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 stars are on your side, you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends whom you will never get to know but who love you. And that is an immense reward.”

I really geek out out on glimpses of the marked-up copy of other writers, so I was pretty fascinated to see a page of a Presidential speech-in-progress. If you click through to the zoomed-in page, you’ll see that all of Obama’s notes are all copy-edits; there are no developmental “what I’m trying to say here”-style edits. Not sure what that means, but I thought it was interesting. The Flickr caption indicates that the photo was taken “in the Oval Office, Sept. 9, 2009, in preparation for the president’s address to a joint session of Congress.” Cool.

This clustercuss is the redesign. (I can’t find a picture of the “before,” but it wasn’t really too different, to the casual observer).

The real problem: The redesign isn’t radical enough.

It simply shifted content around — a sure-fire bet to piss off regular readers. The redesign doesn’t address bigger problems around findability, readability, navigability, whatever you want to call a lingering sense of not being able to get around easily. It also breaks from a common blog convention: homepages that includes lengthy content for each post (UPDATE: they’ve changed this). The biggest change is that they’ve moved away from individual blogs as linear, ever-expanding solo narratives, which I think is interesting. What they’re moving toward is less clear.

According to spirited commentary by the Atlantic writers, the redesign was driven by the arcane calculus of advertising. I won’t pretend to know how online ad placement works in a place like The Atlantic, but what I do know is that someone told them to spread their fresh content around, and it’s kinda half-spread.

I am a big Atlantic reader. I subscribe to the print edition, and I regularly read three of its bloggers — Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows and Andrew Sullivan. I subscribe to their feeds, so I don’t go to theatlantic.com unless I want to comment on Coates’ blog, or read comments, which means I’ll head there a couple of times a week, but when I get there I’ll be deeply immersed in a thread.

To me, the true opportunity was to leverage the sprawling, smart conversations that these writers continually create — to create a sort of salon among the readers and writers. To Klein’s point above, you’d think a virtual salon would be exactly the kind of thing that would “re-center” the brand. Breaking out of the conventional blog model is a reasonable first step. Blogs are long threads, and maintaining individual threads needlessly inhibits wider-scale conversation. So they’ve taken that half-step away from threads (which are a helpful organizing principle for readers), but the salon is nowhere in sight. And this is a problem.

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 by a series of keys. However, the tarpon when hooked and running reminds the angler of a piano sliding down a precipitous incline and while jumping makes cavities and explosions in the water not unlike a series of pianos falling from a great height. If the reader, then, can speculate in terms of pianos that herd and pursue mullet and are themselves shaped like exaggerated herrings, he will be a very long way toward seeing what kind of thing a tarpon is. Those who appreciate nature as we find her may rest in the knowledge that no amount of modification can substitute the man-made piano for the real thing—the tarpon. Where was I?

I came across this in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, an absolutely killer collection edited by David Halberstam, but you can check it out in the SI Vault: “The Longest Silence,” by Thomas McGuane.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

It’s not technically available online, but you might be able to stumble across it in the depths of the Internet archives. Thanks, Dave.

(It’s possible that I’m taking this all far too seriously).

When I first joined Facebook, I dutifully wrote all of my status updates in the third person, as the format dictates. Because I am both a grammar snob and a rule-follower.

Rule-abiding: Doug ... his

This construction is appropriate for the feed, but it’s also terribly awkward. Statuses are usually personal, “microblog-ish” bits of content, and it just sounds weird when personal stuff is written in the third person. Recently, I started to lapse into the first person in the body of the status, and while doing so, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable condemnation.

Rule-bending? Rule-breaking? Rule-adapting: Doug ... my

But so far, there has been no condemnation forthcoming. Why? Maybe we all quickly become blind to the totally obvious disagreement? Or maybe it just makes cognitive sense that the content of the status will be in the first person? If the latter is true, how soon will we be updating Fowler and Strunk & White to reflect this new kind of usage?

