a portrait of the artist as a young man

"While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian’s finding that we..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:56:12 -0500

““While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian’s finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede—in fact we find it intolerable to imagine—that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning… . Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry: we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth.””

- Malcom Gladwell, “The Gift of Doubt” [via Paul]

"As regards my own attention span and concentrational abilities? I’m as much pond life by now as..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:58:20 -0500

“As regards my own attention span and concentrational abilities? I’m as much pond life by now as anyone else is, but I do try, I make an effort – on a dreary pragmatic level, this involves me not going online in the mornings. If I reach to the bedside table first thing and start checking email, that’s pretty much it, I’m in flitty online mode for the day, and I won’t get any work done. So I don’t go online now until the afternoon, and this means that I still get some work done. I don’t want it to be all doom-and-gloom here – I do believe that humans still need and will continue to need stories, and we just have to get through the sea of distractions (somehow) and deliver them.”

- The Irish Writer Kevin Barry in an interview

Writing for the Reader | an interview with Victor LaValle

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:59:16 -0500

Writing for the Reader | an interview with Victor LaValle

"Walker Evans, whom no one has ever accused of letting shit slide in the department of human..."

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:02:00 -0500

“Walker Evans, whom no one has ever accused of letting shit slide in the department of human observation, once wrote that for Agee, “human beings were at least possibly immortal and literally sacred souls.”

- Sullivan, again

"The more nonfiction you read, and from further back in time, the harder it gets to pronounce the..."

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:14:00 -0500

“The more nonfiction you read, and from further back in time, the harder it gets to pronounce the word “new” in New Journalism with a straight face. I’m thinking partly here of pieces like Ned Ward’s “Trip to Jamaica,” 1698—Edward Ward, seminal Grub Street hack, writing sarcastically and in a detail-studded first-person prose, a reportorial style that pointed forward to Defoe while listening to Bunyan, about an actual trip he’d made to Jamaica with other prospective settlers. Sixteen ninety-eight—that’s early. When Ward published his dispatch, London’s printers were just emerging from under the so-called Licensing Act, which for half a century had restricted them to a limited range of material. Parliament let the act expire, or “lapse,” in 1695, sparking the Grub Street explosion of magazines and newspapers that helps mark the dawn of the eighteenth century. Modern English-language journalism begins New, and never really looks back.”

- John Jeremiah Sullivan in “Southern Exposure”

johannacecilia: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium A Teenage Emily...

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 10:16:53 -0500

johannacecilia:

Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium

A Teenage Emily Dickinson’s Careful Collection of Dried Flowers

(via slowpilgrim)

explore-blog: Humans of BEA – Brandon Stanton of Humans of New...

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 09:12:40 -0500

explore-blog:

Humans of BEA – Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York visits Book Expo America and comes back with a wonderful photoessay.

"The kind of people adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy types hate the most are other adult,..."

Thu, 30 May 2013 14:09:08 -0500

“The kind of people adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy types hate the most are other adult, white, middle-class, liberal-artsy types. And that is what animates Slate, that annoyance. It’s partially self hatred and partially the hatred of those who resemble you in many ways but who, in your own mind, fall far short of your own standards. I’m not suggesting that that’s a ridiculous attitude; we all feel some version of these feelings, and unless you’re of the opinion that all people are equal in temperament and character, they can be rational. But I am saying that satisfying this desire, to grind away the resentment of the digitally-inclined creative (or “creative”) bourgeois, is the real ethos of Slate. The contrarianism is a means, not an end; cheesing off other AWMCLATs will often involve defying the conventional wisdom in a kind of showy way.”

- L’Hôte: Slate’s Rosetta Stone (via ayjay)

8mm still of an old man reading on his dock in Thailand. From a...

Tue, 28 May 2013 09:58:00 -0500

8mm still of an old man reading on his dock in Thailand. From a British vacation film shot sometime in the fifties or sixties.

"Dear Mr Michael: This is a long-shot, but are you the same David J. Michael that wrote a book..."

Tue, 28 May 2013 07:39:00 -0500

“

Dear Mr Michael:

This is a long-shot, but are you the same David J. Michael that wrote a book called Death Tour, published by Signet back in the late 1970s?

”

- If there was ever a time when I wish I could have said, “Yes,” this is it.

unapologetic-book: An Orthodox priest asperges the press corps...

