May 2011
46 posts
Goodwin Liu withdraws 9th Circuit nomination due... →
D:
“That evening I was the sole guest in the huge dining room, and it was the same...”
– W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (the most enjoyable bit of food writing I’ve read in ages! XD)
Dorothy Dunnett's Excellent Adventures →
It is a truism that great novels have seldom been instant successes. Runaway best-selling acclaim tends to settle on the lowlier branches of the literary enterprise, like fantasy, mystery or romance, whose virtue (and defect) is their accessibility. But ”popular” literature itself, paradoxically, can take years to achieve popularity; consider J. R. R. Tolkien and Patrick...
Rebecca Solnit: Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite:... →
The New York Times reported it this way: “As the impact of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s predicament hit home, others, including some in the news media, began to reveal accounts, long suppressed or anonymous, of what they called Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s previously predatory behavior toward women and his aggressive sexual pursuit of them, from students and journalists to subordinates.”
In other words, he created...
Leo Messi, Boy Genius →
In Hudson’s words, Messi has “chameleon eyes” and is as “slippery as an eel covered in Vaseline” and plays with the predatory appetite of a “zombie hunter looking for a Twinkie.”
“Vintage Messi”
How many angels Can dance on the head of a pin? How magnificent Is Messi? There is no answer It’s like counting the bubbles In a bottle of Champagne
ahaha, this whole article is one long...
Justices Order California to Shed 30,000 Prisoners →
mixed feelings about this.
an admission
moutheyes said: why would you be ashamed. D: also i did not mind villa/silva, it’s just that albiol/silva was CLEARLY FOREVER MEANT TO BE. i’m glad you have come to your senses about fic, though. gen is so relevant to my interests it’s not even funny. anyway :D
I was ashamed because you were blogging the shit out of legit stuff, like tactics, and had like, MINUTE-TO-MINUTE BREAKDOWNS OF MATCHES...
moutheyes asked: I DID NOT REALIZE YOU WERE SUCH A BIG DAVID SILVA STAN. WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN. AND WHY DID IT NOT HAPPEN WHEN I WAS STILL BLOGGING THE FUCK OUT OF VCF.
La Furia Roja, under World cup 2010.
spanish-eye-candy:
I just have to blog this whole thing because it is TOO ADORABLE FOR WORDS.
scarlet86:
Diary, by Hilary Mantel: on the author's stint in... →
“Let us call her Ruby, because she had a name like that: old-fashioned, staid, anomalous. ‘I am known everywhere as sparrer,’ she said. We had sparrows enough and to spare in those days, but I couldn’t think of her as a cheery little bird. She was 16, with the face of a skull. She wrapped bony limbs around herself, bending stiff joints; she was always cold. She looked like a victim of...
There isn't a Spanish Stoke, says Manchester... →
“It is that vision and balance that makes Silva a player of uncommon ability. Then there is the close control, the origins of which can be traced back to his childhood in Arguineguín, the fishing village in southern Gran Canaria, where the four-year-old Silva would play with a ball his father, Fernando, had made out of cloths and rags. The family had grown tired of the way the young Silva...
Reading "In Search of Lost Time", by Jane Smiley →
minimoonstar:
halou:
It is important that you go about your business while you pursue your reading project. You have to take M. with you on planes and trains and into hotels and to the dentist’s office and into your child’s piano lesson. “In Search of Lost Time” will not have its full effect if you sequester it. It must diffuse into your life, color every place you go and every scene you look...
The Fun Factory: Life at Pixar →
I usually skip Lane’s film reviews, because snore, but this is really cute! Must check out his other longform articles now.
“Everybody who reads has a first book - maybe not the first book you read, but...”
– Michael Cunningham, “First Love” (On Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”)
Mine is Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time. I must’ve read that twenty times as a kid.
Paper Tigers: What happens to all the... →
“Instead, I set about contriving to live beyond both poles. I wanted what James Baldwin sought as a writer—“a power which outlasts kingdoms.” Anything short of that seemed a humiliating compromise. I would become an aristocrat of the spirit, who prides himself on his incompetence in the middling tasks that are the world’s business. Who does not seek after material gain. Who is his own...
Reading "In Search of Lost Time", by Jane Smiley →
It is important that you go about your business while you pursue your reading project. You have to take M. with you on planes and trains and into hotels and to the dentist’s office and into your child’s piano lesson. “In Search of Lost Time” will not have its full effect if you sequester it. It must diffuse into your life, color every place you go and every scene you look...
Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education →
“Well, but so what? A bunch of spoiled kids are having trouble finding jobs—so is everybody else. Here’s so what. First of all, they’re not spoiled. They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig,...
The Wise Man's New Clothes →
or, why Patrick Rothfuss is shit, guys. Just don’t do it. Don’t effing do it.
“We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.”
—Adrienne...
Not So Clásico: The fascinating, infuriating... →
Best trainwreck ever. *g* And the lawsuits are still piling up!
