a portrait of the artist as a young man

Map of the Relationships of the X-Men

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:45:00 -0600

Map of the Relationships of the X-Men:

[via Barclay]

Daily Drop Cap

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:35:33 -0600

Daily Drop Cap:

An illustrative initial every day

Literary criminals, caught on paper

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:39:11 -0600

Literary criminals, caught on paper:

The Believer asked the “forensic artist” Barbara Anderson to sketch eight literary criminals, working from descriptive details offered by their creators.

[via sarzhaplus]

“My grandfather was born and raised on our New Zealand...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:37:15 -0600

“My grandfather was born and raised on our New Zealand farm. He and my grandmother were married nearly 60 years. Preparing for a photo in the barley, my grandmother lovingly reached up to adjust his hat. This was his last harvest.” (Photo and caption by Gemma Collier)

[From National Geographic’s International Photography Competition, 2009 via The Big Picture.]

patrickmoberg’s Internet Vices [via alaina]

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:06:00 -0600

patrickmoberg’s Internet Vices

[via alaina]

Pitchfork…. [via Jason]

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:51:48 -0600

Pitchfork….

[via Jason]

Support Wunderkammer with your Amazon purchases

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:07:57 -0600

Support Wunderkammer with your Amazon purchases:

Dear Readers,

If you’re buying any holiday gifts—or anything, really—at Amazon, perhaps you’ll consider using the above link. A small percentage of the purchase will go to support Wunderkammer, the magazine that I edit, so that it can eventually pay its wonderful writers. Maybe you could even bookmark the link and use it for all your future Amazon purchases.

If you’re interested in learning more about other ways to support Wunderkammer, click here.

1962 ad in Life Magazine. Ironic.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:03:00 -0600

1962 ad in Life Magazine. Ironic.

TIME Magazine Corpus of American English

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:44:00 -0600

TIME Magazine Corpus of American English:

TIME magazine text from the 1920s to the 2000s— you can search for word frequencies by decade really easily.

[via ericapolis]

"Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing."

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:12:41 -0600

“Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.””

- Cormac McCarthy

Bouncers in Starbucks

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:55:21 -0600

I wrote a chunk of this column at a local Starbucks. One seat over from me, some dude in his 40s was listening to music on his headphones, playing online Scrabble and occasionally talking loud calls on his cell phone. How much do you have to hate your own apartment, house, wife or girlfriend that you say, “I can’t stand it here anymore, I’m going to Starbucks to play online Scrabble?” Last week, someone brought work to the same Starbucks, then proceeded to sing and hum to the songs they were playing despite everyone else glaring at her. Of course, that didn’t top what happened to me nearly two years ago, when some crazy dude grabbed a New York Times from the newspaper rack, brought it into the unisex bathroom, proceeded to drop anchor for the next 15 minutes, then emerged from the bathroom holding the newspaper like Dad coming out of the john on a Saturday morning.

Now, in a perfect world, people would only go to a coffeehouse to eat, drink, write, read, study or converse. You can’t turn it into your personal office. You can’t act like it’s your house. You can’t make loud phone calls and sing along to music. You can’t sit in a comfy chair not drinking, not eating and not doing anything other than staring at everyone else. But since people can’t seem to get the hang of this, here’s my suggestion: Every coffee place should designate one employee (a barista, waitress, pastry chef or whomever) as a de facto bouncer. It becomes their job to jettison loiterers, loud talkers, losers, weirdos and everyone else. Maybe they could even wear different uniforms. We could call them “coolers.” This would work. Until then, I will remain peeved.

[Bill Simmons via Kyle]

"Unfriend" is the New Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:23:17 -0600

"Unfriend" is the New Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year

"a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who..."

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:12:00 -0600

“a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.”

- Steven Pinker on Malcolm Gladwell

Can America Fail?

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 02:38:06 -0600

The first systemic failure America has suffered is groupthink. Looking back at the origins of the current financial crisis, it is amazing that American society accepted the incredible assumptions of economic gurus such as Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin that unregulated financial markets would naturally deliver economic growth and serve the public good. In 2003, Greenspan posed this question: “The vast increase in the size of the over-the-counter derivatives markets is the result of the market finding them a very useful vehicle. And the question is, should these be regulated?” His own answer was that the state should not go beyond regular banking regulation because “these derivative transactions are transactions among professionals.” In short, the financial players would regulate themselves.

This is manifest nonsense. The goal of these financial professionals was always to enhance their personal wealth, not to serve the public interest. So why was Greenspan’s nonsense accepted by American society? The simple and amazing answer is that most Americans assumed that their country has a rich and vibrant “marketplace of ideas” in which all ideas are challenged. Certainly, America has the freest media in the world. No subject is taboo. No sacred cow is immune from criticism. But the paradox here is that the belief that American society allows every idea to be challenged has led Americans to assume that every idea is challenged. They have failed to notice when their minds have been enveloped in groupthink. Again, failure occurs when you do not conceive of failure.

[more here]

"I have the same letter from about six different people. One from Australia, one from Germany, one..."

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:54:21 -0600

“I have the same letter from about six different people. One from Australia, one from Germany, one from England, but they all said the same thing. They said, “I started reading your book after dinner and I finished it 3:45 the next morning, and I got up and went upstairs and I got my kids up and I just sat there in the bed and held them.””

- Cormac McCarthy, answering the question of what sort of responses his novel The Road has received from fathers (via @epjohnson) (via wesleyhill)

Andrew Moore “Swedish Schoolroom” I sat down with...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:35:44 -0600

Andrew Moore “Swedish Schoolroom”

I sat down with Andrew today for an interview for Wunderkammer. Soon to be published.

Poetry and Public Relevance

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:48:24 -0600

Here is a poem Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote for his mother in her extreme old age:

I wish I could carry you in my arms
from your life to nothingness
the way you carried me, when I was a child,
to the cradle from your breasts.

Notice the role of desire: I wish. The loving dialogue, a man speaking to his mother, giving back the care he received. The powerful, defiant transformations: the poet turns approaching death into a woman’s breasts, and nothingness into a cradle. Notice too the near hopelessness of the desire and the way the poem holds out, not eliminating hopelessness but never defeated, maintaining life in the face of annihilation. This poem is a primary political document. In addition to and because of its rich human meanings, it has greater relevance to public action than any work of political philosophy or political science, any constitution, bill of rights, speech, or policy paper. In fact, a society’s health might be measured by how it understands and admits that such a poem is essential to sound social organization. In each era, the relation of poetry and society changes; for us, it is bound up with the problem of isolation and communion—our basic social question. Sounding this question leads us to the role of poetry, in the general sense, as it exists, or could exist, in all of us, and in the specific sense, as poems.

[from “What Man Has Made of Man,” A.F. Moritz in Poetry]

Though I understand what Moritz is getting at, I think that, as a poet, he’s placing far too high a value on poetry (or this poem in particular). To quote Auden’s poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,”

 For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
 In the valley of its making where executives
 Would never want to tamper, flows on south
 From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
 Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
 A way of happening, a mouth.

a word from your host

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:36:37 -0600

I’ll be taking a break from posting this week as I head to NYC, Princeton, and Durham to film some interviews for Wunderkammer.

Paul Muldoon on the Colbert Report

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:00:00 -0600

Paul Muldoon on the Colbert Report

"One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction..."

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:34:22 -0600

“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.”

- Joan Didion - “Goodbye to All That”

[via jinxyte]