"I went and saw
Iron Man 2 today, pretty good, I read
Anathem too, yeah, not bad, I think, and I finally managed to work though those last two seasons of
The Wire": few personal cultural blogs are interesting.
with hidden noise is different. The blog of Dan Visel of the
Institute for the Future of the Book, it covers, regularly and in depth, reading material that's genuinely fascinating and often surprising — and he actually cares, seriously, about culture.
Some of the books covered include Nicholson Baker's
U and I, Aeschylus'
The Oresteia, Jean-Philippe Toussaint's
Self-Portrait Abroad and Donald Barthelme's
Paradise. (Also, his
immortal review of ulillillia's
The Legend of the Ten Elemental Masters, though it's not on this particular blog cannot be missed.)
posted by colinmarshall
on Jun 11, 2010 -
24 comments
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
First reported by
an anonymous tip to a blog, the
Los Angeles Times has confirmed that
David Foster Wallace has hung himself.
posted by gerryblog
on Sep 13, 2008 -
483 comments
Rob Rummel-Hudson is a likeable smartass, who's been blogging
forever. He and Julie have a
cute daughter,
Schuyler. One day, she was
diagnosed with a rare, serious neurological condition:
Bilateral Perisylvian Polymicrogyria or, as they have come to call it,
Schuyler's Monster. Rob continued his candid, passionate diary - at one point stirring the growing
group of
loyals to raise more than $10,000 dollars (in less than a
month!), endowing Schuyler with a
speech device (a.k.a.
Big Box of Words).
Slated for
publication in 2008, as
blogs-become-books go, this
father/
daughter story deserves a
closer look.
posted by progosk
on Jul 11, 2007 -
17 comments
Play money is a blog about a guy trying to make money selling artifacts from online games. The guy is Julian Dibbell, whose
work has been discussed on metafilter before.
posted by rdr
on Oct 20, 2003 -
11 comments
"By removing both costs and the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing of its financial value, making a coin of the realm unnecessary. A lot of people in the weblog world are asking
"How can we make money doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't." Though he finally admits: "Right now, the people who have profited most from weblogs are the people who've written books about weblogging."
posted by zenpop
on Oct 5, 2002 -
27 comments
Dan Rhodes is a talented British author whose books have been recommended to me by many web-people, and now he's got a website. It's an opportunity to sample his
Anthropology collection (hit refresh a few times), and boasts a
reviews page which should please fans of the Eggers Po-Mo style. What I think is interesting about Rhodes is how much his little stories remind me of the tiny vignettes you find in, uh, 'daily web publishing'.
posted by freakytrigger
on Feb 26, 2001 -
0 comments