During one editing session, one of the Dickmans recalls an interview with former American poet laureate Mark Strand in which Strand cautions against relying on “clusters of words” that pop into your head ... This sounded to me like a good rule of thumb for writing. (It also added fuel to the fire of my dislike of Twitter and Twitter-like tools that encourage people to offer half-cocked, cliche-ridden mini-opinions about everything.) I plundered the Internet in search of the interview.

Turns out that he was referring to a 2003 piece in Post Road Magazine. It was conducted by writer Michael O’Keefe. The relevant bit is the last passage from Strand, but the context is helpful:

Mark Strand: Nobody wants to arrive because that’s the end. One wants to have openings constantly before him so there are places to go.
Michael O’Keefe: Do you believe that sometimes words can get in the way when you write?
MS: Words do get in the way when you have heard them used in a particular manner before. When you write all you’ve got are words but they both get in the way and serve as a salvation.
MO: Do you avoid using any kind of combinations of words that you could remember easily?
MS: Yeah, I mistrust them because it means that they existed in that way before. The idea is to use a modifier-noun combination that may never have been used before. Otherwise you may be just quoting others or quoting yourself. The excitement comes when you have done something that was unthinkable before.

Amen, brother. Mistrust ease. Seek the unthinkable.

In my digging, I also found some excellent Strand resources, including a nice interview in a 1975 issue of Ploughshares and a very helpful page at the Library of Congress that eventually led to my discovery of the above interview.

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 to say: We know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know. — Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Thoreau cites Confucius during a discussion of self-knowledge in Walden, and it reminded me of Ol Rummy. Looks like he was on to something deeper after all. I thought he was talking about intelligence, but he was really getting at “true knowledge.” Perhaps the US government should create a Central True Knowledge Agency? Speaking of true knowledge, the entirety of Walden is online.

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, duh. War and Peace is available for the Kindle, but who wants to wrestle that monster through a keyhole? Anyway, last night, I downloaded the awkwardly named Kindle for the iPhone. I had tried to become a Kindle user (of the device — confusing, yes?). I failed at this, but I had some Kindle-ized books left over — Leaves of Grass and the Modern Library’s Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson — and I downloaded those. I didn’t really expect much.

Twice today, I found myself reading through sections of Leaves of Grass: “A PROMISE to California, / Also to the great Pastoral Plains, and for Oregon: / Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain, to teach robust American love.” Good reading as I watched the lunch crowd at Mixt Greens. The entire Leaves of Grass is available on Bartleby, by the way. Then, as I was waiting for a conference call to start, I read Emerson’s poem “Self-Reliance.” Hard to conduct a conference call with a mind thus expanded by poetry, but I think I can get used to it. Poetry on the iPhone! It makes a lot of sense, and Amazon did a nice job with the interface. Simple, to the point, no BS, just like reading should be.

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 the brink — of patience! of sanity! — by the New Yorker’s incessant publishing of Updike’s fiction, which seemed (to me) not only incessant, but over-stylized, nauseatingly East Coast-ish, maudlin, wooden. No matter my mood, I found it insufferable and insulting, tone-deaf when it came to anything but older white guys. I don’t like to speak ill of the departed, so I’ll stop there and I’ll admit that I’ve softened in the meantime. Updike’s literary criticism is — who can argue? — instructive and insightful. He knew his stuff, and I felt enriched (sometimes grudgingly so) when I read his reviews.

With regard to the aforementioned letter, my hand was forced almost immediately. Updike had published something like 25,000 stories in the New Yorker to that point, so I might as well have told John Henry to stop driving steel, or for Jerry Garcia to stop jamming. By the time my letter was fluttering into David Remnick’s trashcan, I was already being forced to make good on my threat, a task that was ultimately embarrassing in its cold, bureaucratic execution. Contrary to any engaged reader’s conception of the publisher-reader relationship, when you say “I’d like to cancel my subscription,” they don’t transfer you to the desk of the editor so that you can ream him a new one. You hear a few keystrokes, and then get asked if there’s anything else you need help with.

