Postscript

(Ah, a friend has tweeted my favorite part of the Bookforum review I was toiling over in April-May - shared here!)

@triaspirational beautifully anatomizes the magic-understated style of Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life in @bookforum pic.twitter.com/fvVN5nuMMo

— ScottSaul (@scottsaul4) June 2, 2015

Twitter tabs

Twitter isn't so much a closed space as Facebook, but I've been trying to be a little more active there (book promotional purposes) and I find myself too often just retweeting a good link instead of more usefully for my own purposes sharing and archiving it here! One great thing about blogging is that it makes for such a consistent archive - these other more tailored proprietary formats (especially Facebook) are much less suited to that purpose....

Anyway, some funny bits I've had on my Twitter feed:

Cat paws have an uncanny resemblance to tiny little bears. pic.twitter.com/bUfk1KfXH5

— Faces in Things (@FacesPics) July 8, 2014

Long-lost section of the Bayeux Tapestry shows what happened when Pooh met the Normans (artist: E. H. Shepard)... pic.twitter.com/cW8I8XEfCO

— Britannia PR (@Britanniacomms) July 16, 2014

"Ghostbusters is a movie about 3 scrappy technologists who build disruptive tech to do supernatural defense." - @TimHwang #Transition2014

— Percolate (@percolate) July 16, 2014

Also: Will Amazon provide a Netflix-type service for books? (Via Sarah W. NB this will do me no good if a lot of books are excluded....)

"I made my husband try a sex robot."

Book recommendations from Stephen King.

The blue meth

Dwight Garner on criticism:

By the time I was in high school my English teachers had turned me on to Pauline Kael and Greil Marcus. I loved James Wolcott’s stuff, too. [. . . .] I remember going through the microfilm and microfiche machines, getting a sore neck, just to find Wolcott’s old stuff in the Village Voice and Harper’s. I still have those Wolcott printouts. They’re on those warped old pieces of prehistoric photo-print paper. I’m still a fan.

His stuff just popped off the page. It was the most vivid critical writing I’d ever read. His stuff shouted, the way good art does, “I’m alive.” I felt the same way about Kael and Marcus, among others. These people had things appearing in magazines like Rolling Stone, and in newspapers, and it felt like, to my blinkered perspective at any rate, a golden age.

I reread the work of my favourite critics—Orwell, Agee, Updike, Tynan, Sheed, Macdonald, Kazin and so on—all the time. Just to breathe that air. But there’s nothing like reading a critic in real time. That’s the blue meth. There’s nothing like going to see a film and coming back and inhaling the words of a critic like AO Scott or Stephanie Zacharek, now at the Village Voice. There’s nothing like getting that buzz in your head.

It is a terrible confession, but I just don't feel that buzz - it's partly why I don't like Twitter, I don't want to be peppered with news about things happening right now - I love instead that feeling of immersion in a deep elsewhere, preferably far in the past....

Swarmlogix

TEDxSummerisle.

"The man is a monster"

The trouble with Twitter. (Via Andrew.)

Data covered in cats

Twitter account details plotlines from unaired Season 8 of Star Trek: TNG. (Via Brent.)

NB this is clearly written out of same impulse that prompted the only short story I've written in adulthood! I should write another one like this sometime - many life stress problems would be largely solved if I could write shorter pieces instead of books primarily!

Closing tabs

Feeling a sense of moderate but pronounced well-being I haven't had since probably early November or so.  End of the school year in sight! 

A few links:

Why Kevin Hartnett started writing by hand.

Amanda Hesser's advice to aspiring food writers.  This piece is a must-read for anyone hoping to make a living as a professional journalist: the financial underpinnings of that sort of work have changed radically in the last fifteen years, and almost everything she says here is equally apt for other kinds of journalism as well, including arts journalism.

More on Teju Cole's small fates.

New Haven trip tomorrow.

Closing tabs

The year is ending for me on an unexpectedly somber note.  I got a call late yesterday afternoon to let me know that a college friend had killed himself the day before.  It was more sad than surprising news, as he had spent many years fighting the legacy of a childhood and adolescence marred by deeply neglectful parents and a terrible stint in foster care and then coping with a diagnosis in adulthood of bipolar disorder, but it is such a loss.  In adulthood it is often too late to remedy this sort of damage, and I think the only takeaway is that if you know a child or teenager in need of help, reach out and give whatever help you can!  Spent the evening at a sort of unofficial wake at a mutual friend's apartment in Brooklyn; combination of emotional distress and alcohol consumption have now exacerbated my cold, which has moved from lungs to sinuses and which clearly mandates another day of no exercise...

Some links, in no particular order:

Language Log on the twitter hashtag.

Wage slavery in its natural habitat.

George Pringle's new blog.

Greg Zinman on Bravo's Work of Art.

It seems likely that I will post again between now and the official end of 2011, but just in case not, I hope that you all have a very happy and healthy New Year!

Thursday linkage

Settling back into a routine is very good!

A few links of interest:

Maxine offers a useful list of her Twitter likes and dislikes. (I cannot get into the Twitter vibe, it seems; I've had an account for a while, and I look over there occasionally to see if anything has changed that might make it more appealing to me, but it gives me an irritable feeling of being peppered with unwanted pellets of information and really I mostly steer clear of it. For some reason Facebook seems much more innocuous, though I do appreciate Twitter's utility for those who are actually following news closely as it develops - that is not me, though!)

A fascinating piece, of particular interest to novelists and would-be novelists, by Alex Shakar at the Millions about getting a 300K novel advance in 2000, then having his book come out just after 9/11. Interesting glimpse of Bill Clegg there... (Link courtesy of Sarah Weinman, who by the way has a grasp of Twitter's potential and best Twitter practice that is matched by few of the other users I "follow" there!)

Also at The Millions: highly anticipated books of upcoming months. Lots of extremely desirable stuff there: I think I am especially excited to get my hands on the next installments from George R. R. Martin and Lev Grossman, Colson Whitehead's zombie novel (Colson is also a gifted Tweeter!), new novels from Helen DeWitt and Lauren Groff, Neal Stephenson's Readme and Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, but the biggie there for me is Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, which is already out in England and which I think I will go ahead and order from the Book Depository (free international shipping, to the Cayman Islands as well as the US...).

And after I do one piece of work that cannot be postponed (overdue reader's report on a journal article), I am going to get back down to work on BOMH...