Variations on a Theme: Poor Loonies
(via) My vocation [as a writer] changed everything: the sword-strokes fly off, the writing remains; I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be…
The Art of Cuisine (2): Samuel Johnson
Dinner on a Man-of-War, Anonymous, ca. 1893 Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay’s sharp, scintillating 1856 biography of British author Samuel Johnson turned out to be quite…
Lost & Found (2)
Dispatches from the Reanimation Library Danger! Icebergs Ahead! Poole, Lynn and Gray Johnson Poole. New York: Random House, 1961. The Reanimation Library is a…
Urban Planning
Monologue from The Cruise (1998) The image makes me think of this conversation with this woman the other day. She was this fastidious Judaic type woman…
Better to Fade Away than to Burn Out?
John Tremblay at Francesca Pia (Contemporary Art Daily) “Writing, as such, takes an almost intolerable combination of hubris and naiveté. This has destroyed many a…
Intellectual History for What?
(via) It is not professional to burn a 300-page book manuscript because it no longer “speaks to you.” Nor is it befitting the product…
The Art of the Obituary (7): Momofuku Ando
(via) Momofuku Ando, inventor of instant noodles (March 5, 1910 – January 5, 2007) He ate Chikin Ramen, his original flavour of noodles, almost every…
The Art of Cuisine (1): Mămăligă
H. Ellen Browning, distant relative of English poet Robert Browning, chronicles her adventures in Eastern Europe in her travel memoir A Girl’s Wanderings in Hungary…
Variations of a Theme: The Cost of Happiness
He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able…
The Art of the Obituary (6): Susan Sontag
Annie Leibovitz, Susan at the House on Hedges Lane (1988), Brooklyn Museum Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) She was bookish almost from birth.…
Messages The City Wants Us To Hear
Some excerpts from Timothy “Speed” Levitch’s Speedology (2002) 1. The Fastest Way to Adventure is to Stand Still Boredom is an illusion. Boredom is the…
Only One Part of Us Is Sane
“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and…
The Art of the Obituary (5): Ike Turner
Ike Turner (November 5, 1931 – December 12, 2007) Though his musical and entrepreneurial talent was enormous, he had been slow to break out of…
The Lover
Julia Kristeva (1987): We have lost the relative strength and security that the old moral codes guaranteed our loves either by forbidding them or determining…
The Art of the Obituary: Janet Frame
Janet Frame (August 28, 1924 - January 29, 2004) She needed ‘treatment’— electro-convulsive therapy at the Seacliff hospital in Dunedin. Every part of this therapy…
Humanity and Suffering on Craigslist
pp. 26-27 Carson McCullers, “The Ballad of the Sad Café” First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it…