Poetic pragmatism, neo-transcendentalism, bikes, burritos, basketball.
A great three-minute account of a meeting with Borges. About the life of an artist, he says: “The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory ... as the years go by, if the [...]
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There’s a lot of animated chatter among some of my favorite journalists over the redesign of their publication’s site. Last week, the Atlantic Monthly rolled out what appears to the casual reader as a slight update of the IA, along with some major changes to the way that blogs are integrated. Reader reaction was anything [...]
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Thomas McGuane takes a shot at describing what it’s like to land a tarpon: The closest thing to a tarpon in the material world is the Steinway piano. The tarpon, of course, is a game fish that runs to extreme sizes, while the Steinway piano is merely an enormous musical instrument, largely wooden and manipulated [...]
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If you haven’t read David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address at Kenyon, you should. It’s humble and real and warm, and truly great. It’s also very difficult to read. After his suicide, it’s impossible not to hear the echoes of Wallace’s internal conversation, the darkness and doubt and obsessive thoughts that he clearly struggled to [...]
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Doug LeMoine is puzzled that the construction of Facebook status updates requires me/him to refer to myself/himself in the third person. This format gives structure to the News Feed, but it also encourages the updater to craft the update as a sentence beginning with his/her full name. The forced third-person would seem to create myriad [...]
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Last night I read the New Yorker profile of Matthew and Michael Dickman, poets from Portland, Oregon who happen to be identical twins. (Here’s the abstract). In their work, they have very different voices, but there’s a strange sort of twin telepathy that seems to exist within it. They also edit each other’s work, providing [...]
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Confucius: To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge. Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, aka “Rumsfucious:” As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is [...]
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If I were a derivatives man, I’d go to the Chicago Board of Trade and buy up some poetry futures. Sell frozen orange juice and pork bellies; buy poetry. Why? Because it is the perfect product for small screen reading. People are reading more and more stuff on smaller and smaller screens, everyone knows this, [...]
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I love writing letters, but for some reason the only letter-to-the-editor I’ve ever written went something like this: Dear Mr. Remnick, If you publish one more story by John Updike, so help me God I will cancel my subscription immediately. Sincerely, Doug LeMoine The year was 1999. I had been driven to what I saw as [...]
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My name is Doug LeMoine. I work both on, and for, the Internet. You can find more about me in the About Me page that I wrote about me.