Upon reflection, this experience was a life lesson in itself. Mr. Updike, I thank you, and I wish you well.

The Internet is like a small town, especially when there’s something to disagree about. Recently, some of my favorite Internet citizens got into it over Obama’s decision to have poetry at his inauguration.

I’ve always liked George Packer, the New Yorker’s man on the ground in the early days of Iraq. I devoured his book about the first year of the occupation, The Assassins’ Gate. It tells the stories of a few Iraqis who put their necks on the line to support us when we arrived in 2003, and it comes to mind whenever a conversation turns to the need to find a way out of Iraq. I also read his blog, Interesting Times. He’s the kind of journalist who always does his homework, which made it all the more puzzling when he somewhat flippantly criticized Barack Obama’s decision to ask Elizabeth Alexander to read a poem at his inauguration:

For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings ... [Ed.: Ouch.] ... Obama’s Inauguration needs no heightening. It’ll be its own history, its own poetry.

Ouch. A blanket dismissal? The activity of “a few people?” I started writing a response to this, but Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic beat me to it. His blog rules. He called out Packer for being prematurely judgmental, and suggested that perhaps hip-hop lyrics were suitably rhythmic and emotive for the occasion. Yes.

Lo and behold, Packer just posted what amounts to an apology, and he does so in the best way, comparing the current poetry scene to the NBA in the 1970s:

Contemporary American poetry has too many mansions to be summed up under a throwaway phrase like “private activity.” Its multitude of schools and forms is like the N.B.A. in the nineteen-seventies, when there was no dominant team but a confused contest of warring tribes. And I should have read more of Alexander’s work than appears on her Web site, and more carefully, before expressing skepticism that she’ll be equal to the occasion on January 20th.

So, the real question is: Who will be the David Stern of 21st century American poetry? Chris Fischbach, I’m looking at you.

A selection of Twitter Shaquliciousness:

• His bio, two words: “Very quotatious.”
• Yesterday: “Last nite i told greg oden , ‘we r not the same, i am a martian’”
• Last week: “About to go to yoga, gotta get my stretch on”

Which reminds me of another star who has a way with words: Randy Moss, who recently launched “hellified” into the everyday sports lexicon. Back in 2002, he became a permanent fixture on my refrigerator when this passage appeared in Sports Illustrated:

The perception was that [recently hired coach] Mike Tice, after one game as interim coach, was given a three-year deal last January because he convinced McCombs he could control Moss. “No,” says Moss. “Mike Tice got the job because he and Randy Moss can get along. Nobody controls me but my mama and God.”

There’s something about that quote that sticks with me. Only controlled by his mama and God. @RandyMoss: It takes a special kind of person to even think in those terms. Keep it up.

This is the top shelf on one of our book cases. It’s comforting to have the books sitting there; they’re like a version of myself, sitting on a shelf, disassembled and re-arrangeable.

In August 1995, Harpers Magazine conducted a round table discussion with Wired’s Kevin Kelly, author Sven Birkerts, the Well’s John Perry Barlow, and Mark Slouka. The results were condensed in the magazine [PDF], and the conversation outlines the two ideologies that continue to converse today: Those who believe that the paper incarnation of the book is an irreplaceable arena for the delivery of its content, and those who don’t. Birkerts discusses the former in his 1995 book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts sent a shot across the bow in a paper called “Reading at Risk,” [PDF]. The researchers surveyed 17,000 people, and they concluded that the future of literary reading is bleak: “Literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young.”

Still, the total number of books sold continues to rise, so is the future really that bleak? The NEA thinks so. It released a follow-on to Reading at Risk called “To Read or Not To Read.” This study focuses on young readers, and links the decline in reading to “civic, social and economic” risks.

