February 2012
14 posts
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My Big Ambition was to do Nothing
Question: When your friends said they wanted to be writers, what did you want to be instead? What did you think you could do? Deborah Eisenberg: I didn’t think I could do anything and my big ambition was to do nothing. But, of course, the matter of supporting myself did intrude.
From an excellent and very funny interview with Deborah Eisenberg at The Days of Yore.
I share this big ambition at...
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“I do think there are interesting things to be said about the relationship...”
– Will Self in a Guardian story about his appointment as “professor of contemporary thought” at Brunel University. (Nice work if you can get it.)
What the Dickens? →
austinkleon:
“If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.”
— Charles Dickens on his 20-miles-a-day walking habit
Twenty miles a day? Plus all that writing? I’m guessing Boz didn’t need much sleep.
Yes
khealywu:
“If what’s always distinguished bad writing— flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.— is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret Easton] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant...
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January 2012
3 posts
“Piracy’s preserving effect, while little known, is actually nothing new. Through...”
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Provocative read on why history needs software piracy. Reminiscent of the story of how the widely pirated first edition of Arabian Nights made it one of the most influential pieces of storytelling in history. (via curiositycounts)
“Intellectual property” is an oxymoron.
December 2011
2 posts
5 tags
November 2011
5 posts
Watchthenearsightedmonkey:
I was a kid growing up in a troubled household. We didn’t have books in the house but we did have the daily paper and I remember picking out Family Circus before I could really read.
There was something about the life on the other side of that circle that looked pretty good. For kids like me there was a map and a compass hidden in Family Circus. The parents in that comic...
October 2011
18 posts
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep...”
– Anatole France, Le Lys rouge
“Mark your calendars: The corporate media died when it announced it was too...”
– Dahlia Lithwick, “Occupy the No-Spin Zone,” Slate
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“We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field,...”
– Derrick Bell, Dead at 80 (via nevver)
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Soul Power
“I have a great tape of old blues singers recorded in Yazoo City, Mississippi, that I got down in Oxford at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss. It’s called Bothered All the Time. I like Jimmy Reed, Big Maybelle, Dorothy Love Coates, a lot of singers from the old Stax/Volt series, the early Verve recordings, a lot of Southern blues, Chicago blues. What I like...
September 2011
9 posts
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“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a...”
– Elizabeth Warren (via jacobjoaquin)
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“BLANK-COLLAR WORKERS Formerly middle-class workers who will never be middle...”
– A Dictionary of the Near Future (via nevver)
See also “Fear of Falling,” Barbara Ehrenreich.
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