I gathered my laptop to take with me to work this morning. I noticed that it wouldn’t shut down right away, but I didn’t have time to wait on it. When I got here, it was frozen. I had to power it off. The attempted booting process took about twenty five minutes, ending first with [...]

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I’ve been reading the back issues of the New York Review intermittently over the last few days. I’m still in the glorious era when they would print things like this [subscriber, though, given the author, I suspect it's online elsewhere]. It’s fascinating reading (with the increasingly strong feeling that it’ll be anagnostian throughout for me [...]

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(I want to mention for those googling that I am in fact the son of a mechanic, though not at present one myself.) Stevens requested erudite teas from China. I wonder what he would have made of the Houston International Airport on an ordinary cloudstirring evening, waiting to board a flight to Dubai. You can [...]

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Much has been made of it, not least in the long New Yorker profile I linked to a few days ago. But did anyone find young Nick Sabotka listening to Iggy and having a π tattoo on his neck a bit hipsterish for type? Perhaps conurbation is to blame.

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My course blog for an American Lit survey at ECU last year gets about ten-to-twenty hits each day for “anecdote of the jar analysis” or similar. I told the students in that class that this would be likely to happen and that they were writing for future generations (and even developed a poster presentation based [...]

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1. Walon on The Wire. I didn’t even realize until I read the New Yorker piece today that it was him. 2. On the Shut Up And Die Like An Aviator album, he introduces “Dead Flowers” by advising the crowd that this is one to “put it between the ditches by.” Where I grew up, [...]

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I watched this sparkler last night, perhaps on some half-remembered reference from a David Remnick column, I don’t know. Gussie Fink-Nottle, and Karloff, two aspiring goons, misadventure, and eventually stake some heroin legit to Moscow Centre for currency speculation. I believe a nationalist line might be inferred from the kino, with the casual brutality and [...]

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I was involved in a deck collapse at Wrightsville Beach, NC some years ago. Clustered cups, herded tightly on the deck by some barrier force. I pushed my way almost to the living beachside room, almost crossed the threshold, when a sudden crack—a sound more blinding than overhead lightning—cast arms, legs, and cups down to [...]

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These worshipers lose no opportunity of asserting what their adopted author meant. And they lose no chance of slipping into print on the false pretense of clearing up a mistake or of possessing a hitherto unpublished scrap by the “master.” They attribute the meanest motives to all who cross their paths, and lose no chance [...]

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I spent the last week in Liverpool, working in the Olaf Stapledon archive. I found, as you do, many serendipitously interesting things (letters from the young Frank Kermode to Stapledon, for instance) and have nearly gone blind trying to read his micrographic journals and notebooks, made even more amusing by Greek-letter substitution at odd intervals [...]

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