I LIE TO YOU ABOUT TWICE A DAY

2011-11-23T12:58:00.004-05:00

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read....but after three solid years of taking literature courses, Madeleine had nothing like a firm critical methodology to apply to what she read. Instead she had a fuzzy, unsystematic way of talking about books. It embarrassed her to hear the things people said in class. And the things she said. I felt that. It was interesting the way Proust. I liked the way Faulkner.

--Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

2011-10-23T17:45:00.005-04:00

If you were wandering around Chapel Hill yesterday, you may have happened upon this scene: a bride whose cape tickled the grass; a groom surrounded by his tuxedoed, dancing daughters; an audience timidly singing along with Stevie Wonder, then timidly swaying along to the beat of tribal drums; beakers turned centerpieces; a girl's mouth flying open in wonder when the magician made foam balls multiply in her hands; and shivering guests viewing the smudge of star clusters through telescopes.

If you had wandered down the path towards the gazebo, you would have seen two friends who hadn't seen each other since another wedding, talking as if nothing (and everything) had changed. Feeling so old and so young at the same time.

PARENTS

2011-09-05T14:52:00.001-04:00

(via Hark! A Vagrant)

2011-08-09T22:21:00.002-04:00

(Courtesy of The Glow)

Been interacting with babies more than ever this summer. Having and raising a kid seems like the wildest thing you could ever do.

A FINE LIFE, JUST A FINE LIFE

2011-08-02T10:33:00.002-04:00

2011-07-01T02:20:00.003-04:00

It’s not hard to find articles about Nineties nostalgia, many of which begin with this kind of personal narrative about one’s emotional connection with a cultural object. Though enjoyable, such pieces often fail to ask a single critical question about Snick, Metropolitan, ‘NSync, Beanie Babies, or whatever. Their discussions remain rooted in emotional reactions, barely departing from claims like “I LOVE Land of the Lost and you should watch it on Netflix Instant!” They end up saying little about either the object or about nostalgia itself. Perhaps more importantly, readers often feel entirely left out of such articles if they don’t already have affection for the thing being discussed. Nostalgia pieces can seem incredibly defensive, precisely because they focus on feelings, and not on ideas. They defiantly insist that the joy in revisiting the near past resides in reproducing the experience of falling in love again. And if you’re not already in love, too bad....
....An overdose on nostalgia for the things we once treasured often does them injustice by simplifying our memories of them. In the worst cases, it prevents us from seeing what they actually say about the world.

--AJ Aronstein, Calvin and Hobbes and the Trouble with Nostalgia (via Ian)

GREAT!

2011-06-17T22:01:00.005-04:00

Tomorrow, I leave on a five week road trip across the country with some great people, with the sole intention of seeing great sites and visiting other great people along the way.

SUMMER IN THE SOUTHEAST

2011-06-14T08:57:00.003-04:00

I am so lazy! I am so free! I am so happy!

2011-05-05T21:05:00.002-04:00

If you want to know who Obama is, really and truly, contrast the image of Obama, totally focused on the mission, with the image still in our brains of W making a flashy, theatrical entry in a mock aviators suit in front of the Mission Accomplished banner.

--anonymous comment from the NYT

2011-04-22T10:06:00.003-04:00

Everyone knew that the restaurant at Haji Ali, like every other illegal nightspot in town that faked a close, would reopen in less than half an hour. Everyone knew about the bribes that were paid and taken. Everyone knew about the warning phone calls. Everyone profited, and everyone was well pleased. The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, Didier once said, is that it works so well.

--Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

BEFORE AND AFTER SCIENCE

2011-04-21T17:51:00.002-04:00

“Living in the past may seem like a disadvantage, but it’s a cost that the brain is willing to pay,” Eagleman said. “It’s trying to put together the best possible story about what’s going on in the world, and that takes time.” Touch is the slowest of the senses, since the signal has to travel up the spinal cord from as far away as the big toe. That could mean that the over-all delay is a function of body size: elephants may live a little farther in the past than hummingbirds, with humans somewhere in between. The smaller you are, the more you live in the moment....“I once mentioned this in an NPR interview and I got flooded by e-mails from short people,” Eagleman said. “They were so pleased. For about a day, I was the hero of the short people.”

--Burkhard Bilger, The Possibilian

Things I like about this article: Eagleman, neuroscience, time, Brian Eno, short people.

SAVANNAH, GEORGIA

2011-04-18T15:12:00.001-04:00

Spring break, yo!

LUB DUB, LUB DUB

2011-03-27T17:16:00.005-04:00

How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?

--DFW, Infinite Jest

Feeling not just un- but anti-interesting today. Gotta shake things up, gotta let go.

2011-03-12T15:43:00.001-05:00

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

--Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

KNOW BETTER LEARN FASTER

2011-02-20T17:02:00.003-05:00

Okay so I know that there are things that need to be done, phone calls that need to be made, loans that need to be figured out, insurance that needs to be taken care of--

But on Friday I wore shorts and we started early so that on Saturday we could wake up early and play Angry Birds until it was time for breakfast (outside in the sunshine) then watch Attack of the Clones (awful, so so awful) and sort of do work until it was time for BBQ and beer, outside with my favorite people in this city, until we pass out exhausted and wake up to watch Revenge of the Sith (better, so much better!) and do lackadaisical work once again.

38 days until spring break, 67 days till finals. Not bad, not bad.

