December 2008
42 posts
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Notes on Mountains Beyond Mountains - Tracy Kidder... →
“Conversely, the one who fights the long defeat can be all the more thankful for victories, even small ones, precisely because (as St. Augustine said about ecstatic religious experiences) he or she does not expect them and is prepared to live without them.”
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Language & the Dance of Time in Cormac McCarthy's... →
“This analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian seeks to identify how the novel illustrates a pragmatic and postmodern understanding of language. We do not discover the truth about the world; we narrate it.”
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me today →
Perhaps the worst display of narcissism on the web.
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“It’s a Wonderful Life is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and...”
– Wendell Jamieson (NYTimes.com) brings the cynicism.
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Watch(via:trmw) This new youtube WS format doesn’t quite fit. But the video is still awesome.
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“Hathos is the attraction to something you really can’t stand; it’s...”
– Andrew Sullivan (via The Daily Dish)
MIGHTY VILLAGER →
I just can’t stop reblogging these visual frosted flakes.
LAMINATION COLONY: Recommended Reading →
A list of ‘sacred texts’ from LAMINATION COLONY contributors. One tough-to-beat reading list.
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Misreading White Noise
My response to 52books’ review of Don Delillo’s White Noise, which may or may not still be one of my favorite novels:
Maybe you were expecting too much from the narrative. The story was not meant to “grab” you. Isn’t a big part of this book playing with the idea of plot (it always leads to death)? DeLillo’s not Michael Grisham or Tom Clancy or whatever. Your...
LAMINATION COLONY // Winter 08 & 09 →
“Lamination Colony has been online since 2003, publishing mainly oddball, surrealist, bizarre, and/or otherwise homeless dream sequence texts. We look to publish work by those doing things…
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Pixies, Sheilas, Dirtbags and Cougar Bait: Modern... →
Caleb Crain on slang: “One comes a little closer to a definition of slang by thinking about context. Dirty words suggest that the audience is no better than the speaker, and vice versa. Slang, on the other hand, usually suggests that speaker and audience share membership in a group.”
(via The Daily Dish)
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The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (December 14,... →
“What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike.”
20 Classic Hip Hop Album Covers Recreated in LEGO... →
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The Penguin Blog →
PDN Photo of the Day →
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“As Susan Sontag has observed, a photograph implies “that we know about the...”
– Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. 1985.
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Library Holiday Sale
The library was having a holiday sale on their used books. Hardcovers were $.25 rather than their usual $.50. Paperbacks were $.10 rather than their usual $.25. Today, only because they were on sale, I bought:
Dry (Hardcover) by Augusten Burroughs. Afraid I will keep comparing him to Sedaris. But at $.25, what the hell?
Breath, Eyes, Memory (Paperback) by Edwidge Danticat. Excited to get a copy...
Folksonomy, n.
“Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Folksonomy describes the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging.[1] In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by...
“Poetry converts reality into imagination. Money converts imagination into...”
– Jack Beaty, On Point With Tom Ashbrook. 4 Dec 2008.
“We are as likely to be moved by a book written 200 years ago as we are by one...”
– The Millions: A Year in Reading 2008
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“The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression....”
– Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. 1985.