August 2011
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“How thoroughly and how radically Google has already transformed the information...”
– How Google Dominates Us, by James Gleick
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The Jargon of the novel, computed →
By BEN ZIMMER for The NY Times, July 29, 2011
We like to think that modern fiction, particularly American fiction, is free from the artificial stylistic pretensions of the past. Richard Bridgman expressed a common view in his 1966 book “The Colloquial Style in America.” “Whereas in the 19th century a very real distinction could be made between the vernacular and standard diction as they were...
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The man who couldn't stop drawing →
itwonlast:
By Amy Ellis Nutt
Jon Sarkin was working as a chiropractor when a stroke changed him. Suddenly, he was self-absorbed, rude and fighting a compulsive desire to create art.
Jon Sarkin and Hank Turgeon had battled all afternoon on the Cape Ann golf course, Massachusetts. The time was about 3pm, Thursday 20 October 1988, and the two friends had cut out of work early, Sarkin from his...
July 2011
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We Can't Teach Students to Love Reading →
By Alan Jacobs
While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that’s to be expected. Serious “deep attention” reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the...
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What Your Beard Says About You →
By ALEX WILLIAMS, NY Times, July 27, 2011
FOUR years ago, I grew the first full beard of my adult life on a whim. I was 41, and it was neither a fashion statement nor a midlife crisis, but it came at a fortuitous time: the style world just happened to be entering the Postmillennial He-Man Beard Epoch.
It was the dawn of an era, when dewy actors like Ryan Gosling and Jake Gyllenhaal started...
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Destroyer – Poor In Love
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Snoop backpack by Timbuk2
bagcollector: Timbuk2’s now got a camera backpack! The Snoop:
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Philip Roth — an appreciation →
In May, the great American novelist was awarded the Man Booker International Prize. The chair of the judging panel pays tribute.
In Roth’s 1998 novel, I Married a Communist, the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, is in high school, learning what, and how, to read. There is nothing genteel about his initiation: “Talking about books as though something were at stake in a book. Not opening up...
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Towards a New Film Criticism
thenewinquiry:
Hollywood directors don’t produce a film’s meaning any more than McDonald’s managers produce a Big Mac’s taste
By Willie Osterweil
What is Hollywood? Hollywood is a pool of money, power, and people. Hollywood is a monomaniacal schizophrenic, making films at the voices’ instruction. Each film represents a different voice in its head; some are violent, some frightening, some...
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“I love making the stuff, that’s sort of the core of it. I love creating the...”
– Louis C.K. (via jimray)
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The Literature of Shoplifting →
By DWIGHT GARNER, NY TIMES June 28, 2011
Jack Kerouac said many things better than other writers have said them, and among those things, in “On the Road,” is this: “I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural born thief.”
Rachel Shteir quotes Kerouac’s sentence prominently in “The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting,” her new book, which is prickly and intelligent...
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At 40, Kevin Smith to Retire from Filmmaking →
On never truly mastering the technical aspects of filmmaking: “I want to finish as I started – completely ignorant. I know what the lenses look like now, but I’ll be happy to make it to the end without knowing all the technical stuff. That just proves anybody can do that job. “That’s part of what I’ve liked about my career – not just making the movies and the money, and I got a really...
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WatchElectric Kettle by Jean-Baptiste Fastrez.
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Rapha on Merino Wool →
Merino wool is one of nature’s little miracles. Naturally breathable and odour resistant, the interior of the fibre is ‘hydrophilic’, meaning it retains water. When merino absorbs perspiration, it holds it in the fibre without the fabric being damp against your skin. The outside of the fibre on the other hand is ‘hydrophobic’, i.e. it repels water. Add to that the fact it also absorbs UV...
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