May 2013
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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...
April 2013
6 posts
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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...
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“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...
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March 2013
8 posts
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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...
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vastandgrand:
“Hammer Down” by Magnolia Electric...
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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...
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February 2013
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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.
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January 2013
8 posts
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Hey people posting art without crediting and/or...
Stop it! It’s bullshit. Does this look like Pinterest?
(same applies to reblogs…)
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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...
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“Like the fraternity of smokers, there’s a fraternity of insomniacs, the disquiet...”
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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...
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December 2012
11 posts
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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November 2012
12 posts
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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!
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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...
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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,...
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Whew.
We can all go to bed now.
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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...
October 2012
11 posts
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