Gran Torino. Weaknesses up front: there’s some lazy writing, some bad acting, and Eastwood’s estranged family seems excessively caricatured. BUT, I thought the overall story arc here (themes: growing old; American confronting the Other; reluctantly becoming a better person) was really interesting and I never thought of switching it off. It had some good food-for-thought staying power after it ended. And Clint Eastwood gets a co-writing credit for the movie’s theme song.
[$10,000] wouldn’t go so far now, and yet most of the reasonable necessaries of life cost less to-day than they did two generations ago. The difference is that we need so very many comforts that were not invented in our grandfather’s time.
And also:
It is man’s peculiarity that nature has filled him with impulses to do things, and left it to his discretion when to stop. She never tells him when he has finished. And perhaps we ought not to be surprised that in so many cases it happens that he doesn’t know, but just goes ahead as long as the materials last.
The Tyranny of Things by Edward Sandford Martin – The Oxford Book of American Essays
Bad poets just bore us, but bad critics mislead us.
“Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice.”
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
I’m 1/3 of the way into Jane Eyre at the moment, and I’m pretty sure this is the mental image I’ll have from now on.
Man, The Point seems like a fantastic magazine (see also). This is one of the better DFW appreciations I’ve read, looking past the form and into the function, his mission, if we may call it that. Special focus is given to E Unibus Pluram and Infinite Jest. It’s one of those articles that makes me want to read more. Great, great stuff.
Death is Not the End – David Foster Wallace: His Legacy and his Critics – The Point Magazine
Glances are the big guns of the virtuous coquette; everything can be conveyed in a look, and yet that look can always be denied, because it cannot be quoted word for word.
One of the best things I’ve read this summer. Great writing. Well worth the time. (via)
The essence of passionate love, what grants it the nobility that the others do not possess, is what Stendhal calls crystallization. Just as the naked branch of a tree will gather diamond-like crystals if it is dropped into a salt mine, a lover will gather perfections about the crooked timber of his beloved.
Love in the Age of the Pickup Artist: Stendhal Among the Seducers – The Point Magazine
It kind of gives you hope. If you do creative work, there’s a sense that inspiration is this fairy dust that gets dropped on you, when in fact you can just manufacture inspiration through sheer brute force. You can simply produce enough material that the thing will arrive that seems inspired.
The Wrong Stuff: On Air and On Error: This American Life’s Ira Glass on Being Wrong
More specifially, on books about “how to succeed”:
It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation.
Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can’t be a cheap workman; he can’t be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise.
mr youse needn’t be so spry
concernin questions artyeach has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain partygimme the he-man’s solid bliss
for youse ideas i’ll match yousea pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues
It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. FUTURE AGES SHALL TALK OF THIS; THIS SHALL BE FAMOUS TO ALL POSTERITY. Whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out.
It’s terrible to be a bad loser. I like Soros’s proverb that you should never marry a woman you wouldn’t want to divorce.
The Wrong Stuff : Hoodoos, Hedge Funds, and Alibis: Victor Niederhoffer on Being Wrong
I love the Cup because it stripped away all the things about professional sports that I’ve come to despise. No sideline reporters. No JumboTron. No TV timeouts. No onslaught of replays after every half-decent play. No gimmicky team names like the “Heat” or the “Thunder.” (You know what the announcers call Germany? The Germans. I love this.) No announcers breathlessly overhyping everything or saying crazy things to get noticed. We don’t have to watch 82 mostly half-assed games to get to the playoffs. We don’t have 10 graphics on the screen at all times. We don’t have to sit there for four hours waiting for a winner because pitchers are taking 25 seconds to deliver a baseball.
“Hugh Morton’s famous image of Johnny Cash holding aloft a tattered American flag. –NC, 1974.” HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AMERICA & GOD BLESS JOHNNY CASH « The Selvedge Yard.
Ben Casnocha infers two myths from Derek Sivers’ How to Get Hired:
The first is that we all have one or two things we are destined to do. In fact, I think you can become good (and thus) really interested in a range of things. The second is that the way to find what you “really want to do” is through inspection and reflection. In fact, introspection seems never to bear the fruit you’re promised; personal discoveries and self-knowledge seem sooner found via experiments and activity.
Mark Larson 