quote:"To explode with flesh, without collapse. / To feel sick in my skeleton / in all the serious confetti / of my cells, and know why." (from "Me in Paradise," by Brenda Shaughnessy.)links:
1. I was going to link to this before I even realized who wrote it!: Obama's Impossible Speech, by Sam Anderson. (@nymag)
2. "Deep Holes": short story by Alice Munro. (@the new yorker)
3. Critics Choose Their Most Loathed Books (@the times online uk)
4. No Clear Winner Emerges In Keith Gessen’s Party To Take Back the Internet: "Gessen had spent the last two weeks on the Internet! he shouted over the din of the crowd. And during that time, he learned that the Internet was a place where people expressed their pain! (“Isn’t that what literature is?” somebody shouted back.) He would continue to express his pain via the Internet, he declared! Eventually, he got off the table." (@gawker)
5. Vote for Muffin!: Haviland stars in a staged reading of VOTE! The Musical in NYC on June 30th, check out THE VOTE! SHOW! "Your Next Prez" featuring Hav in a cheerleader skirt!. (@youtube)
6. Furthermore: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (@the atlantic.)
7. Also, The World of the Used Book. (@popmatters)
8. Oh! AND! One day I'm gonna have a nice website that'll use this technique: Hand-Drawing Style In Modern Web Design - Volume 2 (@smashing magazine)
9. So, She's Got the Look = ANTM (@fourfour)
10. And also. also. also. Thanks, But No Thanks by Will Doig; Same sex-marriage is wonderful progress, but I'd prefer a civil union. (@nerve)
9 comments:
I thought the most interesting part of the Atlantic article was the Nietzsche anecdote. The rest is so stuck on "different=bad" and anyway if you actually want to stop skimming, throw your modem out the window or something.
Later I mentioned the article to a friend. He said something like "oh right I saw that," and we talked about it for a while, and then I brought up the Nietzsche anecdote and he was like, "What? Typewriter?" Because he had only skim-read the first part of the article. It was like rain on your wedding day.
February was an awesome month.
Ugh. I feel like I'm about a week behind in replying to your entries with actual coherent, cohesive comments! I even still owe you my thoughts on that Sorgatz piece from what feels like last month already! Eventually I'll catch up, I promise.
That Gessen / Gawker amused me deeply, and I loved the Atlantic / Google piece, as well, nearly as much as I liked the semicolon piece that I *think* you also linked? But I may be mistaken / hallucinating since it is 3:30 a.m. and I am overdosed on the caffeine and not really thinking straight.
Oh, and that hand-drawing elements in web design thing? Totally fabulous. I've been wanting to do that on my own site (you know, whenever I finally get it back online? you know how that goes?) ever since I discovered Ironic Sans, which is probably my favorite example of the technique ever because he integrates the elements into his site design so freaking well. Funny that I read recently, I believe after the last Seed Conference in Chicago, a designer remark somewhere in a rather disparaging tone that this technique was heralded at the conference as being the new "It" technique in web design. Which I don't really get (the disparaging tone, I mean), because I think if it's done well it can look sooooo unbelievably awesome.
Also? If you are further than I am in the Diaz book already, I will die.
Also, P.S. to Lozo: HA HA HA HA!
it's been a while since we had such a dense auto-fun. usually there's some fun, some thought, and a few personal notes of limited interest.
today, I've read no fewer than four really important and interesting pieces.
thanks.
meghan: Yeah at first he seemed very focused on different = bad, but I felt like it evened out at the end sort of. But also I was like, really confused about the Nietzsche anecdote 'cause the section where he talks about how N's writing changed after the typewriter, the adjectives he used aren't imperative negatives or positives, so I was like, wait, is he saying it got better or worse? And if it got better, doesn't that go towards your anti-thesis? Wazoo?
I feel like it was also like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife. I felt that way when I was reading it on my blackberry while walking to CVS.
d-lo: I know, I almost get this weird urge to re-live it over and over again.
atherton: No worries, that happens to me all the time, as I'm sure you've noticed. I'm eagerly anticipating your Sorgatz piece when you know, catch-up time occurs.
Oooo I wonder if I accidentally linked a semicolon thing, instead of another link I meant to use. That was one of my original links, but I moved things around and thought I'd gotten rid of that, hm.
Speaking of semicolons, she's re-doing my website and I'm pretty sure that's the technique she's using too. I agree that if it's done well, it looks awesome, and I feel I could bring this back around to the typewriter thing and Nietzsche from above but instead I will just tell you I'm on 231.
adam: You're very welcome. I guess then that I have too. One of them was even about dense, interesting pieces. I'm not sure if that's meta, or just interesting.
It seemed like he was implying Nietzsche's writing got worse--quoting the guy who said it turned to puns and aphorisms (connoting more shallow content). But either way, it's totally a subjective judgment. I think it's really interesting to suggest a link between contemporary prose styling (& possibly associated brain function!) and composition on a computer, versus more classic styles and pen/paper/typewriter and so on. I mean, neat stuff. But to claim either is a better kind of prose kinda bothers me... maybe it's just my vaguely post-modernish cultural lens talking. I didn't mean to sound so down on the article in my first comment, I did think it was fascinating. I guess "Is Google making us stupid?" was just one of those pithy sound-bite headlines and I didn't like that angle being played up when parts of the article were in fact more nuanced. Which, well, hey Meghan, meet Publishing Media. =)
The handwriting website style trend has really freaked me out the past two weeks... I started to realize how many people do it and do it well.
I seriously had no idea when we discussed the look for your site.
We clearly just wanted to avoid a rigid, mechical, and typical website. You are none of those adjectives, obvs.
re: Nietzsche's later writing
Keep in mind that N was writing philosophy, not literature. His later (I now know post-typewriter) work is decidedly murkier, and in that sense it is worse. That's not to say there weren't good ideas in there (in fact, I think a lot of the work in philosophy for my generation will be mining the generally terrible writing of 20th century Europe for good ideas), but there's not a lot of good philosophy being done.
Factory Five Racing
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