woolandfelt-blog

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I'm not normally into contests, but I am into Denmark, and this photo, and by extension, I'm thinking, Lomography.

(by cathychow on Lomography)

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The Mountain Goats - No Children

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Zoo Kid - Out Getting Ribs

This, I think, is great.

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When you look at the strategy of my media diet, which is to ignore the noise, I think that is subconsciously an effort to avert the ADD, the focus on the shiny superficiality that Nick Carr warns about. At this point, my media diet reflects what actually seems to make my life better. I made a conscious decision to shield myself from the conventional notion of what people should be consuming on a daily basis. It wouldn't allow me to focus on the things I do want to focus on--more long-wave things. Once I identify a long-wave trend, then my appetite is infinite. Whereas what's going on in Washington today, I may not hear about it for months.

Chris Anderson's media diet. It's so easy to get sucked into the "conventional notion of what people should be consuming on a daily basis"! Still, as time goes on, I also find myself reading less, and focusing more on the things I care about. I get much more out of reading, that way.

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Books to buy, borrow, or somehow obtain

Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

(more to come)

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Read this more.

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Penfield Kasson.

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you want to do something new when you’re writing a novel. i mean, it’s right there in the word. novel.

jonathan franzen. (via paperbackgirl)

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It is with unbelievable difficulty that my ideas arrange themselves into any order in my head. They circle there obscurely, they ferment to the point where they stir me, fire me, cause my heart to palpitate; and in the midst of all this emotion I see nothing clearly; I cannot write a word, I must wait. Imperceptibly, the great movement subsides, order succeeds chaos, everything finds its proper place; but slowly, and only after a long and confused agitation. Have you ever been to the opera in Italy? While the scene is being changed in the great theatres there, an air of disorder prevails, which is disagreeable and lasts for quite a while: the sets are all muddled together on every side there is a heaving and a pulling, which it is disturbing to watch; you are afraid it is all going to topple over. And yet little by little everything finds its place, nothing is missing, and you are astonished to see emerge from all this tumult a delightful spectacle. This process is more or less what goes on in my head when I am trying to write.

Rousseau, Confessions (via asterisksforvowels)

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A Leonard collection is not a miscellany. From the start, his work has expressed powerful ambivalences about inherited systems of thinking. His main strength, as a reader of fiction and literary nonfiction, is the way he complicates what are often framed as zero-sum debates. Among his best writing in recent years is an essay on Primo Levi that scrutinizes the assumption of some critics — the novelist Cynthia Ozick among them — that Levi was too forgiving of the Holocaust, too willing to put his hatred and damage aside. For those critics, Levi’s final book, The Drowned and the Saved, in which he writes about the horrors of camp prisoners’ collaborating with Nazis to avoid being exterminated, marks an ascent to form because it finally unleashes Levi’s rage and hate. But for Leonard, it is a further tragedy, the manifestation of the encroaching unbalance that led Levi, finally, to kill himself. The earlier Levi, he suggests, “argues that perhaps something of the best of us, skeptical, ironic and aware, could outlive the worst.” Why wish for those who bring us news from horror to have no sense of forgiveness?

If the primary mode of literary criticism is exposition, Leonard’s method tends to be immersion. His reviews rarely treat a single book by the author at hand; rather, he gathers together a mass of textual and biographical materials. In his essays on Saul Bellow, Bruce Chatwin, Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud, Bob Dylan, and, more recently, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, and Jonathan Franzen, he peers closely at “those masks, sacred and profane, that the artist wears while digging up the buried bodies and playing with the bones.” Instead of merely analyzing a book, he brings to life an entire literary sensibility, warts and all, animating each writer’s larger outlook.

[...]

[S]uspicion of intellectual arrogance is behind the impulse to dismantle one’s pretenses in public that runs through Leonard’s essay collections; it is an impulse that all critics might take to heart. Critics, after all, play games in their reviews, often preening and primping at the expense of the writer. As Leonard put it, reviewing a biography of Saul Bellow by James Atlas, “A hoary old reviewer’s scam is to pretend you already knew all the inside stuff before you ever read the biography you’re about to quibble with by poaching from. Let me be upfront: Almost everything I know about Bellow that I didn’t guess from reading him I got from the encyclopedic Atlas.” For all his knowledge, Leonard has been able to build into his writing a form of ambivalence and questioning, and it’s this point of view that separates the good reviewer from the great critic. Writing about why he travels, he says, “I want to go anywhere, and to feel ambivalent about it,” explaining that what he most desires is to “dislocate myself.” It’s an apt summation of his critical approach.

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INTERVIEWER: Do you ever feel envy of other writers who are near your age? Deep envy about their writing, about what they can do?

LETHEM: There are people who can do amazing things. But I never take it personally. Any more than I would take it personally if Christina Stead could do things that I can’t imagine doing, as she does, or Philip Roth, as he does. The generational thing just doesn’t really come into it. That sounds like a real wussy answer, but writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions. You’re not fighting the other writers—that Mailer boxing stuff seems silly to me. It’s more like golf. You’re not playing against the other people on the course. You’re playing against yourself. The question is, What’s in you that you can free up? How to say everything you know? Then there’s nothing to envy. The reason Tiger Woods has that eerie calm, the reason he drives everyone insane, is his implacable sense that his game has nothing to do with the others on the course. The others all talk about what Tiger is up to. Tiger only says, I had a pretty good day, I did what I wanted to do. Or, I could have a better day tomorrow. He never misunderstands. The game is against yourself. That same thousand-yard Tiger Woods stare is what makes someone like Murakami or Roth or DeLillo or Thomas Berger so eerie and inspiring. They’ve grasped that there’s nothing to one side of you. Just you and the course. [...]

INTERVIEWER: OK, that’s the pure relationship between the writer and his work, sure. What about envying other writers?

LETHEM: Every human life includes moments of rage at unrecognition. We’re all injustice collectors. But that’s not the truth of any situation. I don’t mean to pretend that those bad feelings don’t exist. I know them intimately; they’re daily friends. But once you give them their name and shape, they’re like a set of really lousy cats living in your house. You kick them out of the way to get to where you’re going. In truth, it’s only dazzling when, say, Colson Whitehead puts out John Henry Days and there are sequences where I just don’t know how he did it. God what a great feeling! To have him over there in Fort Greene, living a few blocks away, as opposed to Christina Stead, dead and in Australia. Holy shit, right over there in Fort Greene and I don’t know how he did it. What a fantastic sensation. Would I want to be the only writer? No. Would I want to be the best? Well, that’s a lie, there’s no best. So there’s nothing to want.

INTERVIEWER: You can’t imagine experiencing a crisis of faith.

LETHEM: Crisis of faith? But that’s not where the writer lives. He lives in sentences, in fictional architecture. Look, anyone seeking ontological meltdown can easily find it in the attempt to write. Many have. The need to fall apart is well indulged in this line of work.

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Weejuns

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L.L. Bean

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We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all to infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.

Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (via first-lines)