May 2013
1 post
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May 8th
84 notes
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Oh yeah, poetry month...
Seeing as how I squandered National Poetry Month, failing to post a single personal favorite, I’m starting May on the right foot! For the full, delicious experience, read this lip-smacker by Karen Volkman aloud. MAY In May’s gaud gown and ruby reckoning the old saw wind repeats a colder thing.   Says, you are the bluest body I ever seen. Says, dance that skeletal startle the way I...
May 1st
5 notes
April 2013
6 posts
2 tags
Apr 18th
35 notes
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Apr 15th
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Tove Jansson: The Artist Whose Writing You Need To... →
nyrbclassics: How did we miss this nice endorsement of Tove Jansson from inkt|art, a journal of women in comics? (A journal that lists Nicole Hollander as “grande dame” in its masthead!) I only just finished reading Jansson’s The Summer Book a few hours ago. It’s a slip of a novel about not a whole lot, and its humor occasionally flirts with slapstick (one of those cultural...
Apr 12th
18 notes
4 tags
“This was during the happiest time of his life, the early to mid 1980s when Mrs...”
– Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up ! (aka The Winshaw Legacy in the U.S.) Carve Up is fiction, but for my money, it’s the truest (and funniest) portrait of Thatcherism—as the brutal, selfish, immoral ideology it is. And doesn’t the above (published in 1994) make you think, just a...
Apr 8th
5 notes
4 tags
Apr 7th
2 notes
March 2013
8 posts
3 tags
Goodreads' and Amazon's marriage made in hell
I’ve been an Amazon customer for so long I remember when they included free t-shirts and coffee mugs with my book orders (that was when Amazon only sold books) and it was actually not shameful to use the branded freebies because hey, Amazon was cool! Oh, bygone days before the dot-com bubble burst. It’s taken me a long time to shake those formative impressions even though the evidence...
Mar 29th
10 notes
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Mar 27th
3 notes
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Mar 26th
273 notes
1 tag
Listenvastandgrand: “Hammer Down” by Magnolia Electric...
Mar 18th
9 notes
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Mar 6th
7 notes
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Jane Friedman: The Problem With Online Freelance... →
janefriedman: From Felix Salmon at Reuters: The fact is that freelancing only really works in a medium where there’s a lot of clear distribution of labor: where writers write, and editors edit, and art directors art direct, and so on. Most websites don’t work like that, and are therefore difficult places to incorporate freelance content. The result is that it’s pretty much impossible to make a...
Mar 6th
4 notes
4 tags
Mar 3rd
1 note
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Mar 2nd
3 notes
February 2013
3 posts
5 tags
Feb 19th
2 notes
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“We know our economy is stronger when our wives, mothers, and daughters can live...”
– — Barack Obama in tonight’s State of the Union. (via cheatsheet) Uh, I like to think I have rights that don’t derive from being someone’s wife, mother or daughter… This is the kind of thing I expect to come from a Republican’s mouth.
Feb 13th
231 notes
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Feb 13th
186 notes
January 2013
8 posts
2 tags
Hey people posting art without crediting and/or...
Stop it! It’s bullshit. Does this look like Pinterest? (same applies to reblogs…)
Jan 27th
8 notes
1 tag
Jan 19th
286 notes
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Jan 17th
6 notes
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Mark Hollis and demos →
robinallender: I love this interview with Mark Hollis. And I agree, in part, with his attitude to demos. Whatever you record first time round will always have something interesting or unique about it that you can never hope to recapture again in later takes. Having said that, I find that demos can be a really useful way of developing and structuring songs.  I do think that you need to be...
Jan 12th
6 notes
3 tags
“Like the fraternity of smokers, there’s a fraternity of insomniacs, the disquiet...”
–  A lifelong insomniac (Chloe Aridjis) recalls her struggles in getting to sleep. (via Granta) Hoo yeah. I’ve never read anything that describes the sleep-deprived so well as harboring a “low, tired crackle beneath the surface.” Also, elsewhere in the piece: “The thought of...
Jan 12th
50 notes
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Jan 9th
22 notes
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Jan 8th
5 notes
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Jan 1st
6 notes
December 2012
11 posts
3 tags
Dec 31st
4 notes
4 tags
Year in reading
I promised to read 45 books in 2012 and I read 48 (almost—down to the last 200 pages of West of Here). My book challenge list of musts was 30 long, and although I didn’t get to two titles (The Fountain Overflows and Ten Thousand Saints) I read everything that participated in the To-Be-Read challenge (books that have sat on my shelves unread for more than a year) and Chunkster challenge...
Dec 31st
15 notes
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Dec 30th
6 notes
1 tag
Dec 25th
31 notes
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And ich abide
vermilionink: In honor of tomorrow’s impending apocalypse, I give you Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English translation of REM’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”, as published on twitter earlier this month. Enjoye! HEERE BEGINNETH GEOFFREY CHAUCERES TRANSLACIOUN OF THE APOCALYPSE OF THE RAPIDE MOVEMENTS OF THE EYE: ‘Tis grande, yt commenceth wyth an upheaval of the erthe,...
Dec 21st
51 notes
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Dec 17th
5 notes
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Dec 13th
16 notes
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Dec 13th
4 notes
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Karen: To me, it seems that no matter how prominent they ultimately become, the people who are the most fun and the least pretentious have usually done something with their hands in their careers. Simon: I think it’s the people who can actually create something with their own two paws who know the meaning of creative satisfaction. Conversation between Karen Brown, Creative Director of the...
Dec 12th
4 notes
3 tags
Dec 7th
4 notes
2 tags
Dec 2nd
61 notes
November 2012
12 posts
4 tags
Nov 30th
7 notes
Nov 29th
83 notes
Nov 29th
34 notes
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A Different Stripe: Happy Birthday Nancy Mitford →
nyrbclassics: Voltaire in Love still stands as a portrait of the French Enlightenment as it really was, with intrigue and idealism in strange but fizzy solution.Why did Nancy Mitford have the insight into the nature of French intellectual life denied to so many others? Many English people live for a… Love! Her!
Nov 28th
10 notes
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Nov 25th
8 notes
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My OWOB
I posted the last of my Beta Band musings for One Week One Band yesterday and if you missed any of the fun, it’s all here. Sincere thanks to Hendrik for having such a great idea for a site and executing it so well. Running a successful blog that depends on the voluntary contributions of (unreliable, chronically procrastinating, ahem) writers can’t be easy! A few tips for anyone...
Nov 18th
11 notes
4 tags
Nov 14th
14 notes
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Nov 12th
28 notes
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Coming up: The Beta Band
oneweekoneband: Thank you, Nick! Moving on from electro-funk to “folktronica”, we will talk about British cult act The Beta Band next week, and Amy Granzin is going to be your host. Amy lives in Chicago where she writes and edits financial publications. She used to run mp3 blog Shake Your Fist and for several years wrote record reviews for Pitchfork. Her tumblr is Anything Could Happen,...
Nov 11th
19 notes
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Whew.
We can all go to bed now.
Nov 7th
2 notes
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Nov 6th
47 notes
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http://imathers.tumblr.com/post/35069960356/ladyk-d... →
imathers: ladyk: daisysoverrdiamonds: ladyk: Saw this sticker on the back of a not-even-fancy SUV this morning. I feel somewhat sheltered given I live in probably one of the most liberal towns in this country. This caught me off guard. I did not know such a thing existed. Does she hate herself?? If I had been thinking clearly at 6:30am, I would’ve left her a referral to a psychiatrist to...
Nov 5th
44 notes
October 2012
11 posts
3 tags
Oct 31st
24 notes