October 2009
September 2009
1 tag
“Scion: Drives like a rhombus, handles like a rectangle.”
– Jordan Morris
“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not...”
– (via iwannotowidigdo)
Or hers
(via steampoweredmedia)
“You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The...”
– Stephen Fry (via inky)
Wikipedia: Kurt Vonnegut →
inky:
In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of...
3 tags
The Forest Hillbillies › Katie and David move from... →
My pal David and his wife, Katie, just moved from Alaska into a tony neighborhood around the corner from us. “Tony” is San Francisco for “Holy Shit, I wish I’d been rich enough to buy a house there 30 years before I was born.” Welcome, Clan McCreath. See you at “Chou Chou.” We’re the ones just having appies and nursing that first drink.
“Try to make Hank give up.”
– Reminder Ken Kesey kept on his desk as he wrote, Sometimes a Great Notion
Seven Types of Ambiguity
The first type of ambiguity is the metaphor, that is, when two things are said to be alike which have different properties. This concept is similar to that of metaphysical conceit.
Two or more meanings are resolved into one. Empson characterizes this as using two different metaphors at once.
Two ideas that are connected through context can be given in one word...
Sublime. (and penance)
This one’s still my favorite, though. Goosebumps, ladies. Goosebumps:
We may have fucked the world up flatter than hammered shit, but, sweet mercy, do we ever make some excellent movies and music.
“Susan Atkins has died. My heart goes out to the entire Manson Family.”
– Tim Siedell
138 Index Cards
Advance PW Review: Nabokov’s ‘The Original of Laura’ - 7/30/2009 8:01:00 AM - Publishers Weekly
Before Nabokov’s death in 1977, he instructed his wife to burn the unfinished first draft—handwritten on 138 index cards—of what would be his final novel. She did not, and the cards have been locked in a Swiss bank vault for the past 30 years. Now, Nabokov’s son, Dmitri,...
Pomplamoose - “Hail Mary”
And Your Bird Can Sing
“And Your Bird Can Sing” (Take 2 w/Overdubs)
What I love:
Without the (albeit insanely amazing) leads from Paul1 and George playing from the top, you get to hear George’s (unused) gorgeous 12-string Rick arpeggios. Jesus, what a boner that gives me. Big Rick boner. LOVE that sound.
The chatter and clowning.
I’m not a deep Beatles scholar, but I think this...
A flood of flat-sevenths
“Or, what are all those flat-sevenths doing in the Beatles’ Revolver?”
Is this peculiar chord, along with the quartal harmonies, responsible for the album’s meditative atmosphere?
6 tags
Connected by Strings
Revolver (album) [“Eleanor Rigby”]
George Martin used to claim that his composition was inspired by the Bernard Herrmann score for François Truffaut’s film Fahrenheit 451, however this is not possible because the film had not yet been released. The writers of the book Recording The Beatles theorized that Martin was probably referring to the score from Psycho, which was...
“I ditched the format when I saw what it was becoming. It’s saved my time, my...”
– Rise of the Tablog [via]
Mustard Gas and Roses
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - Paperback - Random House - Read an Excerpt
The whole first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five. Lovely.
Snip:
I had the Bell Telephone Company find him for me. They are wonderful that way. I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like mustard gas and roses. And...
The Of Mississippi Code
Drunk on success, Author Dan Brown rewrites Absalom Absalom!
It begins:
Aging woman Rosa Coldfield was sitting in a room as hot as a Hotpoint oven that had been left on for a very long time even though nothing was cooking yet that anyone could sense or smell. She could almost taste the Southern aspects of the air that was full of air things like hot molecules and the paint chip things that...
Two bits of Vonnegut followup
New-to-me. The 92nd St. Y (whence the previous audio arrived) has a Tumblr. Followed.
Oldie recurrent. Here’s the story of the day Kurt Vonnegut bought me breakfast. Well- and gratefully-remembered.
It was one of the best Saturday mornings ever. It was like Palm Sunday but with eggs and actual Pall Malls — with him carrying on about politics and madness and misunderstandings and...
"...that kind of a machine..."
92Y Podcast: Kurt Vonnegut Reads Breakfast of Champions - 92Y Blog - 92nd Street Y - New York, NY
I can’t believe I’ve made it this long without ever hearing this audio, described as Vonnegut’s “first public reading of the classic Breakfast of Champions, three years before it was published, on May 4, 1970 at the 92nd Street Y.”
Sounds just terrific in the...
