February 2011
1 post
January 2011
1 post
June 2010
1 post
A 1200-page manuscript has the dimensions and heft...
This past week I hand-delivered a massive block of writing from SF to Berkeley. It’s the sort of menial errand that internships are notorious for, but I usually perform these little unglamorous tasks with gusto, cheerfully. But 1200 pages? To Berkeley? If it weren’t for the recipient of this bricklike parcel, I may have bristled at the task. However! In a scratchy hand on a to-from...
May 2010
0 posts
Video Shows Squirrel Reacting to Death
My internship is rewarding and joyless by turns. Most workdays involve phoning publishers, requesting review copies of books, fact checking, probably a burrito, maybe a mail run. Today I was asked to contribute a few entries to a fake bibliography that’s part of a forthcoming book. The biblio runs fully 5 pages, not including my additions, and half the titles have nothing whatever to do with...
January 2010
2 posts
". . . personal 'feelings' are deployed in a... →
A pretty great essay on T.S. Eliot.
“Opinion divorced from demonstration is nearly useless, even when stated with...”
– Some thoughts on objective criticism from Alfred Corn’s weblog
December 2009
3 posts
2 tags
2 tags
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: An Open Letter to... →
“Yes, President Hennessy, yes, I am happy to send you some money for Stanford. As I said, I am unemployed, but I have $108 in my wallet.”
November 2009
3 posts
“This was not the speech we were expecting. It was intimate, it was about death.”
– A brief remembrance of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ 90th birthday party at the Collège de France in 1999. More surprising to me than the news of his recent death was the realization that he’d been alive and writing all these years. Maybe it’s time to finally read Tristes tropiques.
“As to his talent, it’s clear there’s long been a thought around that ‘creative’...”
– An article at the LRB about the Roman Polanski controversy.
October 2009
1 post
2 tags
“VONNEGUT
… Twerp also had a very specific meaning, which few people know...”
– Vonnegut discusses howitzers, slapstick and, occasionally, storywriting in this 1977 interview from the Paris Review.
September 2009
1 post
one, two, three
Test-flying this here tumblr.
