The best advice I ever got about reading came from the critic and scholar Louis Menand. Back in 2005, I spent six months in Boston and, for the fun of it, sat in on a lit seminar he was teaching at Harvard. The week we were to read Gertrude Stein’s notoriously challenging Tender Buttons, one …
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There’s a character in the film who, in passing, mentions that “talent plus persistence equals luck.” Are those your words? And has that been your experience? Those aren’t my words. I got that from a book that Steven Soderbergh wrote about his experience making sex, lies, and videotape. He may have even been quoting someone …
The writ of this collection of letters runs from about 1950 until 2007, the year of Vonnegut’s death. It is not exactly packed with revelations. We don’t write to those we see every day; anthologies such as these are documents of absence, plaster casts of empty rooms – involuted autobiographies. Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, review – …
Tom Waits on habits
“It’s very hard to stop doing things you’re used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.” ― Tom Waits
Wipe the slate clean every day. You don’t need to worry about your reading lists. Mark them all as read. Don’t worry about all the social media posts you haven’t read. Don’t worry about all the blogs there are to search through, or all the news sites there are to keep up with. Each day, …
Here’s what I’ve learned from not writing about my life because I was scared you wouldn’t like it: I’ve learned that you don’t care what I do in my life as long as I’m interesting. If I am doing something that’s scary, and I tell you, then you can identify with me when you do …
After attending the Green Vale School in Old Brookville, N.Y., where her classmates included Gloria Vanderbilt, and graduating from St. Timothy’s School in Stevenson, Md., she turned down a scholarship to Radcliffe to marry Arthur Twining Hadley II, whom she later described as “handsome, but a cad.” Her mother handed her off with the only …
Information is weird like that. It is its own ailment, its own deficiency, its own excess, its own cure. You flush out bad information with more (different) information. You fill a gap in information with more information. Programmers (and geneticists?) know: you could be just one character, one punctuation mark away from heaven. The Clicking …
(via The Smart Set: Is Superman Jewish? – February 1, 2013) Source: thesmartset.com
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