as unattainable as that moon; thus, they do not later have to waste more time defaming the object of their former ardor.
Or consequently run and crucify themselves in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.
I have news for you— there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room
and open a window to let the sweet breeze in and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.
[Thanks, luke]
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“Jane Mecom had 12 children; she buried 11. And then, she put down her pen. Today, two and a half centuries later, the nation’s bookshelves sag with doorstop biographies of the founders; Tea Partiers dressed as Benjamin Franklin call for an end to social services for the poor; and the “Path to Prosperity” urges a return to “America’s founding ideals of liberty, limited government and equality under the rule of law.” But the story of Jane Mecom is a reminder that, especially for women, escaping poverty has always depended on the opportunity for an education and the ability to control the size of their families.”
—Poor Jane’s Almanac
A six-year-old girl writes a letter to God. And the Archbishop of Canterbury answers. →
blogs.telegraph.co.uk
Lovely. [via Wesley and Benjamin]
How These Two White Guys Wound Up In This Kendrick Perkins Family Photo →
deadspin.com
Phenomenal article about the guys behind Perkisabeast.com
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“But the day continues. It always does. The Japanese—a pragmatic people, a realistic people—deal with the situation by having a meeting at a long white conference table. Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon!” and so we put down our glasses and sigh. The afternoon—free from the blur of hangover or the fug of sleep—is when our shared predicament on this planet becomes clear.”
— Zadie Smith in Killing Orson Welles at Midnight
Bookworm: David Lipsky and Rick Moody on 'The Pale King' →
kcrw.com
Michael Silverblatt’s slow, meandering voice is annoying, but if you can get past that, the program is pretty interesting.
“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will not give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté.”
—DFW, Infinite Jest
Guernica/The Straight Dope: Interview with David Simon
Bill Moyers: I did a documentary about the South Bronx called The Fire Next Door and what I learned very early is that the drug trade is an inverted form of capitalism.
David Simon: Absolutely. In some ways it’s the most destructive form of welfare that we’ve established, the illegal drug trade in these neighborhoods. It’s basically like opening up a Bethlehem Steel in the middle of the South Bronx or in West Baltimore and saying, “You guys are all steelworkers.” Just say no? That’s our answer to that? And by the way, if it was chewing up white folk, it wouldn’t have gone on for as long as it did.
[here]
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“Do you get social academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?”
—Stephen King (via lukescommonplacebook)
“Shteyngart says the first thing that happened when he bought an iPhone “was that New York fell away … It disappeared. Poof.” That’s the first thing I noticed too: the city disappeared, along with any will to experience. New York, so densely populated and supposedly sleepless, must be the most efficient place to hone observational powers. But those powers are now dulled in me. I find myself preferring the blogs of remote strangers to my own observations of present ones. Gone are the tacit alliances with fellow subway riders, the brief evolution of sympathy with pedestrians. That predictable progress of unspoken affinity is now interrupted by an impulse to either refresh a page or to take a website-worthy photo. I have the nervous hand-tics of a junkie. For someone whose interest in other people’s private lives was once endless, I sure do ignore them a lot now.”
—Alice Gregory (via Nicholas Carr)
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“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”
—DFW, The Pale King
Czeslaw Milosz, "Readings"
You asked me what is the good of reading the Gospels in Greek.
I answer that it is proper that we move our finger
Along letters more enduring than those carved in stone,
And that, slowly pronouncing each syllable,
We discover the true dignity of speech.
Compelled to be attentive we shall think of that epoch
No more distant than yesterday, though the heads of caesars
On coins are different today. Yet it is still the same eon.
Fear and desire are the same, oil and wine
And bread mean the same. So does the fickleness of the throng
Avid for miracles as in the past. Even mores,
Wedding festivities, drugs, laments for the dead
Only seem to differ. Then, too, for example,
There were plenty of persons whom the text calls
Daimonizomenoi, that is, the demonized
Or if you prefer, the bedeviled (as for “the possessed”
It’s no more than the whim of a dictionary).
Convulsions, foam at the mouth, the gnashing of teeth
Were not considered signs of talent.
The demonized had no access to print and screens,
Rarely engaging in arts and literature.
But the Gospel parable remains in force:
That the spirit mastering them may enter swine,
Which, exasperated by such a sudden clash
Between two natures, theirs and the Luciferic,
Jump into water and drown (which occurs repeatedly).
And thus on every page a persistent reader
Sees twenty centuries as twenty days
In a world which one day will come to its end.
[Berkeley, 1969]
[via wesleyhill]
Chicks With Steve Buscemeyes →
chickswithstevebuscemeyes.tumblr.com
uhhhh…..internet win.
[via Barclay]
You
TV On The Radio
TV on the Radio, “You”
Coming soon to break-up mix-tapes…
Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library →
theawl.com
via The Awl via Barclay
“This is the task of preaching…the task of telling men that they can have images if they like, they may do no harm, but they are not what we are talking about, none of them are God: God is not part of the world, God is the unfathomable mystery of love by which the world is; there are no gods, there is only this love.”
—Herbert McCabe, “On being Dominican”
“In the 1950s, Putnam explains, America was a country with “three mutually tolerant but not connected faiths — Protestant, Catholic, and Jew.” Those faiths were closely tied to ethnicity; boundaries were very strong not only between the faiths, but between their denominations. Americans were likely to inherit their religions, and to pass them on to their children. Today, Putnam and Campbell argue, those differences don’t matter as much. Between one-third and one-half of all marriages are interfaith marriages. More than one-third of Americans switch denominations or even religions, often several times. Many people have diverse social networks, make friends across religious lines, and regard all religions as containing “basic truths.” American religion is less about “hermetically sealed and inherited religious faiths” and more about tolerant choice.”
—A preacher, a rabbi, and a bishop walk into a bar… - The Boston Globe
“It was in trying to capture that hectic, chaotic reality — and the nuanced, conflicted, ever-mutating thoughts of his characters — that Wallace’s synesthetic prose waxed so prolix, his sentences unspooling into tangled skeins of words, replete with qualifying phrases and garrulous footnotes. And this is why his novels, stories and articles so often defied closure and grew and grew and grew, sprouting tendrils and digressions and asides — because in almost everything Wallace wrote, including “The Pale King,” he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life.”
—Michiko Kakutani’s review of ‘The Pale King’