Last spring, Nicholas Carr discussed Google’s effect on literary reading in the Atlantic, provocatively titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” [I discussed this in a blog post at the Cooper Journal called “Dumb is the new smart”]. In it, he interviews a blogger who confesses the following:

“I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

The article also sparked a discussion on brittanica.com, collected in a forum called “Your Brain Online.” It’s got a lot of interesting stuff from folks like Kevin Kelly, Danny Hillis and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, who thinks that the “unprecedented abundance” of the web will function to break the vise-grip of the “literary world” on culture:

It’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting. This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream ... The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.

Ursula Le Guin disputes the notion that people have ever read War and Peace. (Well, maybe.)

Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems questionable. But I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

The title of her recent Harper’s essay pretty well sums up her position: “Notes on the alleged decline of reading.” It roars through the various aspects of the state of reading and publishing, quickly turning into a ringing indictment of corporate publishers:

The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere P.R. because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.

On that social note

I was just looking at my beat-up copy of “The Dharma Bums,” and I felt a sort Chris Matthews-esque tingle. I bought it during high school at Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas, and it sparked my fascination with the West Coast, years before I ever traveled here. Would I ever read it again? Probably not. In fact, just now, I could barely read even a couple of pages without feeling like Kerouac was on auto-pilot. But I like the idea that my bookshelf is a kind of externalization of myself, a collection of important influences and expressions. The future of my books appears to be not so different than the present: A combination of talismans, objects of beauty, and points of reference.

On the subject of reference, in (wait for it) a Harper’s essay called ““A Defense of the Book,” William Gass talks about the pleasures of not having the world at your fingertips:

I have rarely paged through one of my dictionaries (a decent household will have a dozen) without my eye lighting, along the way, on words more beautiful than a found fall leaf, on definitions odder than any uncle, on grotesques like gonadotropin-releasing hormone or, barely, above it — what? — gombeen — which turns out to be Irish for usury.

And holy crap, there’s a whole lot more Gass at Tunneling. Articles, links, thoughts. I love the Internet.

My fellow panelists were a murderer’s row of publishing insight. Rick Simonson is the co-founder of Copper Canyon Press and a book buyer at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle; Richard Nash is the publisher of Soft Skull Press; Patricia Wakida runs Wasabi Press; and, Michael Coffey is the Managing Editor at Publisher’s Weekly (and the author of an excellent baseball book, 27 Men Out).

When we got started, I suspected I’d been tossed in a shark tank wearing a meat necklace. I found myself rattling on about things in my frame of reference — technology, social media, iPhones, Kindles, stuff wanting to be free — and I worried that all of it was simply chumming the waters for my fellow panelists who (a) know a lot about publishing, and (b) clearly recognized that their business models are being eroded by technologies that offer new ways to read (i.e., everything with a screen) and supply chain disintermediation, i.e. Amazon.

Side note: The weather was beautiful

Whenever I take a picture of him, Fish (i.e., Chris Fischbach of Coffee House) tells me: “I better not see this on the Internet.” But I just had to take this one while he and Katie (of Graywolf and New York Times fame) took me on an excellent walk along the Mississippi just before winter arrived.

As it turned out, we had a series of productive conversations. My colleagues and the audience were keen to know about how companies go about determining the right way to conceive technological products, and to implement them appropriately. Meanwhile, I learned a lot about small presses, publishing, and the ways that editors at literary presses think about their work. Allan Kornblum, the founder of Coffee House Press, saw himself as “the inheritor of the Maxwell Perkins tradition” in creating deep and lasting relationships with artists, supporting them and providing a consistent venue for publication. Fish said that he wanted “to create art objects that last.” Both of those goals make a lot of sense to me, and they seem like a firm foundation for a business in transition.

So, what is the future of reading, anyway?

