February 2012
1 post
January 2012
7 posts
Papers from Philosophical Transactions of the... →
This is a link to a torrent on the Pirate Bay. I’m not encouraging you to participate in illegal downloading, but rather to read the uploader’s remarks beneath the link, which are:
This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously...
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense...”
– Martin Luther King, Jr
alexwhines:
The Best of Alex Whines
I’ve been doing this tumblr thing for about 2 and a half years, accumulating 291 posts in that time. Of those 291, I have compiled some of the better ones. If you follow the link, you’ll find a list of these better posts, organized by topic. Here are the topics:
Games
Music
Nesting and recursion in fun places
Food
More words
Aren’t...
This American Life: Mr. Daisey and the Apple... →
If you haven’t already listened to this, you should stop what you’re doing and listen to it now.
Five things
1. Monevidayo on “The Muppets”
2. Mills on life, death, and creativity
3. NY Times on a new study of teacher effectiveness
4. Jon Lanchester on Walmart
Edit: 5. Alex on nicknames for Stuart/Stewart
December 2011
10 posts
Smithsonian: Why Are Finland's Schools So... →
Fun facts about Finland’s schools (emphasis mine):
“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every...
L'Hôte: The Resentment Machine →
This made the rounds a few weeks ago and I finally read it just now. Loved it from top to bottom. I’d pull out excerpts but you better just read the whole thing.
Paris Review interview with William Gibson →
GIBSON: If you’d gone to a publisher in 1981 with a proposal for a science-fiction novel that consisted of a really clear and simple description of the world today, they’d have read your proposal and said, Well, it’s impossible. This is ridiculous. This doesn’t even make any sense. Granted, you have half a dozen powerful and really excellent plot drivers for that many science-fiction novels, but...
Geoffrey Pullum: Academic Hate Mail →
I made some Spotify mixes!
This summer, my friend Liz asked me to make her a mix, and I got kinda carried away and made four. I’ve now recreated them on Spotify for your listening pleasure. Here they are:
Mix 1
Mix 2
Mix 3
Mix 4
“Instead of seeing everything in culture and society as ultimately emanating from...”
– Edward Said
The Believer's interview with Ben Lerner →
Highlights:
BL: More generally, the failure of the poem to reach the objective right margin of the page is for me one of the almost definitional ways poetry makes absence felt as a presence.
And:
BLVR: Do you have a favorite movie from your youth?
BL: I guess it would probably be Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.Maybe because my brother looked a lot like Matthew Broderick, especially in WarGames....
“For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing,...”
– FDR
November 2011
23 posts
Books I'd like to check out from the library and...
My bookshelf is stuffed with high-priority books I own, haven’t read yet, and look forward to reading one day. But there are also lots of books I covet:
Reamde (and/or Anathem), Neal Stephenson
The Lovers, Vendela Vida
Nowhere Man, Aleksandar Hemon
The Angel Esmerelda: Nine Stories, Don DeLillo
The Greenhouse, Audur Ava Olafsdottir
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches,...
Mike Young at HTML Giant: Moves in Contemporary... →
Some highlights:
1) Exposed revision
Example: Alice Fulton’s “About Face“:
At least embarrassment is not an imitation. It’s intimacy for beginners, the orgasm no one cares to fake. I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.
4) The “blank of blank” construction
Examples:
From “Marriage Proposal” by Sarah Messer: “I want to be trapped by the cage of your ribs”
From “Synchronized...
Cathy Day: Advice for writing a Creative Writing... →
“The faculty of the UC Davis English Department supports the Board of the Davis...”
– Responsible, correct, and pretty damn all-around awesome faculty-style response to UC Davis’s recent police state. Strong rhetoric balanced (and made meaningful) with a call for action. The department site, where this was originally posted, is down at the moment (unsurprisingly), and this is taken...
Here's some helpful advice you can follow for the...
Many bad writers do this thing where they follow a full body paragraph of text with a single line of text for emphasis, like a punchline. Please don’t do this. Often this single line of text is either a “revelatory” detail, or (more often) a repeated phrase. Good writers do this, too, sometimes. What bad writers don’t realize is that the importance of the punchline...
Evert Cilliers/Adam Ash: There's No There There:... →
http://slaveryfootprint.org/ →
(via)
this is a playable archive →
of every track of every John Peel Festive Fifty ever
October 2011
2 posts
1 tag
September 2011
1 post
“New York has a couple of characteristics that are undeniable and one of those is...”
–
Steve Albini.
First: ha. Second: aw. Third: Midwest Represent! Fourth: Wait, this is Chicago, too. Fifth: And L.A. Sixth: And all large metropolitan areas. Seventh: And all college towns. Eighth: And all small cities with more than 2 young people in them. Ninth: And a condition of modernity more...
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
3 posts
How a zebra ended up in my back yard (click here... →
The zebra belongs to Jerome Hilcox, of Jerry’s Traveling Zoo, which is a string of three trailers that Jerry tows from town to town in his lime green Ford F-150. The trailers contain the zebra (whose name is Patty), a Burmese python, two llamas, an ocelot, and several glass tanks housing a variety of insects (walking sticks, Madagascar hissing cockroaches, etc), scorpions, and tarantulas....
3 tags
“Please, Please George,” by Dinosaur...
May 2011
3 posts
Of interest, possibly?
I’ll be teaching an “intro to fiction writing” course next year, for undergraduate students at OSU. The first half of the term is spent reading and discussing short stories of my choosing (the second half of the term is spent workshopping the students’ work). Each week, we’ll read several stories in view of a few specific elements of craft.
Here are the stories...
An overview of the new digital currency Bitcoin →
This is fascinating and awesome. For some reason this excites me very much.