man reading digital New Yorker on hanukkah day 2 has 22 thoughts
1. Is it worth the money?
2. I feel guilty if I’m not reading at least three times a week because of all the money. Very tough to read everything you need to read. It’s depressing, like Christopher Hitchens dying or Schopenhauer or some of the things he said.
3. Schopenhauer:
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
4. The digital New Yorker keeps writing about Christopher Hitchens out of respect but you can tell the writing is a little guarded, still bitter about Hitchens Left-2-Right turn and his steadfast support for the War in Iraq.
5. Shouldn’t I be adding links? If you are going to talk about something digital, please add links, you miserable cur.
6. Will Blake Butler do one of those “Look at all these fucking books I read” list this year? That list always makes me angry and unsure of myself. Then I think, “Well shit, he has insomnia, maybe he’s reading a lot at night?”
7. I’m surprised no one has talked about James Franco yet. He hires his professors into Hollywood jobs. He maybe got a professor fired because of a D grade? I don’t know.
8. If you have any fucking sense, you’ll want to read Christopher Hitchens on James Joyce.
A century later, the literary world will celebrate the hundredth “Bloomsday,” in honor of the very first time the great James Joyce received a handjob from a woman who was not a prostitute.
9. Who wants to read a Q & A with Margaret Atwood?
10. Not being able to read all the books I want to read makes me think about dying.
11. Here is when Christopher Hitchens went and got water-boarded.(He finds out, yep, it is torture.)
12. I hope these links work. I hope they don’t just work for me because I have a digital subscription to the New Yorker.
13. Would Christopher Hitchens admire Tim Tebow? That would piss all his liberal friends off, too. Yes, Tebow’s religion is fair game for discussion.
14. This profile of John Gruden in The New Yorker has proven to be very popular. It’s also a great example of the changes over the years in the magazine. This profile is clearly shorter, less interesting, and less revealing than profiles of even a decade ago. Wow, Gruden studies a lot and is intense. Well, no shit.
15. Feel like it is OK to talk about sports.
16. An English professor vehemently defends James Franco.
17. Sports bars seem more expensive than regular bars.
18. Feel like it is OK to read books and not talk about them. Or to watch a sporting event and never discuss that sporting event with another human being.
19. This photo of Tim Tebow and a friend is very popular online. Mostly it is used in posts criticizing the young quarterback. The subtext of the photo is supposed to make us think something about Tebow, and I find this interesting. What should we think?
20. The Year in Not Reading.
21. I think I did OK, with the linking I mean.
22. Christopher Hitchens died the day the war in Iraq Ended.
Tags: Come on what is Tebow doing here?
Great list.
The best: “as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.”
we’ve all [presumably] had more sex than Tebow, that’s what I’m thinking about.
I mean I hate to lay down all the cards here but that lady has some stunning cha-chas
I’m glad someone has the, um, cha-chas(?) to admit that.
I am very brave
I’ve noticed.
in addition to great tits, im most impressed by her teeth. they must be the whitest that tim’s ever come across. ohhh i went jr high, you see that.
also sean, i gotta admit that i love tim tebow. i mean, i dont want his dick in my ass (or do i), but the kids got something… too bad he plays in the afc west.
I can’t believe people surfing the internet are interested in such concerns.
I can’t stop staring at Tim Tebow. I can’t say the same thing about John Elway.
I miss Allen Iverson.
“it was Hitchens whom I first heard say, although he may have been quoting someone else, that the only proper answer a journalist can give to the question ‘Is nothing sacred?’ is “Yes.'”nice. King Lear tries to teach us this. so does Melancholia. enjoyed the pierce article. thanks.
That was my first thought about that picture. Mr. Tebow likes big titties. Like everybody else.
tinyurl.com/can5hdg
Will Blake Butler do one of those “Look at all these fucking books I read” list this year? That list always makes me angry and unsure of myself. Then I think, “Well shit, he has insomnia, maybe he’s reading a lot at night?”
yeah, this, same with most everybody’s end-of-year lists, don’t know how they read so fast and so often. but mostly so fast
I like that Schopenhauer quote.
3. Even reading books is not to be mistaken for appropriating their contents.
8. It’s easy to effuse inaccurately about Ulysses–Ithaca, the 17th (next to last) episode, has a “call-and-response” structure “fairly obviously an echo of Plato’s Symposium“? The (Platonic) Symposium reads like a mediaeval “master”-candidate’s catechitical defense of his knowledge?? The Symposium is a literary masturpiece [thanks, Hitchens]; that Ulysses‘s Ithaca is, too, is a transmutation of a different order than of mere “echo”, and is only with difficulty an echo of any drinkless symposium. (Unless one feels that Bloom is leading Stephen “upwards” to the “ideas” or forms, like Diotima does Socrates. That’s a s t r e t .)
13. Excellent blogicle–best (of many fine) Madison quotations, in my small reading. –but why not sneer at all the God-cares-about-sports-results creeps? like Ben Rohypberger? (I do hate the one-sided dogmatism of the football anti-Thibeauxners – “mechanics”?? have you seen Rivers throw a football? or Favre?)
On one side, you have anti-Tebowers, the Shooter McGavins, sneering and mumbling angrily to themselves:
“He’s different.”
And on the other side, the pro-Tebowers are whipping out the noisemakers, getting fucked up, and celebrating a player they can show off to their families with a resounding:
“He’s different!”
Also Roethlisberger was accused of sexual assault. As it stands, the most controversial act we might be able to dig out of Tebow’s past is that he might have had sex.
I do think it’s possible to be rational about Thibeauxner as a quarterback. Erratic, but sometimes perfect, passer with an athletic head that defenses have trouble with. Cunningham, Young, Vick–hell, Tarkenton – it’s not like there’s never been a successful un-Unitas before. And give Thibeauxner an O-line and a possession tight-end–have him and St. Brady switch teams: the Patsies win as many games and St. Brady is avalanched off the depth chart.
The religious crap is earritating – and politically toxic, as the blogicle linked to at 13. makes clear – , but the Great Circumciser has plenty of company crediting “God” for sports results, is what I mean to mean.
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I can’t see it. A running QB winning a Superbowl? History says no. Vick and Cunningham are good examples of QBs who have not won Superbowls. Young was a 64% passer. Why not have Teebow be that Tight End? That’s where he belongs.
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Well – and not that you don’t already know – , but it is a team game. Young was passing to Rice, Jones, Watters, and so on, in a by-then well-oiled system that he’d had some years to learn hands-on (or at least up close), and behind solid protection. We can’t know whether Cunningham would’ve won a Bowl playing in Montana’s place, but we know that Hostetler, Williams, Johnson, and Dilfer won rings with less offensive support. –and Montana came into the league as an average-armed scrambler – the next Tark (it’s true!).
–and part of my premise is that Thibeaux isn’t that bad a passer. (He’s had some horrible-looking throws this year and some beauties, too.)
And a final-for-now methodological note: I ‘believe in’ “history”, but one thing I believe about it is that it contains its own malleability. Cast your thought back to 1980. Teams of the ’70s: Steelers, ‘boys, (earlier) Fins and Vikings, Traitors, (later) Oilers. Now imagine, in that context, controlling a game offensively by short and medium passing. Today, the Gilman/Walsh ‘West Coast offense’, while not universal, is surely at least normal.
A quarterback-option offense? with certain personnel? Give it a chance!
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