October 2011
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10/21/2011: Birthday:
Ursula K. Le Guin - 1929
If you see a whole thing - it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
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10/20/2011: List: Top Cold Weather Horror Movies
I watched the prequele (excellently titled “The Thing”) of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” this weekend and I didn’t hate it. I think I really enjoy horror movies that are in the cold or the winter so I made a list.
Honorable mentions: Dead Snow, Let the Right One In, The Last Winter (Only Because I haven’t seen any of them)
5. Dreamcatcher
Not a great...
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10/20/2011: Birthday:
Arthur Rimbaud - 1854
I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman...
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10/19/2011: Birthday:
John Le Carre - 1931
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
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10/18/2011: Books: Why Read Moby-Dick? - NPR
What does he mean by that fairly weighty reference? Moby-Dick, Philbrick explains, published in 1851, was itself born in the pre-Civil-War churn of a very tense American consciousness. While it wasn’t a critical or popular success upon publication (critically, he calls it a “great disaster”), Philbrick notes that after World War I, Americans here and abroad came to understand...
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10/18/2011: Birthday
Rick Moody - 1961
Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.
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10/15/2011: Will the eBook Kill The Footnote - NYT
“Since typing that small type, I have received dozens of angry and concerned queries about the anecdote. Why had I fed her grapes? Did I not know they were toxic? After some back-and-forth, I was surprised to discover that these incredulous comments often came from readers of the electronic version of my book, where the footnotes are shunted off to the end of the text, relegated to being...
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10/15/2011: Birthdays:
Friedrich Nietztche - 1844
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
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10/14/2011: Theatre Review: Twelfth Night by...
Directed by Melia Bensussen, the almost imperceptibly cut proceedings (ASP’s briskly paced show clocks in at 2:20, including one 15-minute intermission) are set in what looks like the hold of a ship, with a curving, seaweed-pocked slide at one end, and a channel of water running through the center. The matching white, three-piece suits that Viola and Sebastian wear are stained seaweed green on the...
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10/14/2011: Birthday:
Katherine Mansfield - 1888
Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, you can’t build on it it’s only good for wallowing in.
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10/13/2011: Books: Interview: Jeffrey Eugenides -...
Slate: The novel seems to gently mock the study of semiotics, but at the same time it has a sense of reverence for it. What was your take on it at the time?
Eugenides: I’m ambivalent. My intention wasn’t just to mock it because I found a lot of value in many of the theorists that I read, and I continue to wrestle with and against their pronouncements. It still has a meaning for me. On the other...
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10/13/2011: Book Review: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami -...
“And yet, readers will be surprised how restrained 1Q84 is for such a mindfuck. There’s a rigid format to the book that alternates between Tengo and Aomame’s viewpoints, and the most surprising structural turn comes with the introduction of a third perspective in the last act. I’m not entirely convinced Murakami needed a thousand pages to frame a metaphysical love story. It’s worth...
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10/12/2011: Jeffrey Eugenides & Adam Thirlwell: A...
JE: ”I sometimes tell my students that, when you write, you should pretend that you’re writing the best letter you’ve ever written to the smartest person you know. That way, you won’t pander at all. You won’t put on a false face because your smart friend would spot that in a minute. Also, with this method, you naturally gain an intimacy, even a shorthand with which...
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10/12/2011: Birthday
Ann Petry - 1908
The first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies for her novel The Street.
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I think we must be occupying tumblr
I don’t think me posting this is helping.
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10/11/2011: Book Review: Nemesis by Philip Roth -...
“Why, I wondered, if the guy’s so anti-everything, does he keep bothering to write?
From the vantage point of two decades and thousands of pages of Roth later, I don’t think it’s a bad question. My mistake was asking it rhetorically. If treated as a point of real inquiry, the question affords an opening, a way of reading and being reached by the work. For a writer so generously endowed...
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10/11/2011: Birthday:
Elmore Leonard - 1925
Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing : 1. Never open a book with weather. 2. Avoid prologues. 3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. 4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely. 5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. 6....
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10/11/2011: Books: The Year of Reading Differently...
“It was one of those reporting trips that really test your physical stamina. There were several days of frantic scurrying around Moscow collecting interviews, followed by an overnight sleeper to Kazan, the capital of Tartarstan. The drunken Russian oil engineer who shared my compartment thought he spoke English but he was mistaken; the unbroken miles of birches that flashed passed as we...
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10/10/2011: Book Review: Best American Short...
Brooks, however, errs in a different way by setting up criteria that may have proved too restrictive. In her introduction, she makes clear that for her plot is everything. There’s nothing wrong with the intricately plotted story, but, given her prejudice, the elegantly written vignette, or the artful, maybe cerebral, character study wouldn’t stand a chance of inclusion. Likewise, Brooks dismisses...
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10/10/2011: Book Review: The Price of Civilization...
In structure, the book is a bit like a medical treatise: the symptoms are identified, their causes diagnosed, the cures prescribed. However, the science is a bit of a veneer. Sachs is a very political doctor. This does not mean he has written a bad book. He is a fine economist and statistician, and if you want to stockpile facts and arguments for radical advocacy, this is the book for you. I had...
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10/10/2011: Birthday:
Claude Simon - 1913
For me, the big chore is always the same: how to begin a sentence, how to continue it, how to complete it.
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WatchHere’s a video of Dr Grau.
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10/9/2011: An Eight Year Old Paper on Ethics
This is the second philosophy paper I ever wrote. I present it to you unedited, it all it’s almost-understanding glory. So be nice. (My Professor was Dr. Christopher Grau at Florida International, he’s the most influential professors I’ve ever had). Fair warning, the views presented below do not necessarily reflect the views of The Acacian.
In this paper, I hope to compare and contrast...
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