K8lin!’ I yelled, hitting the screen with a rolled up People. K8lin winced, balancing on her juice-stained little wings.
So begins my Twitter serial, “@M1racleM0m,” being tweeted today — from now to 3pm — via @storyvilleapp. There are Easter eggs, for those who would find them. My story “Miss Tennessee” — from my collection Why They Cried — is featured this week in the Storyville iPhone app.
Like Ami Greko, I’m not exactly sure what the cover of this week’s New Yorker is trying to say. Books are dead? E-books are bad? Old white men are befuddled? In any case, my friend Daniel Radosh long ago taught me the appropriate response to non sequiturs in The New Yorker. That’s right: a caption contest. There is a prize.
You know that salesperson who asks for your name? So they can use it over and over again, in an attempt to engage you? Do you like that? Are you more likely to buy something from them, or less likely? Please. Don’t answer.
Community managers like to ask a lot of questions in order to engage you. I would like them to stop it.
I took last week off from Plus Ça Change to write a longer essay for the Reanimation Library. If you’re not familiar with it, the library is a private collection in Brooklyn that saves discarded and out-of-date books for use by artists and others. Founder Andrew Beccone recently started a featured called “Word Processor,” where he asks writers to consider a volume from the collection. In my essay, I consider the Fourth Edition of Otto Kleppner’s Advertising Procedure an introductory advertising textbook that has been continuously revised since 1925. But “the advertising spiral”—shown here—abides as the centerpiece of the book, all the way to the current edtion. Head over to the library’s site to learn more.
And the winner for best title and best cover design of 1905 is … Miss Nonentity my L.T. Meade. Ms. Meade wrote over 300 (!) books for girls, including “A Gay Charmer, Wild Kitty, Daddy’s Girl, etc.”
I assume that is Ms. N, not the author, there on the cover.
I haven’t done a contest in awhile, so every Friday in November I’m going to give away a copy of my story collection Why They Cried — delivered via Kindle, Kobo, or as a pdf. (Your choice.) Here’s how to enter.
This weekend’s release of The Rum Diary reminded me of the time I tried to give Hunter S. Thompson a call, fifteen years ago or so.
In today’s column: the time I tried to call Hunter S. Thompson.
From the October installment of Adult Education: Everyone (well, just about) deserves a standing ovation. That’s why Laura Silver and Shawn Shafner have been clapping for Monday morning commuters by the 7th Ave subway station. Is it performance art? A social movement? Plain ol’ neighborliness? A report from the front lines.
The next installment, Adult Education Presents: Crime & Punishment, is Tuesday.
From the time A. introduced this volume — 1936’s How to Worry Successfully by one David Seabury — into our home, I knew it was the book I had been looking for my whole life. I had worrying down, but was always trying to stop. Maybe I was doing it wrong? From the preface:
Again and again people have asked me: “What do you mean by ‘successful’ worry? Isn’t it always harmful?” And the answer is: “No.”
Unfortunately, that’s as far as I’ve gotten.
Released in 1998 — not coincidentally, about the time Gen Y was hitting 18 — Aeroplane’s un-self-conscious poetry was immediately recognized as an antidote (even when we hadn’t been looking for one) to the quotation-mark-laden Matador catalog, featuring the plausibly deniable plaints of Pavement, Guided By Voices, et. al. These bands were smart, clever, and knowing. Mangum, on the other hand, was smart, guileless, and unknowable. Aeroplane is an album Dave Eggers wished he could have written, if he hadn’t been back there with me — and others — on the other side of the dividing line.
In today’s column: In the Aeroplane over the Sea, revisited.
Should art necessarily be a profession rather than a hobby, and is culture demonstrably better served by the former?
Question of the day: Should art be a profession?
So I have been and still am angry at being mediocre. Yes, yes, I am mediocre and angry.
Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew
We were no more than the pointed instruments of that life, activated symbols in an allegory whose authors were untold billions. And only they, acting in concert, could alter a line of its text. And the alterations could best be impelled by remaining what we were. Innocence outraged, the sacred defiled, the useful made useless.
Jim Thompson, “This World, then the Fireworks” — in today’s column.
“Very funny…very pertinent; however major problem for me is no hero…no hope…Script is too wordy. Everything is punched home twice or even thrice. Let’s discuss more.” — United Artists executive who passed on Paddy Chayefsky’s Network script.
(Source: thecomposites)
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