Posts Tagged by Reading
This Be The Verse
| September 1, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
— by Phillip Larkin
More here.
Things you might enjoy reading
| August 27, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
I enjoyed them:
- Man discovers his six-year-old son, who can’t read or speak, has much more to say than anyone could have imagined
- Patricia HIghsmith’s bizarre fascination with Michael Jackson
- President Jimmy Carter leaves the Southern Baptist Convention because the way the religion routinely mistreats women. Love him.
I’ll say it again. Instapaper is my all-time favorite iPhone app. It has made my life so much better. I even splurged for the Pro version because I felt the developer deserved my $5 as a thank you.
School
| August 27, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
Yes, school. I am enrolled full-time now, which leaves little room for much else than writing response papers and reading. Oh god, the reading. Something like 26 novels in 16 weeks, short stories too numerous to count, free time too rare to even mention.
Luckily several of the novels I have read before, and I plan to be doing a lot more writing. It has been a lazy summer. We shall see.
And now, here is a quote from Hemingway, of whom I’ve never been a fan:
I have drunk since I was 15 and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work all day with your head and know you must again work the next day, what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whiskey? — from “The Seven Vices of Highly Creative People” by D.A. Blyler
The Tender Night
| August 13, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
It’s a year old, but this is a said, beautiful story about strangers, neighbors and one’s need to connect to other people.
We’ll Know When We Get There
| August 12, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
Very good story. This girl, as a teenager, was penpals with John Hughes. (Via 29-95)
Seydou Keita
| August 5, 2009 | Filled under Internerd, Photo Album |
Last fall, when CLH and I were traveling through Europe, we visited the Tate Modern in London. Eight years before, when I was in London studying abroad, the Tate Modern had it’s grand opening on the week of my birthday. I had always wanted to take CLH there.
We saw lots of exhibitions of modern arts from famous painters (Mondrian is always a favorite) and we rented these crazy iPod-like AV devices that go into so much detail it would be impossible to tour the whole museum in a single day.
But the exhibit that stuck with me most was the photography of Seydou Keita. Keita photographed ordinary Malians, his own neighbors, who would come to them in their finest clothes and with their favorite props. Sunglasses, hats, musical instruments, jewelry and other notions of wealth factor heavily in the charm of the images. Usually Keita just posed his subjects in from of a sheet of fabric, sometimes ornate woven weavings, other times a simple white cloth. It was street photography before there were streets to photograph.
Here is an interview with him and here is a NYT audio slideshow about him that is very, very worth listening to.
Blue fever
| July 29, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
I’ve had hardcore dog fever for about two years now, desperately wanting to get a young dog to bond with Gus and for CLH to have the experience of raising a puppy. (Gus is the first dog he’s ever had, and they got to know each other after Gus was full-grown and fully-reared.)
Lance set me off on an obsession about the hunting dog the Blue Lacy. How friggin’ cool is it that Texas has an official state dog breed? A dog that is part coyote! Look at how beautiful they are! And now this story, which will make you cry unless your heart is a shriveled piece of rotting plant matter.
Clear Lake family finds missing dog 10 months after Hurricane Ike
Neighbors reported seeing the dog emerge late at night from the wooded area through a break in a fence at the end of a cul-de-sac. Neighbors had become accustomed to leaving food out for her. She would make her rounds then disappear back into the woods at daybreak.
Lobster
| July 7, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
Could be one of my favorite words. I love how the more you say it the less it means anything until it just eventually turns into a blob of saliva you roll around on your tongue continuously. It’s got everything — soft consonants, hard consonants, and the perfect inflection of vowels in between. Same with the word table.
Glad to see someone else shares by hatred for the word pulchritude. That word sounds like a rotting corpse in an overgrown cemetery.
But what’s with everyone who has trouble with the word moist. It sounds exactly like what it means, which is a rare and wonderful thing for a word to do.
Now what?
| July 2, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
…you are supposed to be having a hard time. This is how the world makes writers. It kicks their ass long enough that they start finally telling the truth. They just finally give up and start bleating out little truthlets.
In the process of trying to make a few difficult decisions, I found this advice column comforting.
