Poetic pragmatism, neo-transcendentalism, bikes, burritos, basketball.
This is a photo by Thomas Allen. I first noticed his stuff when I saw the covers of Vintage reissues of James Ellroy’s novels (like this one for Suicide Hill). The photo above is from a series of dioramas that Allen created from cut-outs of 50’s pulp novels. I love the use of the book-ends [...]
{ 0 comments }
The NYT book blog Paper Cuts recently published a nice entry about William Faulkner’s late-in-life visit to West Point. It reminded me of one of my favorite moments from the (apparently out-of-print) Faulkner Reader: his acceptance speech for the 1949 Nobel Prize. Reading it again this afternoon, this portion of his speech seems especially timely and eerie [...]
{ 1 comment }
I stumbled upon a treasure trove of old outdoors books at Iconoclast Books in Ketchum, Idaho this weekend; this one’s from 1970. The cover ultimately doesn’t make much difference, but I like this one. If only hiking through sun cups like these was as serene and lovely as the photo implies. Also, the introductory text instructs Yosemite [...]
{ 0 comments }
I’ve spent a lot time combing through the archives of Paper Cuts, the blog of the New York Times Book Review editor Dwight Garner. It steers clear of smartypantsness, focusing on what one might call the lighter side of serious literature. In fact, most of the content is on the periphery of the strictly literary — a [...]
{ 1 comment }
I came upon the work of journalist William Langweische in pre-Internet times, reading a faded and dog-eared photocopy of “The World In Its Extreme,” a series of Atlantic Monthly articles that trace his travels across the Sahara desert. A vivid scene leaps to my whenever I’m in an airplane: He is on his way to [...]
{ 0 comments }
I was one of the suckers who pre-ordered The Complete New Yorker magazine. I am a long-long-time New Yorker reader, and the enticement was just too powerful — 8 DVDs filled with 60+ years of cultural commentary, quirky cartoons and cool cover art, all in a distinct highbrow-yet-practical-minded voice and scanned in at super-high-res? For a few [...]
{ 2 comments }
As I poked around new-ish social networking sites targeted at wordy people (Library Thing — connecting through lists of books) and (Wordie — lists of words), I came across a reference to a satirical paper entitled English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects.1 The paper’s author is listed as Quang Phúc Ðông of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology. As [...]
{ 0 comments }
Let’s just say that I’ve crossed paths with the Anarchist Cookbook [Wikipedia] [Amazon] a couple of times in my life. In my youth, making a film canister bomb was a popular diversion, and the cookbook teaches you how to make it with stuff you can buy at a scientific material supply store. The first step [...]
{ 0 comments }
Somehow a recent NYT Book Review convinced me that I needed to read this season’s hott new thing, Special Topics in Calamity Physics by a much-blogged-about literary debutante, Marisha Pessl. It’s no Secret History, if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s not bad, but on the other hand it’s not especially delicious, nor smart, nor [...]
{ 0 comments }
In 1978, Philip K Dick published an essay called “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” The title sort of says it all; it’s about how to envision the world of a story in a way that lasts. He cuts right to chase, too, confronting the hard question that most [...]
{ 2 comments }
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.
