ZZ Packer interview
ZZ Packer “is an oddity among short-story writers. She has something to say.” And so she does — she tosses off one insight after another in this Telegraph interview.
The NYer hires Sasha Frere-Jones
Great news from the New York Post:
David Remnick, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, has hired Sasha Frere-Jones, most recently at Slate and a past Village Voice writer, to be the magazine’s first on-staff pop music critic since Nick Hornby left a year and a half ago to pursue books.
Congratulations, Sasha!
Gallery of Nostrums
A gallery of early patent medicines featuring FatOff Obesity Cream, Dr. Bonker’s Celebrated Egyptian Oil, Mack Mahon The Rattlesnake Oil King’s Liniment for Rheumatism and Catarrh and more. “Catarrh” is a word you never hear any more. And yet it’s still a common ailment, unlike scurvy or, say, consumption. While we are on the subject [...]
This Condition by Lydia Davis
In this condition:
stirred not only by men but by women, fat and thin, naked and clothed; by teenagers and children in latency; by animals such as horses and dogs; by certain vegetables such as carrots, zucchinis, eggplants, and cucumbers; by fruits such as melons, grapefruits, and kiwis; by certain plant parts such as petals, sepals, [...]
Gass on Language
William Gass in “A Symposium on Fiction” from Donald Barthelme’s Not-Knowing.
Language is… more powerful as an experience of things than the experience of things.
Google management boggles the mind
Yesterday, Google filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. Here is a nice fluff piece to mark the occasion. Oh, those wacky billionaire visionaries and their crazy ideas:
If life before Google is difficult to recall, the next six years promises to be mind-boggling.
Google’s Chief Technology Officer Craig Silverstein spoke last month [...]
Would you like some more meat with your meat?
The James Joyce celebrations this year will include a hideous breakfast from Ulysses.
Organizers… plan to dish up a free breakfast for 10,000 people which will require 25,000 pork sausages, 20,000 pigs’ kidneys and 12,500 bacon rashers.
The fry-up on Dublin’s historic O’Connell Street in June, will also entail 20,000 blood puddings, 15,000 bread rolls, 10,000 [...]
Giant Ralph Lauren ad eats review
I link this New York Times review of Karen Joy Fowler’s latest* only to say Jesus, how are we supposed to read this? Is the review written in the form of a poem or something? Would you get a load of that giant blonde Ralph Lauren lady and her enormous purse or viola or whatever [...]
“Some Sounds”
Roy Kesey has a new dispatch from China on McSweeney’s.
As regards things not in my apartment: please attempt to imagine that in the attic of your home, eight large cats are being fed, and caressed, and well loved, and that they are very pleased, and that they attempt to express their pleasure using the [...]
Bookforum review of Gary Lutz
The Reading Experience does not care for Emily Barton’s Bookforum review of Gary Lutz’s latest, I Looked Alive. Apparently Emily Barton took a bite out of a great big orange and proclaimed, “This is a very bad apple.”
I wish Four Walls Eight Windows would put a story or two from the collection online. There are [...]
Sensory Homonculus
This model shows what a man’s body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception.
Hmm, I’m surprised by the relative size of the man’s reproductive organs, package, schlong, what-have-you. I’d have thought that area would obscure one’s view of [...]
So why is this funny?
James Wood over-explains a joke in this otherwise very interesting excerpt from his book The Irresponsible Self: Humour and the Novel.
One London lunchtime many years ago, the late poet and editor Ian Hamilton was sitting at his usual table in the Soho pub, the Pillars of Hercules. This was where much of the business of [...]
Still more time out
So sorry to flake out on you good people this way, but the Fed Ex package hasn’t arrived, it’s busy season at work, my absence earlier this week means I’ll be working late to make my deadlines on Friday, and I have ironclad lunch plans. (A girl has to have her priorities.) For literary [...]
“Happy Mother’s Day! Yes, I’m Still Out of Touch with the Lord and Going to Hell!”
Dana points out that there’s a vast, untapped market for dysfunctional Mother’s Day cards and suggests a few slogans, including:
“This Card Is a Testament to All the Wonderful Things About You, Mom, But I’m Sure, Like Everything Else, It Won’t Live Up to Your Impossible Expectations”
“Mom, I’m So Glad We Have These Fifteen Minutes to [...]
Video of poets, writers, and critics online
The very impressive Guide to Poetry & Literature Streaming Video is a resource for locating streaming video of poets, fiction writers, and critics as they read and discuss their own and each other’s work.
Among the writers represented are Laurie Anderson (if you’ve ever really listened to Bright Red, you’ll understand how she qualifies as [...]