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 […]
Archive for the ‘Words’ category
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 […]
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 […]
Top 5 bits of advice for first-time readers of Moby-Dick
In my line of work it’s fairly common to come across people who’ve started Moby-Dick but found themselves stalled somewhere along the way: in the details of the ship, the proliferation of supporting characters, the intimate chronicle of whale-parts and boiling blubber. That’s to be expected. It’s not supposed to be an easy read. Right […]
Stay gold, Ponyboy
This week I stayed with a friend’s daughter while she started her first day of high school and her parents dropped her brother off at college. I had a wonderful time as acting auntie, a role I don’t get to play very often. We also have a lot in common which means we chatted and laughed […]
I still love you, 33 1/3
Remember the time I totally fell in love with an album that completely rearranged my DNA and then tried to write about it analytically and it was a massive success? Me neither. The 33 1/3 book series, with which many of you are familiar at least since it published Great Whatsit alum Bryan Waterman’s awesome […]