Tue, 28 May 2013 07:37:02 -0500

unapologetic-book:

An Orthodox priest asperges the press corps at the launch of Soyuz Expedition 36 (NASA)

"… an illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:49:10 -0500

“… an illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed.”

- Soren Kierkegaard (via lukescommonplacebook)

"I write a little every day, without hope and without despair."

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:27:26 -0500

“I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.”

- Isak Dinesen (via kentwoodyard)

"What makes “The Little Way” such an illuminating book, though, is that it doesn’t just uncritically..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 08:01:25 -0500

“

What makes “The Little Way” such an illuminating book, though, is that it doesn’t just uncritically celebrate the form of community that its author rediscovered in his hometown. It also explains why he left in the first place: because being a bookish kid made him a target for bullying, because his relationship with his father was oppressive, because he wasn’t as comfortable as his sister in a world of traditions, obligations, rules. Because community can imprison as well as sustain, and sometimes it needs to be escaped in order to be appreciated.

In today’s society, that escape is easier than ever before. And that’s a great gift to many people: if you don’t have much in common with your relatives and neighbors, if you’re gay or a genius (or both), if you’re simply restless and footloose, the world can feel much less lonely than it would have in the past. Our society is often kinder to differences and eccentricities than past eras, and our economy rewards extraordinary talent more richly than ever before.

The problem is that as it’s grown easier to be remarkable and unusual, it’s arguably grown harder to be ordinary. To be the kind of person who doesn’t want to write his own life script, or invent her own idiosyncratic career path. To enjoy the stability and comfort of inherited obligations and expectations, rather than constantly having to strike out on your own. To follow a “little way” rather than a path of great ambition. To be more like Ruthie Leming than her brother.

Too often, and probably increasingly, not enough Americans will have what the Lemings had — a place that knew them intimately, a community to lean on, a strong network in a time of trial.

And absent such blessings, it’s all too understandable that some people enduring suffering and loneliness would end up looking not for help or support, but for a way to end it all.

”

- Ross Douthat, reflecting on Rod Dreher’s new book (via wesleyhill)

"John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, has been imprisoned for describing — leaking —..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 07:25:45 -0500

“John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, has been imprisoned for describing — leaking — torture tactics to the press, but no one in the agency has been punished for torturing people, and the CIA’s investigations of its own alleged abuses remain classified.”

- Obama’s Plumbers - By James Traub | Foreign Policy

"I was walking down Great Russell Street a few weeks ago when a young man emerged from a house..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 06:27:57 -0500

“I was walking down Great Russell Street a few weeks ago when a young man emerged from a house wearing sandals, khaki trousers, a backwards University of Tennessee baseball cap, and a yellow T-shirt that had FUTURE WORLD LEADERS CONFERENCE emblazoned on it. This, I thought, is why they dislike us: sockless boys from Knoxville asserting their place in the hegemonic order a block from where Marx wrote Das Kapital.”

- Christian Lorentzen · Short Cuts

"To my way of thinking, something latent in our news media became overt and catastrophic around the..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 19:42:00 -0500

“To my way of thinking, something latent in our news media became overt and catastrophic around the time of the O.J. Simpson trial. Because the premise of the crime’s national importance was obviously false, it had to be bolstered. A new style of presentation had to be invented. To wring thousands of chorus of coverage from what could have been summarized in a couple of minutes every few weeks, a new rhetorical strategy was developed, or—let’s be generous—evolved. IF someone has to lecture ten hours a day on a piece of dog crap in a bowl, adjustments will need to be made. To say the ridiculous things that will need to be said, to sustain the illusion that the dog crap is serious news (“Dog-crap expert Jesse Toville provides his assessment of the probable size of the dog and its psychological state at time-of-crappage!”), distortions of voice, face, and format will be required.”

- George Saunders in “The Braindead Megaphone.”

"Luhrmann’s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:10:39 -0500

“Luhrmann’s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.”

- David Denby: “The Great Gatsby” Review : The New Yorker

"I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:15:19 -0500

“I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.”

- Yeats, from “The Winding Stair”

[via this Robert Bly interview]

smithsonianmag: Delivering a dinosaur to the Boston Museum of...

Mon, 06 May 2013 15:35:36 -0500

smithsonianmag:

Delivering a dinosaur to the Boston Museum of Science - Arthur Pollock - 1984

via atlasobscura