Rivalries are born from teams that play each other a lot. When you’re not in the rivalry and you look back at it, you’re thinking, Well, I hated that guy because he would have made a great teammate.
Scot Pollard. Cf. Carolyn Hax: “Competitive people are most annoying to other competitive people.”
The Last Word On Nothing | Guest Post: The Art (& Science) of Lefty Portraits.
Consider these simple line drawings of half-smiley, half-frowny faces. In a literal sense, each is equal parts sad and happy. But to most people the emotion on the left side of each face (from the viewer’s point of view) dominates, and determines the overall emotional tenor. There are a few reasons for this…
With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad. […] Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.
Lizzie Widdicombe: Could Soylent Replace Food? : The New Yorker
Doubt is what drives me, the nervousness that I don’t have it anymore. There’s nothing a coach or anyone can say to me that’s more powerful than my own fear that I can’t do it anymore.
Under the Skin. Even now, a couple weeks later, I’m still not sure if I liked it or not. Which technically is a “yes”, I think. At the least, I appreciate that there’s nothing quite like it.
My father was a very disciplined and punctual man; it was a prerequisite for his creativity…. No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk and then work, he’d say, because the demons hate it when you get out of bed, demons hate fresh air.
Linn Ullmann talking about her father Ingmar Bergman. Via Matt Thomas.
Kill Bill: Vol. 2. The lesser of the two Bills, I say, because there’s so much more talk-talk-talk. It’s thoughtfully done, but I just like the more action-y first one.
Kill Bill: Vol. 1. The better of the two Bills. Kind of exhausting at times, being submerged in a fanatic’s imagination and obsessions for two hours, but it’s good goofy fun.
La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast). So creepy and strange and fantastical. Props (so to speak) to the set and costume design and clever special effects.
Frozen. Sorry not sorry: that famous song isn’t very good – and especially not in comparison to “In Summer”. Good movie overall, though. The state of animation today just blows my mind.
“James Naismith in 1928, holding a peach basket for his wife, Maude, to make a shot.”
Blessed with 20/20 hindsight, we’re now able to look back on a given era’s “future” and glean some of what was percolating through the collective unconscious.
If Tyler Cowen, Austin Kleon, and Ben Casnocha all recommend a book, I don't really need another nudge. I loooooooved Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Two structural things you don't see very often in fiction: it's written in the second person, and the novel's chapter titles and general format are plays on the self-help genre ("Move to the City", "Get an Education", "Don't Fall in Love"). In the story, the protagonist (uh..."you") is a third-world scrub who gradually climbs his way up the social ladder. I really appreciated the perspective on economics and daily life in a world that that's not all that familiar. Some favorite parts:
You read a self-help book so someone who isn't yourself can help you, that someone being the author.
Some understated humor on receiving bad news:
You take this news as well as possible, which is to say you do not die.
So much awesome imagery and color in this one. As in this classroom scene, where students look on as one of their classmates gets on the wrong side of their teacher:
They watch in horrified fascination, like seals on a rock observing a great white breaching beneath one of their own, just a short swim away.
On becoming a parent:
Fatherhood has taught you the lesson that, even in middle age, love is practicable. It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.
On books:
Writers and readers seek a solution to the the problem that time passes, that those of us who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.
On taking out a business loan:
With borrowed funds, a business can invest, gain leverage, and leverage is a pair of wings. Leverage is flight. Leverage is a way for small to be big and big to be huge, a glorious abstraction, the promise of tomorrow today, yes, a liberation from time, the resounding triumph of human will over dreary, chronology-shackled physical reality.
That passage hints at what's particularly hard to capture: the restless energy in this book. It just keeps coming and coming, so much invention, and it's so fun to read. I wouldn't be surprised if I reread this one soon.
“Comedy thrives inside a fixed frame. It’s not an essential element, but as with dancing and magic tricks, it’s always more impressive if the viewer can see the performer’s hands and feet at all times. In Sherlock, Jr, Keaton moves the camera when he has to, during all of the movie’s crazy chases. But even then, the motion is limited: Keaton tracks alongside the actors, or he attaches the camera to the front of one of the moving vehicles so that he can keep all the action inside the rectangle.Sherlock, Jr. is at its funniest, though, when the camera stays still, and the characters move in and out, like figures in a side-scrolling platform videogame. Maybe that’s because the fixed frame emphasizes the characters as characters, arriving into the picture exactly when needed for the plot—and sometimes remaining stuck there, like the projectionist, never confident that he can find a way to break out of the box.”
Noel Murray kicks off our Movie Of The Week discussion of the 1924 classic Sherlock, Jr. with an examination of how Buster Keaton’s physical comedy thrived in a fixed environment of boxes and lines. [Read more…]
Buster Keaton insta-reblog rule in effect.
Plus, I wonder whether you’ve actually just talked about it in a non-charged setting and, if you have, why one or both of you isn’t accepting the outcome of that talk as your current reality. “Fighting” is really just a nickname for an attempt to renegotiate what you already know is the truth but don’t want to accept.
Oh, snap. Carolyn Hax bringin’ some real talk. Carolyn Hax: Weddings bring out the worst in an unmarried couple - The Washington Post
There’s only one viable time management approach left (and even that’s only really an option for the better-off). Step one: identify what seem to be, right now, the most meaningful ways to spend your life. Step two: schedule time for those things. There is no step three.
“One dominant, overarching, nearly definitive principle for reading: Read at Whim.”
Somewhere around Christmastime I fell into a massive reading rut. What I was reading was no fun, and there was nothing better out there, and there never would be. Everything was in ruins. Then I read this book. And for the past couple months, I've been on one of those glorious hot streaks where just about everything I've read has been fun, and the stuff that wasn't I dropped without second thought. Coincidence? I have to give some credit to leaving behind the cold, dark, depressing winter, and stepping into the golden light of springtime... but Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction definitely deserves some credit, too. I like the tone of this one. It's like your at a smart friend's house, and he's reclining in a chair and talking at length. Some favorite parts... In an awesome footnote, relating to the "gateway drug" theory of lowbrow reading eventually leading to "better" books, an excerpt from Alex Rose:
“The only conceivable value of trashy books is the dubious but not unthinkable possibility that they might go some of the way towards engendering in young people a love of reading as an end in-itself, which in turn might whet the appetite for better books. For many, that’s the only way in. They’ll read Sweet Valley High or Twilight at thirteen, lose their taste for it by fourteen and demand something richer and more challenging at sixteen. Or so the thinking goes. If the argument applies to one form of entertainment, though, it should apply to all. Why is it that when kids become enraptured by some idiotic program, no one says, “well, at least they’re watching TV?””
In hindsight, this is obvious, but it's a really good, liberating reminder:
“If I set a book aside today I am not thereby forbidding myself to return to it later—nor am I promising to do so. To everything there is a season, and, by corollary, everything is sometimes *out* of season.”
Timing is everything. And along the same lines of releasing the pressure on yourself, we're reminded that "Many books become more boring the faster you read them" and that "All books want our attention, but not all of them want the same kind of attention." I also liked this excerpt from Auden about thinking about how we evaluate the stuff we read:
““For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perserverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.””
If you find yourself in a reading rut, maybe this one will help you get out, too. Recommended.