I’m going to put together another post about my thoughts on this topic, and in the meantime I’m going to be digesting some of the work that my fellow panelists referenced during our discussions; this list includes Ursula Le Guin’s “Notes on the alleged decline of reading” that I saw in Patricia’s pile of notes; Michael mentioned Bill McKibben’s new book, Deep Economy in making a comparison between regional literature and a larger movement toward regional and local economies; Richard spoke a couple of times about literary subscription programs, such as Soft Skull’s annual edition, and Powell’s indiespensable list.

¹ I was there because my friend Fish (the senior editor at Coffee House Press) thought that my experience with technology and online product strategy would complement the deep expertise of the small press luminaries on the panel. Or perhaps he just wanted to see what happened when I said the words “Kindle” and “free” around Michael Coffey. In the end, there would be no way of knowing.

Recently, it was revealed that he is a runner, like me, when he released a book of ruminations on running and its effects on his life and writing. It’s called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and it is easily in my personal tops of the pops for 2008.

There was something about his writing that struck a deep chord with me, but the nature of it was not revealed until he described a specific moment of “passing through” during an ultra-marathon. People talk about “hitting the wall,” but, in my experience, running is about hitting many walls, and somehow emerging on the other side.

... Around the 47th mile I felt like I’d passed through something. That’s what it felt like. Passed through is the only way I can express it. Like my body has passed clean through a stone wall. At what exact point I felt like I’d made it through, I can’t recall, but suddenly I noticed I was on the other side. I don’t know about the logic or the process or the method involved — I was simply convinced of the reality that I’d passed through.

Once I read that, I started to remember other moments in Murakami books, moments that all of a sudden seemed to spring from his running experience. For instance, there’s a scene in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle when Boku descends into a well to try to pass through its stone wall to find his missing wife, Kumiko, in a room on the other side of the wall:

I try to separate from myself ... I try to get out of the clumsy flesh of mine, which is crouching here in the dark. Now I am nothing but a vacant house, an abandoned well. I try to go outside, to change vehicles, to leap from one reality to another that moves at a different speed.

Now a single wall is the only thing separating me from the strange room. I ought to be able to pass through that wall. I should be able to do that with my own strength and with the power of deep darkness in here.

Later, he breaks through.

All of a sudden, I was asleep, as if I had been walking down a corridor with nothing particular on my mind when, without warning, I was dragged into an unknown room. How long this thick, mudlike stupor enveloped me I had no idea. It couldn’t have been very long. It might have been just a moment. But when some kind of presence brought me back to consciousness, I knew I was in another darkness.

That sense of being changed “without warning” is so recognizable; I feel like I’ve been on long runs in which I’m transported suddenly, through time, and dropped somewhere else. And the part about “another darkness” reminded me of After Dark, when Eri Asai has somehow passed from an actual bed to a bed on a TV screen that faces the actual bed, a similar situation in which the rules were somehow totally different:

In the bed in that other world, Eri continues sleeping soundly, as she did when she was in this room — just as beautifully, just as deeply. She is not aware that some hand has carried her (or perhaps we should say her body) into the TV screen. The blinding glare of the ceiling’s fluorescent lamps does not penetrate to the bottom of the sea trench in which she sleeps.

All of these make more sense now. It’s all about breaking through, about transcending something that is both physical and mental, even spiritual.

I also loved Murakami’s running mantra: “I’m not a human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.” It reminded me of my own mantra, which is the final verse of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues:

Well, if they freed me from this prison,
If that railroad train was mine,
I bet I’d move it on a little,
Farther down the line,
Far from Folsom Prison,
That’s where I want to stay,
And I’d let that lonesome whistle,
Blow my Blues away.

Running: It’s all about pain, machines, escape, and breaking through walls.

If The Wire had a literary analog, this would be it, not only because it takes place in East Baltimore, but because it presents a morally complex view of the relationship between law enforcement and the citizenry with whom they interact (mostly poor people in desperate circumstances). It also adds academic underpinnings and a truly excellent set of footnotes that provide avenues to a variety of interesting sources, one of which led me to one of my all-time favorite New Yorker articles, a 1998 installment of the Cop Diary called "The Word on the Street" about the language of NYC cops. The author, the pseudonymous Marcus Laffey (actual name: Edward Conlon) recently wrote a memoir called Blue Blood, which is going on the list for sure.

