April 2011
53 posts
“Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young...”
– Stephen Colbert
The Female Body: Dead girls — both real and fake —... →
As gender roles shift and evolve, this set-up — man as predator, woman as prey — is one we seem reluctant to let go of. These are roles we play willingly, or at the very least resignedly. It can be difficult even to see there are other alternatives, what with how frequently the girls are scattered about to motivate world-weary detectives to make bland statements about just how out-of-control the...
The Order of Things, or What College Rankings... →
“Do you mean that even the most prestigious public universities in the United States, and you can take your pick of what you think they are — Berkeley, U.C.L.A., University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Illinois, Penn State, U.N.C. — do you mean to say that not one of those is in the top [20] tier of institutions? It doesn’t really make sense, until you drill down...
Jess Row on the Fetishization of Elite Schools →
“I think that the fetishization of elite schools in American culture, the way in which they cultivate an image as brands, as imprimaturs of some scarce resource called “excellence,” is sad and pathological, and profoundly anti-democratic. The truth (a truth I didn’t know, or at least didn’t want to admit, in college) is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost...
“A vine has invaded Shaun Tan’s house in suburban Melbourne, Australia, through a...”
– Shaun Tan’s Wild Imagination, a profile in NYT Magazine
ROCK ON HOME BOY. Also, I finally got to read The Arrival. No words, just *_*
Time Magazine Interviews George R. R. Martin →
Q: Well, one thing that always came up with Lost was this idea of, they better have the ending figured out. I want them to know right from the beginning what the plan is. As a storyteller, do you believe that that is what you should be doing? Is it even possible?
A: I think it’s possible to an extent. Well first of all, there are different kinds of writers. I’ve given this lecture...
Goodbye, My Love, by Jennifer Egan →
Ted rose early the next morning and took a taxi to the Museo Nazionale, cool, echoey, empty of tourists despite the fact that it was summer. He drifted among dusty busts of Hadrian and the various Caesars, experiencing a physical quickening that verged on the erotic in the presence of so much marble. He felt the proximity of the Orpheus and Eurydice before he saw it, sensed its cool weight...
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us...”
– Ira Glass (via hyperallergic)
“This is America, where a white Catholic male Republican judge was murdered on...”
– Mark Shields (via azspot)
“That’s what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It’s...”
– from Last Evenings on Earth, Roberto Bolaño (via blogtastic)
Where does good come from? →
Jennifer Egan wins the 2011 Pulitzer for Fiction! →
“Look at the birds. Even flying
is born
out of nothing. The first sky
is...”
– Li-Young Lee (via darlingnikki-)
BAWLING THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL.
Should I check out Phillip Larkin, K? Your turn to rec your heart out (or not).
Every time I kind of forget that I spent my... →
HAHAHA facepalm.
“As he stood before them the perfection of their survival often struck him as the...”
– Henry James, The Tragic Muse
Annie Dillard and the Writing Life →
In her class, I learned that while I had spoken English all of my life, there was actually very little I knew about it. English was born from low German, a language that was good for categorization, and had filled itself in with words from Latin and Anglo Saxon words, and was now in the process of eating things from Asian languages. Latinates were polysyllabic, and Anglo Saxon words were short,...
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196, 2008 →
Reminder to self: read this after finishing the Ishiguro books (Remains of the Day,When We Were Orphans, Pale View of the Hills, The Unconsoled) in my possession. Should I do this after or before my Atwood/Le Guin/Shriver spree? Hmmm. Well, yes, I know he’s male, but he’s also Asian. Oppressed societal subsets are my flavor of the month. I feel justified okay.
You know, the more I...
