they found a new photograph of Emily Dickinson

From the Guardian:

A photograph believed to be an extremely rare image of Emily Dickinson has surfaced in her home town of Amherst, Massachusetts, showing a young woman in old-fashioned clothes, a tiny smile on her lips and a hand extended solicitously towards her friend.

The rest of the article is fascinating, especially the details of how they verified the facial features of the new photograph against the old photograph.  The official medical report, linked in the article, is incredible.  To quote it:

Other similar facial features are evident between the women in the daguerreotypes. The right earlobe is higher on both women. The inferonasal corneal light reflex suggests corneal curvature similarity, allowing us to speculate about similar astigmatism in the two women. Both women have a central hair cowlick. Finally, both women have a more prominent left nasolabial fold.

She needed glasses.

I Like __ A Lot / 7 Comments
September 6th, 2012 / 10:06 am

Leaving Hawaii: An Interview with Heiko Julién

OK, interview. (interview is beginning)

(swallows gum)

I am listening to Riff Raff “Rice Out” on repeat, for context.

I am currently broke.

(Irony)

Cool. I am wearing my brothers t-shirt and shorts and am on his computer at my parents’ house.

Nice.

He has soccer shorts but he doesn’t play soccer. He just likes to watch the players I guess.

What topics are on the table. Your ebook. Can we talk about Hawaii?

Wonder if he calls it Football. Not sure how authentic he is… Yes indeed we can [talk about Hawaii].

Sweet.

I have a lot to say about Hawaii.

Please talk about, Hawaii… READ MORE >

Author Spotlight / 1 Comment
September 5th, 2012 / 2:56 pm
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At the Quarterly Conversation, “Ed Park, Laird Hunt, Dan Visel, Jeremy Davies, A D Jameson, John Beer, and Daniel Levin Becker each discuss one of [Harry] Mathews’s books… from The Conversions (a novel worthy of William Gaddis, as Dan Visel puts it) to Cigarettes (Mathews’ most conventional, and only truly Oulipian, novel, says Jeremy Davies) to Mathews’ poetry (discussed by award-winning poet John Beer) and his unclassifiable Selected Declarations of Dependence (discussed by his fellow Oulipian Daniel Levin Becker).”

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Automotive Experience

The Impossible Global Freeway 

Catch me showrooming a discontinued Saab in New Jersey – I would only buy online. I’m trolling the dealer, he’s thinking I can afford a new interior. I’ll end up with Ford, I’m sure. Or, catch me in Paris, loving the  low-emission turbo diesel cab. See me climbing the North Cascade Highway in a borrowed Rav4 or my parent’s (now gone) Forest Green Toyota Sienna.

When I think about everything we’ll lose in the next century, the automobile comes into my mind. It roars in with the the force of the locomotive and the companionship of a horse. I’m reading Train Dreams now, and last week, I read High Life. It’s like, we’re all at a party, singing to the wind blowing by. We’re all smoking dinosaur bones in a back room of a bar at closing. This kind of thing can’t last. Eventually they ban cigarettes, even on city streets.

Here are the cars of my life. May there be many more.

1985 VW Scirocco – This was my mother’s car when she married my father. Silver with leather and it looked very fast. When I was 9, my parents escaped serious injury when it was rear-ended by a large white commercial truck. Totaled. They were driving back from a ski trip to Whistler BC, Canada. The driver was an epileptic who failed to take his medication. My parents chose not to file suit, partly because of the Canadian jurisdiction. I remember very little of my time with this car, though I would like to have it now. I also remember my father’s Yellow Nissan truck, from this period, though it was an ugly thing that he sold or gave to a relative.

READ MORE >

Behind the Scenes & Technology / Comments Off on Automotive Experience
September 4th, 2012 / 9:01 pm

Ways to Use Twitter

I’m relatively new to Twitter. I’ve only posted ~200 tweets. This compared to three people I follow: @blakebutler who has posted over 3,000 tweets or @matthewjsimmons who has +6,000 or @sophierosenblum who has ~9,000.

While I got my twitter account a long time ago, I never used it because I couldn’t figure out my approach. I mean, I couldn’t figure out how to use it in a way that seemed interesting to me.  Also, I couldn’t understand the protocols, all that R/T and # and @ this and that.  Nor did I understand the etiquette.  How many times a day is it okay to tweet?  Are you supposed to follow everyone who follows you?  And so on.  I felt like an old man confronting his inability to adapt to technology.

So, because I’m a nerd, I studied Twitter for a while.  I began to pick up on the etiquette and protocol, and what I  noticed was that the individuals I found most interesting had some kind of a angle.  For instance:

READ MORE >

Random / 13 Comments
September 4th, 2012 / 11:30 am

We Need to Talk About Batman

I want to argue that the conceit of Batman having a secret identity no longer works.

It once did, back in the 1930s and ’40s, when Batman was essentially a badass moonlighting in tights, socking hoodlums and thugs in their jaws. At that time, the extent of the audience’s suspension of disbelief was that the fellow wouldn’t get shot.

How simple, compared to today. The Batman of 2012 is a one-man paramilitary force capable of investing hundreds of millions of dollars into being the Caped Crusader—a one-man Blackwater USA! Frank Miller was right: there’s no way that the U.S. government would permit this guy to exist:

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, page 84 (detail)

READ MORE >

Craft Notes & Film / 29 Comments
September 3rd, 2012 / 8:01 am

Games Taught Me to Care About You

When presented with bad design, I often become irrationally, almost violently angry. The first time I was exposed to the class registration system at NMSU, I was seated at a university computer, in a public place, with my wife. None of these things stopped me from thumping the desk with my fist after twenty minutes of trying and failing to make the goddamn thing do what I wanted. I have said that bad design actually makes me more angry than the Holocaust; this is true. Obviously the Holocaust was worse than bad design, but I have no direct experience of its horrors. Bad design is with us every day, corroding us inside and out. It feels more immediate, to me. It feels oppressive.

Bad design makes me so angry because it is a message from the world, a whisper. It says: “No one cares about you. No one knows that you exist. No one knows what you are like. No one has taken the time to imagine you. No one wants to think about what you need or want. You are profoundly unimportant.”

READ MORE >

Craft Notes / 13 Comments
August 31st, 2012 / 3:31 pm

Dark Sky to Close, Barrelhouse picks up the slack

It’s always sad when a press goes out of business. Why’d it happen? What will happen to the books? Are they falling short of an implicit promise? Dark Sky just went belly up. Though I don’t think a formal announcement has been made, Gabe Durham (DSM editor) redirected all the content for the new issue over to Barrelhouse. You can read it here.

Barrelhouse, meanwhile, seems alive and well. They’ve just announced a new version of their “Conversations & Connections Conference” (always a good time) in Philadelphia. This time the event, which has loads of panels about writing and publishing, features a keynote with Stewart O’Nan. I caught the one in DC earlier this year. Sam Lipsyte gave a funny keynote about Zachary German giving him shit in a crowded bar for not writing better books. Barrelhouse is also starting a new reading series in DC, something that features actors performing stories from the latest issue of their magazine.

Behind the Scenes & Presses / 5 Comments
August 30th, 2012 / 3:17 pm

Shampoo Horns by Aaron Teel (part two)

Author Spotlight / 1 Comment
August 30th, 2012 / 12:11 pm
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Every once in a while, a writer steps out of their word cave and takes to social media to behave badly. Emily Giffin, her husband, and her assistant, recently all behaved in inexplicable ways across Facebook and Amazon. It’s really as hilarious as it is sad (h/t Jessa Crispin).

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