I really appreciated his discussion of research methods because it puts in high relief some of the challenges that any researcher (e.g., one who is trying to understand how people use high-tech tools) interacts with their interview subjects. So much of it is very un-objective, and Moskos addresses his skeptics early on:

Some will criticize my unscientific methods. I have no real defense. Everything is true, but this book suffers from all the flaws inherent in ethnographic work ... Being on the inside, I made little attempt to be objective. I did not pick, much less randomly pick, my research site or research subjects. I researched where I was assigned. To those I policed, I tried to be fair. But my empathy was to my fellow officers. Those nearest to me became my friends and research subjects. My theories emerged from experience, knowledge, and understanding. In academic jargon, my work could be called "front-and-backstage, multisited, participant-observation research using grounded theory rooted in symbolic interactionism from a dramaturgical perspective.

You can read more in an excerpt here [PDF], and he’s got a blog that discusses media coverage of the book here.

I just discovered that Thames & Hudson has published a stunning collection of Tarkovsky’s polaroids, taken of his family and travels. The Guardian displays of number of them here.

Lots more at this blog. In Russian, too. Nice.

things magazine has amassed an incredible index of Pelican book covers from the 1930s through the 80s. The one above is from 1968. Check it.

Dick Clurman of Time magazine, an affable gent, was a guest on the Buckley yacht in the Caribbean. After dinner, Bill B., leafing through a TV log, announced that “The Wizard of Oz” would be starting in half an hour — in English, broadcast from Puerto Rico. Clurman was delighted and confessed to never having seen it.

At the appointed time the set was switched on, but to everyone’s chagrin it seemed the movie had already been on for a good half hour. Bill had read the starting time wrong. Clurman’s disappointment was visible.

“Let’s see if my name cuts any ice down here,” his host said. The incredulous Clurman later described how his friend grabbed the phone, rang up the station in Puerto Rico, managed to get through to the engineer, explained his guest’s disappointment, and asked if it would be too much trouble to start the movie over!

In disbelief, Clurman saw the screen go blank, followed by a frantic display of jumbling and flashing. And then — the opening credits and the comforting strains of “Over the Rainbow.” The movie began anew. Clurman declared that never until then had he known the full meaning of “chutzpah.”

I think Bill decided to let a year go by, giving Clurman time to regale all his friends and acquaintances with the tale of the Oz miracle. It was then, still reluctantly, that the magician revealed his secret. The movie had not been broadcast at all that night — except on Bill’s tape deck, which he had secretly manipulated with his unseen left arm while “talking on the phone” using the other.

Given Buckley’s love of literature, I would wager that the choice of movie was yet another layer of the joke. Right? The wizard seems by all accounts to be supernatural, but is in fact quite human, making the “magic” happen by pulling hidden levers and turning secret knobs?

Read the rest here.

It’s not a word, but lots of people like to use it as if it were. Over the past few years, I’ve heard it more and more often, but today was the first day I’ve ever seen it in the mainstream media. Hmmm.

Is there something deficient about “influential” or “resonant?” What about affecting, authoritative, controlling, dominant, effective, efficacious, forcible, governing, guiding, important, impressive, inspiring, instrumental, leading, meaningful, momentous, moving, persuasive, potent, prominent, significant, strong, substantial, telling, touching, weighty, beating, booming, deep, electrifying, enhanced, full, intensified, loud, mellow, noisy, orotund, plangent, powerful, profound, pulsating, pulsing, resounding, reverberant, reverberating, rich, ringing, roaring, round, sonorant, sonorous, stentorian, strident, thrilling, throbbing, thundering, or thunderous?