TRUE LOVE

2011-02-13T15:39:00.001-05:00

In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.

--Carl Sagan, dedication in Cosmos

2011-01-30T14:59:00.003-05:00

Check it--

66° and sunny out. Don't have to go to work tomorrow or Tuesday. Finished the second Hunger Games yesterday and will probably finish the third today. Had a great time last night. Wearing a pretty dress, straight from Sri Lanka (still smells like lime pickle). Feelin' good about things.

2011-01-16T09:05:00.003-05:00

What has been the hardest part of your job?
There was really a deep belief that there’s only so much you can do, particularly for high-poverty kids. That poverty is, if not destiny, a significant hindrance to effective education. And changing ideas, changing hearts, changing minds — those things are difficult. And not surprisingly, people are going to push back. It’s a lot easier for the school system to say we graduated 45 percent of our kids because our kids had lots of problems and there’s only so much education you can do. It’s a lot harder to say we graduated 45 percent of our kids because we blew it; we didn’t do the job that we needed to do. That kind of ownership is a major kind of transformation.

--Interview with Joel Klein

New semester starts in a week--new prep, new kiddos. Sometimes (always, day after grueling day) it's hard to remember the bigger picture.

HE'S THE BEST

2011-01-13T18:18:00.002-05:00

So why do you encourage these people? Because now she's had this success, she's had this work, she has this life, she has this family, she has this thing going, and now is when people like you have chosen well to say, 'Let's give this person another boost, let's give this person another boost to say keep going, because now life will come to you hard, like it's come to everyone that's lived long enough. It comes hard and it gets in the way of your career; it stops your career, it stunts your life — not necessarily your life, but it definitely will make your career go left. You show me an actor doing a shit movie, I'll show you a guy with a bad divorce. [Audience laughs.] Right? Right? [Looking around the room.] You know who I'm talking about.
I want the best for her because she's a lady. She acts like a lady, the women in her movies are ladies, they have strength and power and they're strong. Even the pole dancers in this latest movie have enough of themselves to call the lead actor a moron. As all you women should call your men this evening, I think, pole or not. So we'll give her a boost to say, go on, you've made it this far, push her out into the deep water, push her out into bigger and deeper films, more and more films. She has a beautiful eye. She has great taste in the people she chooses to work with. She's a kind and thoughtful director and editor and producer. She's all the things that we hoped we could be when we were like this.

--Bill Murray

I LIKE THIS ARTICLE A LOT

2010-12-18T18:00:00.003-05:00

...We now throw away forty percent of all the edible food we produce. And when we throw away food we don't just throw away nutrients; we also throw away the energy we used in keeping it cold as we lost interest in it, as well as the energy that went into growing, harvesting, processing, and transporting it, along with its proportional share of our staggering national consumption of fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation water, packaging, and landfill capacity. According to a 2009 study, more than a quarter of U.S. freshwater goes into producing food that is later discarded.

--David Owen, The Efficiency Dilemma

PART II

2010-12-18T17:57:00.000-05:00

Jay-Z loves the Peace Corps.

--Petter Hessler, Village Voice

2010-12-05T11:06:00.002-05:00

One day four years ago, Jay-Z was reading The Economist...

--Kelefa Sanneh, Jay-Z's Decoded and the Language of Hip-Hop

2010-12-05T10:54:00.003-05:00

And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.

--Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

2010-11-08T13:00:00.002-05:00

Brady and I have started a 5-day Pity Party--if we get it out of our systems then we can leave it behind and never think of it again. You're welcome to join, but only if you're prepared for 120 hours of straight up sadness.

The last time I used the "bliss" tag was in early April.

2010-10-31T16:46:00.003-04:00

Somebody should have told me, Hey, Mac, your life, Mac, thirty years of it, Mac, is gonna be school, school, school, kids, kids, kids, papers, papers, papers, read and correct, read and correct, read and correct, mountains of papers piling up at school, at home, days, nights reading stories, poems, diaries, suicide notes, diatribes, excuses, plays, essays, even novels, the work of thousands--thousands--of New York teenagers over the years, a few hundred working men and women, and you get no time for reading Graham Greene or Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald or good old P. G. Wodehouse, or your main man, Mr. Jonathan Swift. You'll go blind reading Joey and Sandra, Tony and Michelle, little agonies and passions and ecstasies. Mountains of kid stuff, Mac. If they opened your head they'd find a thousand teenagers clambering all over your brain. Every June they graduate, grow up, work and move on. They'll have kids, Mac, who will come to you someday for English, and you're left facing another term of Joeys and Sandras, Tonys and Michelles, and you'll want to know: Is this what it's all about? Is this to be your world for twenty/thirty years? Remember, if this is your world, you're one of them, a teenager. You live in two worlds. You're with them, day in, day out, and you'll never know, Mac, what that does to your mind. Teenager forever. June will come and it's bye-bye teacher, nice knowin' you, my sister's gonna be in your class in September. But there's something else, Mac. In any classroom, something is always happening. They keep you on your toes. They keep you fresh. You'll never grow old, but the danger is you might have the mind of an adolescent forever. That's a real problem, Mac. You get used to talking to those kids on their level. Then when you go to a bar for a beer you forget how to talk to your friends and they look at you. They look at you like you just arrived from another planet and they're right. Day after day in the classroom means you're in another world, Mac.

--Frank McCourt, Teacher Man