Procrastination Notes
I’m sitting in that new office I told you about. The one with the blue farmhouse table and the big picture window. It rocks! There are little pink flowers outside—too delicate, it seems, for the Florida summer, but there they are. I’m trying to write the editor’s note for the latest issue of New CollAge and coming up disastrously short on coherent sentences.
So here are two procrastination links in honor of, well, procrastination.
1. John Wooden wrote this for Poetry magazine just before he died. I always wondered where Bill Walton got his poetical commentating prowess. Looks like I have found my answer. Great line from the piece, “The rules of poetry are and should be flexible; good words in good order is good enough for me.” What if the same were true for basketball? The rules of basketball should be flexible; good ball movement in good order is enough for me. Actually, I think a lot about the similarities between poetry and basketball—I’ve probably even written about them here—the most poignant of which are movement and flow and the necessity to break out of the fundamentals and find that space where real creativity can exist.
2. Neil Gaiman and some other dude have edited an anthology of stories. Here’s Nick Owchar in the L.A. Times gushing about it. He writes, “It should come as no surprise that Neil Gaiman has been on a crusade, throughout his career, to break fantasy out of the genre ghetto—to get people to focus on the power of the storytelling, regardless of the gothic atmospherics.” Hmm. I love me some Gaiman, so I’ll check it out.
Okay, back to the business of being…
“When someone was going through a particularly hard time, we sent each other packages.”
While we’re on the recommendation circuit, let me recommend Elizabeth Ellen’s brilliant essay “Stalking Dave Eggers” in the latest issue of Bookslut. It’s funny, sad, thoughtful, full of amazing parenthetical asides, wide-ranging in a clever way and honest in the best of ways. Click if you want to read about how we live in the age of clicking.
If Alvin Lucier had a Youtube account….
First, the inspiration. Listen to the Alvin Lucier track “I Am Sitting in a Room,” here.
***
Done?
Okay, watch this.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEIzS_27Vt0&feature=related
Now watch what it looks like after 50 uploads and rips:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5hbbsFGDhk&feature=related
And, after the cut, watch what it looks like after 1000 uploads and rips. It’s gorgeous. READ MORE >
Are we going to miss newspapers?
This morning on Mobylives, I found an essay by The Nation‘s book editor, John Palattella, about how everyone in the publishing, books coverage and bookstore world has been wringing their hands since 2007 because of the kindle and the disappearance or reduction of many newspapers’ books sections and, of course, the advent of HTMLgiant. (OK maybe he doesn’t read us, yet.) But Palattella is optimistic in the essay and disagrees with the idea that reduced newspaper coverage of books is representative of larger cultural problems.
Palattella writes, “I think there’s no better time than the present to be covering books. The herd instinct is nearly extinct: newspapers inadvertently killed it when they scaled back on books coverage en masse; and the web, for all its crowds and their supposed wisdom, is a zone of unfederated cantons. The field is wide open. If you can’t take chances now, if in such a climate you can’t risk seeking an air legitimate and rare, when can you?”
Maybe this is news to readers of The Nation but, yeah, tell me something I don’t already know.
Still, I think I will miss print coverage of books. I am going to miss the days when a damning or rave review in The New York Times was something that a lot of people knew about whether or not they agreed with it. It’s like having a rich, arrogant bully on the playground that we can all love to hate together, but secretly hope she’ll invite us to her birthday party because she has the best toys. Plus it’s really fun to say Michiko Kakutani. Am I alone in this? If there’s no herd (and it seems less and less like there is) what can we point to as the mainstream? Does that even matter?
New Yorker’s 20 under 40 Revealed
The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list has been revealed:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32; Chris Adrian, 39; Daniel Alarcón, 33; David Bezmozgis, 37; Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38; Joshua Ferris, 35; Jonathan Safran Foer, 33; Nell Freudenberger, 35; Rivka Galchen, 34; Nicole Krauss, 35; Yiyun Li, 37; Dinaw Mengestu, 31; Philipp Meyer, 36; C. E. Morgan, 33; Téa Obreht, 24; Z Z Packer, 37; Karen Russell, 28; Salvatore Scibona, 35; Gary Shteyngart, 37; and Wells Tower, 37.
Winners of our picks contest to come. What do you think of the list?
Advanced Edition Shipping June 14. Order Up.This Post is Not Safe For Work
I have a real problem with the phrase, “not safe for work,” the false sense of security it provides, and the way it condescends.
I understand workplace politics and that there are certain work environments where “mature” or “adult” content is censored or where individuals can be fired for reading such content. That doesn’t make the phrase okay for me. Censorship, in any form, troubles me a great deal.
Here’s where we’re looking
Using the geotags on digital photographs uploaded to Flickr, Eric Fisher has created maps of cities. To the left is San Franscisco.
Is the real city where we look for it, or is the real city the place we don’t see? Or is it both? Or neither?
Or does it depend on the city? Is your city mapped here? If so, is it the “real” city?