A Commencement Address From the Slapstick President
Where President Obama balances between will and inevitability, we find Buster Keaton, on commencement day, not charging ahead to shape a future, but pausing, vacillating, everywhere at once. Bumbling, stumbling, crashing forward.
Death remains in the poppy fields, away from the homes to which we inevitably return, impossible to assimilate in our minds.
A word, when repeated ad infinitum, tends to lose meaning. Total Zero, when repeated, only grows stronger.
We’ve gone away for the weekend. See you Tuesday morning!
Something Someone Would Actually Tweet
Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize (and every other prize) winning author, is publishing a story on Twitter. Her use of the second person completely and utterly captures the spirit of the medium.
American music legend Doc Watson is sadly no longer in the world.
Reading: Confession / Absolution
My thinking was always, “What’s the point of a long Hemingway work?”
A Trip Around the Writer’s Block
At what point does drawing a blank (and another, and another) officially qualify you for diagnosis with psychic masochism?
The issue of sentence spacing, like all typographical conventions, is a victim of circumstance, and partisans on both sides tend to trace their allegiance back to different writing technologies.
Letter Not About Elections, 5/23/2012
Shklovsky’s theories are rewarding for those trying to articulate to themselves what art is supposed to do and why it is important.