How much can I trust the critical faculties in which I once had so much faith? Now that I see so few movies, every single one is an ecstatic experience. They all become impossibly brilliant and entertaining.

Two (Sucked) Thumbs Up - NYTimes.com

A lot of jobs will consist of making people feel either very good or very bad about themselves.

Who Will Prosper in the New World - NYTimes.com

I made Comedians in Cars out of that show [The Marriage Ref]. If you look at it, you’ll see what I was going for on that show. I think it’s interesting to hear people talk about something that’s powerful and interesting to them out of the box. But I couldn’t make it happen. One of the big things I realized was that the audience is stopping these people from talking. The other thing I realized is that I was much more interested in comedians than I was in a lot of other people whom I thought I was interested in. So, in some ways, I took that pot, smashed it on the ground, took four or five pieces and re-glued them into another thing.

Emmys: Jerry Seinfeld on Why He May Never Go Back to TV (Q&A) - The Hollywood Reporter

Changing the canon — or even a proliferation of canons, as literary studies has fractured into a collection of increasingly well-defined subfields — takes us only so far. Readers are finite creatures, capable of making their way through only a tiny fraction of the millions of books published over the centuries. The problem, at this sort of scale, has less to do with canonical selection bias than it does with our inevitable ignorance of nearly everything that has ever been written. It’s one thing to claim that a particular book was influential in its day (though influence is a tricky matter, more sociological and economic than literary) or that a text has been treated as important in subsequent scholarship. It’s something else entirely to argue that the same book is “representative” of a genre’s or an era’s output, especially when even the best-informed critics have read almost none of the material in question.

An Impossible Number of Books: Matthew L. Jockers's "Macroanalysis" -

The villain is the slaveholder Calvin Candy. He is evil, and as loquacious as anyone in Spielberg’s film; he is suave, and he dispatches his slaves casually and horrifically. At the center point of the movie, he delivers a long, intimidating speech on phrenology. The difference between the races, he explains, is physiological: the construction of the African American skull reveals the construction of their brains, and it is this construction that makes them inferior. […] Here, we are at the epicenter of Tarantino’s vision: the villain is exactly as cool and violent as the hero. Given this tenuous balance, morality becomes a matter of keeping, and defending, a code. This is American history as a story in which the qualities of greatness are also the qualities of terror; it is a vision that understands the double-edged nature of our proclivity for violence and our existential belief in the individual.

Tarantino and Spielberg: Two Visions of America - Bright Lights Film Journal

There was a time when just about anything — dumb commercial entertainment, ugly clothes, the weird dishes your grandmother used to serve — could be appreciated and appropriated in quotation marks. Strained pulp is not quite that — its celebration of the formerly marginal and disreputable is serious and sincere. The condescension is not overt but is latent in the desire to correct and improve the recipes retrieved from the past, to finish vernacular artifacts with a highbrow glaze. We’re going to make ’em — movies, cocktails, regional dishes, zombie novels, garage-rock anthems — just the way they used to, but a little bit better. This strikes me as a form of snobbery. But then again, maybe I’m the snob.

The Strange Ascent of ‘Strained Pulp’ - NYTimes.com

I’m trying to imagine how my 8-year-old self would have reacted to this. Pretty nifty.

The Serengeti Lion

Only on special “it’s such a nice day!” kind of days do people want to go outside. But what’s a nice day? Well, it’s a day when the temperature outside approximates the results of indoor climate control technology.

The Case Against Eating Lunch Outside

On the other side of the equation, I can’t bear the thought that people think they have to move to New York to work in publishing, especially when the future of this country, and the publishing industry, is going to be found outside of New York.

My buddy @WillEvans is the coolest.

Not New York: Building Book Culture in Dallas, TX | Publishing Trendsetter

Well this is… thorough.

Themes and analysis of No Country for Old Men (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia