I'm a father, writer, blogger, digital strategist and insufferable new marketing geek. I'm into Apple technology, functional medicine, health and socio-political nerdery. If you've arrived here in error, I suggest clicking around a bit. If that doesn't work, well, there's always my Google Buzz stream. Not that that solves anything.
Finally, know that an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli
dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like – i.e. orange and parabolic and right-to-left – and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad. — from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
One of the most beautiful sentences DFW ever put to paper.
Foreign Policy asked their top Global Thinkers to recommend their favorite – or most important – books. The responses range from children’s books to biographies to policy manuals to fantasy novels. Here’s the full list of their suggestions.
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Reporter: "What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?"
Sendak: "I would tell them to go to hell. That's a question I will not tolerate."
Reporter: "Because kids can handle it?"
Sendak: "If they can't handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it's not a question that can be answered."
I want to see this movie more with every passing day. Can't wait.
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Matt Latimer, former speech writer for President George W Bush, said that some members of his administration believed her books promoted sorcery.
As a result, she was never presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The claims appear in Latimer's new book called Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor.
He wrote that "narrow thinking" led White House officials to object to giving Rowling the civilian honour.
As I said on Twitter, this is GOP, manifest destiny, entitled nation, divine favorite, narrow-minded thinking. Or bullshit, as it's commonly known.
The highest land in the office, and people are still making decisions based on insecure mythology and superstition. What does the Bible promote? Water into wine, oceans parting, talking burning bushes. By every measure, the Bible promotes sorcery just as much as Rowling's books. Perhaps more.
As a guy who has voted Republican in every election except this last one, it's "values" like this that will ensure I never return to the party until it decides to lose the religious shroud and get back to some level of rationalism.
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"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
I've argued this for a long time: we're all supposed to be getting more illiterate and not reading and writing as much due to technology, but that's not the case if you're willing to look beyond the stupid text message jargon we see demonized so often. We're just reading and writing differently. I know many people who won't read a book to save their lives, but they'll honestly read 100+ feeds -- some very information-rich -- per day. And while we're not sitting down for a rousing night of writing political essays, we are communicating and expressing our opinions over a written medium far, far more than we ever have.
When things that used to happen in a certain way no longer do, it doesn't necessarily mean they've stopped. It means they simply could be changing -- and, in fact, growing.
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I’m still upset at the author for being a thief. Ever been robbed? Like had your house burglarized and your stuff rummaged through and stolen? There’s this period right after it happens when you can’t believe that someone got into where you live, the space where you sleep and bathe and eat, and just took stuff you had bought and taken care of. David Foster Wallace hanged himself and robbed us of all the work he would have produced in the future. Our homes were stocked floor to ceiling with the promise of the best goddamn writing people could make and Wallace fucking ripped it off. I’m still walking around wanting to punch someone. Don’t bother calling the goddamn cops, they won’t do anything.
What an amazing essay. Not too often that they're this touching.
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The best college commencement speech ever written:
I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth…
Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn’t have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am — it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.
Such an amazing speech in its entirety, but very sad in that some parts inform Wallace's suicide in 2008.
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Kevin Guilfoile blogging for Infinite Summer, wonders if anyone will be reading IJ 100 years from now, or if the book’s sheer attention and effort requirements – coupled with timestamped pop-culture references – will doom the work to literary extinction.
I’ve had a lot of people over the years try to pass Infinite Jest into my hands, and there was always a kind of urgency to their plea that was frankly kind of off-putting. I think now that urgency might be related to this sense, perhaps unconscious, that this book by its very nature might be in jeopardy of deleting its own map. I don’t think I’d ever say that any single book is necessary, but anyone who connects with a novel the way so many have with Infinite Jest is clearly going to be distressed by the possibility that it might be on the endangered list, even a few years down the road. I suspect the intensity with which people try to push this novel on other readers is related to the sense that it might be endangered, somehow. That as epic and important and groundbreaking as it is, its future might not be ensured. If there has been a level of desperation in the pleas to me by IJ lovers over the years, I now understand it.
One day, I’ll actually sit down and read the copy I’ve had on my shelf for over seven years. One of my best friends tells me every chance he gets that it’s the best book he’s ever read, and I remember when he read it he devoured it with a cultish obsession.
I have a feeling I’m missing something big.
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This has potential to be amazing.
With that simple question and an enormous white suggestion box, the New York City based collaborative Illegal Art canvassed the five boroughs, collecting suggestions from passersby of every stripe the young, the old, the filthy rich, the homeless, the mouthy, and the shy. "Love each other or perish." "Take breath mints when offered." "Give me a break!" In true New York style, the suggestions are by turns hilarious, nonsensical, angering, and heartwarming. Some people held the suggestion box prisoner while they wrote suggestion after suggestion; others ignored the box, but then came scrambling back with a sudden idea. One woman scribbled as she walked down Wall Street: "More time in the day." One man in Harlem, when asked if he would like to make a suggestion, said, "Isn't it obvious? World peace." Or at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, a woman sadly wrote her misspelled suggestion and then held it up for all to read: "Never brake up with someone on a bridge." With over 350 entries and 50 photos of the suggestion box in action, Suggestion is authentic, honest, and totally appealing a testiment to the the public's innermost desire, whether it's free beer, free daycare, or free pumpkin pie every Thursday.Suggestion (thx Leo)
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Idea: how about you get a newspaper and type every single word of it into a book, then try to market the book as avant garde neo-poetry? Kenneth Goldsmith did exactly that with Day, an 840-page book that contains every single word of an NYTimes issue.
He typed an entire issue of the New York Times into an 840-page book called Day. He recently completed a trilogy, The Weather, Traffic and Sports. They are transcriptions of a year of radio weather reports, a 24-hour traffic cycle and the radio broadcast of a Yankees game. Ums, uhs and ads included. If you think that sounds unreadable, you're right. Goldsmith himself says, "I don't read them. I get bored."Odd way to get your 15 minutes, but hey, at least he got them. 'Uncreative Writer' Retypes the 'New York Times' (via swissmiss)
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