January 2012
23 posts
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“Sometimes, when you find yourself the lone grump before a buzz juggernaut, you...”
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Our own Lydia Kiesling really knows how to start off a book review. (via millionsmillions)
This is a good piece. Kiesling’s jabs are tres amusant. But what makes the review work is the fact that she admits her biases and explains what she does like fiction to do. This is a really helpful...
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“Why do I object so viscerally to Two Lights and their ilk’s expenditure? Is it...”
– Nick Southall, On selling out and privilege in music
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“Bayley loaded the map into a computerized laser-cutting program. An hour later,...”
– Architecture Student Turns Ward Map Into Jigsaw Puzzle | NBC Chicago (via ourmaninchicago)
This is awesome! Me want.
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Watchmaura:
Donating to the Best Music Writing series is the functional equivalent of pre-ordering the 2012 edition of the book—which will collect 2011’s best pieces of criticism, reportage, and other media on music from publications of all types and from all corners of the globe. Why not do so today?
I donated yesterday. What are y’all waiting for? Only five days left!
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“it should be called h+1+n+1 because this shit is worse than bird flu amirite”
– One of ILM’s pseudonymous posters on that n+1 piece about Pitchfork.
I read ILM threads for the comedy and am rarely disappointed. But this seems like the most astute response to the article as well.
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“The deadness of Hirst’s product lines—flipping the bird to anyone...”
– Peter Schjeldahl smacks Damien Hirst (and his devotees and detractors) upside the head
Per usual, Schjeldahl states in elegant prose my scattered, inarticulate feelings about a visual artist. In this case, Damien Hirst, who, as the critic points out, isn’t interesting enough to get offended...
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Notes: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir
It’s probably not a good idea to approach a book of medieval history with high entertainment expectations. Life in twelfth-century Europe? A grim, relentless grind of war, disease, famine (or food so bad famine’s almost preferable) and unquestioning obedience to God, king, overlord, husband—even for the Queen of England and duchess of what constitutes most of modern-day France.
...
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Gosh this new Cloud Nothings album is crazy...
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“Mothers fretting over the sexual precocity of their sons can just sit back and...”
– Heather Havrilesky reviewing Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl land
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desnoise:
“The thing that [Jennifer] Egan does that no other American writer I can think of pulls off, is to be formally daring without being even a little bit pretentious. She takes her stories in crazy twists down wild alleys, without ever let the book turn into a writing workshop experiment. Whenever I read something that is labeled “formally daring”, on each page I can feel the criticisms...
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Here comes the rooster →
Yippee!
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“Many photos on Tumblr are not even credited, because to digital image collectors...”
– Meagan Day, On tumblr
Or many tumblr users are simply too lazy or intellectually incurious to credit images to their creators. This is theoretical excusifying for what is essentially dick behavior.
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“The idea of the “liberal elite” could not survive the depredations of the 1% in...”
– Barbara and John Ehrenreich, The making of the American 99% and the collapse of the middle class
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Notes: A visit from the goon squad, Jennifer Egan
I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad!
Until I read it.
Damn you hype-mongering critics, raving friends and false-hope-boosting Pulitzer Prize committee. I struggled, from the opening scene on a therapist’s couch (really?) to that pointer business in the final dystopian chapter, to understand just what warmed the hearts of my fellow readers and left mine a cold hard stone. I admit that I...
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Book notes: Faithful Place, Tana French
Notes on the first completed item on my 2012 book challenge list. One down, 29 to go.
Good news first. Faithful Place is a superb police procedural. Smart, suspenseful, well-plotted, humane, the novel does exactly what it’s supposed to. What’s that? Oh, delineate law and justice and map those junctures where it becomes necessary to sacrifice one for the other. (I’ve read a lot...
