Lawrence Schiller, Palm Springs Fashion, no. 8
Scheherazadenfreude (noun): perverse joy in the suffering of one of your own characters in the story you are writing/telling. (The Oxford English Fictionary) (h/t @bintbatutta)
Julian Barnes speaks to his bibliophilia: “I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader. Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book – even if it does so numerically. Every book feels and looks different in your hands; every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same (though perhaps the e-reader will one day contain a "smell” function, which you will click to make your electronic Dickens novel suddenly reek of damp paper, fox marks and nicotine).“
"Los Angeles for Beginners”: David Goldblatt with four books: “No one who arrives in Los Angeles comes without baggage. I came with a whole lifetime of seeing the city through the filter of its culture industries and the region’s relentless self-promotion. This did not prepare me for the real thing. Watching Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself—a brilliant documentary composed entirely of clips of the city in other movies—would have disabused me of at least some of the worst inaccuracies and illusions spun by Hollywood, but I didn’t see it until it was too late. I did come with the standard roster of guides: Time Out, Lonely Planet, Rough Guide. They’re all reasonably helpful, but if you want a vision of the city that extends beyond Grumman’s Chinese theatre, Disneyland, and the mean streets of Beverly Hills (all of which you should visit) other books are in order.”
Mary Ruefle, “On Fear”: “I suppose, as a poet, among my fears can be counted the deep-seated uneasiness that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility. Part of what I mean—what I think I mean—by “imbecility” is something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous and thereby unintentionally cruel. It was a Master who advised that we speak little, better still say nothing, unless we are quite sure that what we wish to say is true, kind, and helpful. But how can a poet, whose role is to speak, adhere to this advice? How can anyone whose role is to facilitate language speak little or say nothing?”
Jacob Steinberg with musings on ‘alt lit’ or 'quickshit’: “The debate going on at the moment over the substance, value, and methodologies of “alt lit,” as well as whether or not they constitute something worthy in the realm of literary criticism, seems to be heavily constructed on a simple divide between two stances: 1. That held by those who criticize a lack of artifice, quality control and time investment in the individual works being produced, accompanied by a perceived lack of objectivity in their reception by fellow readers; and 2. That held by those who interpret the former group’s gestures as snobbish and self-aggrandizing, and feel that rapid-fire production (ie, ‘quickshit’) is more authentic or “sincere” than work that’s been mulled over or highly edited.”
“The Slow Web” by Jack Cheng: “What is the Fast Web? It’s the out of control web. The oh my god there’s so much stuff and I can’t possibly keep up web. It’s the spend two dozen times a day checking web. The in one end out the other web. The web designed to appeal to the basest of our intellectual palettes, the salt, sugar and fat of online content web. It’s the scale hard and fast web. The create a destination for billions of people web. The you have two hundred twenty six new updates web. Keep up or be lost. Click me. Like me. Tweet me. Share me. The Fast Web demands that you do things and do them now. The Fast Web is a cruel wonderland of shiny shiny things […] The Slow Web is timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information. These are a few of the many characteristics of the Slow Web. It’s not so much a checklist as a feeling, one of being at greater ease with the web-enabled products and services in our lives.”
