December 2007
26 posts
That great booming Bloombox
Harold Bloom’s success is of a peculiarly American kind and yet not easily fathomed. As a critic, he is not all that accessible and is capable of producing sentences, paragraphs, lengthy stretches that are quite incomprehensible. (“Like Thoreau, Whitman has a touch of the Bhagavad-Gita, but the Hindu vision is mediated by Western hermeticism, with its Neoplatonic and Gnostic...
Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans only as members of groups and never as individuals. Racists believe that all individual who share superficial physical characteristics are alike; as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a...
Venti capitalists
Is “Fair Trade” coffee rather than Starbucks coffee the answer to the third-world coffee growers’ plight? In the first place, Starbucks is the largest international purveyor of Fair Trade coffee, 18 million pounds of it in 2006. And in the second place, no. As of the book’s writing, Fair Trade contracts guaranteed a price of $1.26 per pound ($1.31 if organic) as opposed to free market prices that...
Estoy done with Fall semester. Glory.
The soundtrack approach to (novel) writing
Recently I was commiserating with a writer friend about the trouble I have switching between different parts of my book — even now, when I’m just filling gaps. Every new section feels like another hill to climb, and I’ve never been much of an athlete. I’d rather sit in the lodge, sip a bourbon on the rocks, and watch everybody else ski. (Sorry, that simile transformed into a metaphor that got...
I like John Carl’s “About Me” (via facebook): 1/4 Sisyphus 1/4 Faustus 1/4 Pip 1/4 Adam
When editors at the New Oxford American Dictionary recently announced that their word of the year was “locavore,” which means someone who eats locally grown food, they also became the very definition of publicity. In the last few weeks Ben Zimmer, an Oxford University Press dictionary editor, appeared on numerous radio shows and on a syndicated public radio program to talk about the word...
“You’ll pardon me, maybe, for saying so, but not all readers are skilled...”
– J D Salinger in Seymour - An Introduction [from Kate!]
HD, naturally. →
Berries and Cream! →
The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness. Most of us do wish that we were slim diarists. It’s not that we imagine that we would be happier if we kept a diary; we imagine that we would be better—that diarizing is a natural, healthy thing, a sign of vigor and purpose, a statement, about life, that we care, and that non-diarizing or, worse,...
Watch … and then it melted.
“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.”
– Flannery O’Connor
I like. →
“When two persons establish friendly relations, the form of their verbal...”
– -Mikhail Bakhtin
WatchBullshit via ostrobogulous
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he...
