February 2012
15 posts
“Songs are just interesting things to be doing with the air.”
– Tom Waits
“If what’s always distinguished bad writing— flat characters, a narrative world...”
– —David Foster Wallace, who wrote really good fiction.
[Onion] Suitcase Spends All Year Looking Forward... →
WatchBonny be workin’ ittt
Various writers provide lists of ten rules for... →
January 2012
26 posts
The Unseen
In Krakow it rained, the stone arcades and cobbles And the smoky air all soaked one penetrating color While in an Art Nouveau café, on harp-shaped chairs, We sat making up our minds to tour the death camp. As we drove there the next morning past farms And steaming wooden villages, the rain had stopped Though the sky was still gray. A young guide explained Everything we saw in her tender, hectoring...
“St. Thomas” — Sonny Rollins,...
“I cannot shut myself up within the realm of science. All my knowledge of the...”
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945, trans. 1962), ix-x
“Mornin’ Glory” — Bill Evans...
“Finally, know that an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome...”
– David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”; offered here (warning: PDF) as a eulogy for DFW in his own words. The link contains eulogies from Don DeLillo, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, and others.
“I remember well enough to know it’s not a trick of hindsight, hearing...”
– John Jeremiah Sullivan’s review of The Pale King
[Onion] Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals For... →
Classic album covers redone using clip art & Comic... →
Examples:
A 24/7 webcam on the famous Abbey Road crossing.... →
The Want Bone
The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth’s bell. Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue. The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale Gaped on nothing but sand on either side. The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing, A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung. The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O. Ossified...
[The Onion] Corrections: The Wizard of Id
Due to a printing error, last week’s comics page did not include the final panel of The Wizard Of Id. The parrot was supposed to say, “That makes two of us!” The Onion apologizes for the omission.
Yelping with Cormac: Urban Outfitters →
Urban Outfitters
Union Square - San Francisco, CA
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM
Three stars.
And they come there in great numbers shuffling into that mausoleum that was built for them like some monument to the slow death of their world and among those tokens and talismans of that faded empire they forage like scavengers their faces frozen in a rictus of worldweary their...
Impossible to Tell (by Robert Pinsky) →
Waking Up
But what woke just now at fifty-two years in narrow Dormitory bed, clock on a chair, underpulse Air-conditioning, damp tangle of dream plumage Its afterbirth nimbus—night thong and mandible? Possibly for a few seconds not more professor or Poet or parent or writing conference pooh-bah Than animal emigrant from those featherlands—the screen Of boxes, the alleyway weeping, the black iceberg, The...
December 2011
39 posts
Watch“Pelt,” written and read by Michael Symmons Roberts. Part of a series called Close-up Poetry.
New Year
a child carrying flowers walks toward the new year a conductor tattooing darkness listens to the shortest pause hurry a lion into the cage of music hurry stone to masquerade as a recluse moving in parallel nights who’s the visitor? when the days all tip from nests and fly down roads the book of failure grows boundless and deep each and every moment’s a shortcut I follow it through...
Influential psychologists answer the question,... →
I found all of these anecdotes and explanations to be well worth the read.
A Vermont factory owner was allegedly so moved by... →
Seamus Heaney does the literary world a great... →
