Penn Station is a terrible building but it has its small charms: newsstands that carry quite a lot of magazines, an old-fashioned departure board with moving parts, and a few comfortingly familiar folkways. People stand and watch the board, for instance, and then, despite the fact that Amtrak doesn’t oversell trains, the instant the board [...]
Archive for the ‘Words’ category
Twitter recommendations
Back in February 2012, when I was still on my prolonged hiatus from this here site, my lovely friend Lisa Parrish posted a list called “Things that are supposedly great that I didn’t like at all.” As a rule, I wasn’t even commenting at that point, but she almost dragged me out of lurker status [...]
Thinking about Twitter post-Boston
This isn’t quite the post I promised last week. I’ll get to that one — a list of my favorite Twitter feeds — next time. For now, I can’t stop thinking about the events of last week as a watershed in the history of social media. At every turn, from first-hand accounts of bombings at [...]
Why I don’t do Facebook (or, the state of my social media, early 2013)
As far as I can remember, the first time anyone tried to get me to sign up for Facebook was February 2006. I’m pretty certain about the date because it coincided with events documented in this very early TGW post, which I’ve bookmarked for years in order repeatedly to retrieve the recipe for Mikelle’s Mexican [...]
What’s Happenning? A 1960s NYC video playlist
Happening from Django's Ghost on Vimeo. Antonello Branca, dir. What’s Happening (1967). Featuring Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Gregory Corso, Marie Benois and Leon Kraushar. Peter Moore, dir. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Originale: Doubletakes (1964) Filmed at the U.S. premiere of Originale by Stockhausen, Judson Hall, September 1964. Featuring: Director – Allan Kaprow; Pianist [...]
Tripblog 2
The thing about my family in Dallas is they are family in some sense I never aspired to. They all lived along Hillcrest Avenue the last fifty years. My aunt’s kids went to school close to home and the two boys have lived there again since college though the older one just moved out last [...]
Kenneth Goldsmith’s Deaths and Disasters
Those of you who know how much I enjoy Kenneth Goldsmith’s work will appreciate how excited I am for this forthcoming book. From the publisher’s description: In Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Kenneth Goldsmith transcribes historic radio and television reports of national tragedies as they unfurl, revealing an extraordinarily rich linguistic panorama of passionate description. [...]
Enough
When will we decide, as a nation, that we’ve had enough? That we won’t let this happen again? Or this? Or this?
Language is another name for coffin
It’s end-of-the-year-list season. I always do a little better with music than books, I’m afraid, given that most of my reading time is taken up with a professional obligation to reading old books rather than new releases. But each year I manage to read a few of the many hardcovers I purchase, and then I [...]
At the risk of whaleblogging
From Seamen’s Bethel, a chapel in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Melville writes “In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman’s Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot.” The walls upstairs are covered with these. I found them [...]
