September 2010
6 posts
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“[T]his town is an intellectual wasteland without any sense of humor. I’ve been...”
– The founder of TED complaining about Newport, RI (where he lives in a mansion often mistaken for a museum). It’s such a surreal profile, I don’t even want to spoil it—just please please go read for yourself.
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Franzen goes soft
Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is enjoyable while you’re reading it but leaves you nothing to think about when you’re through. Compared to other great narratives of the past decade, especially Franzen’s own, it’s a cupcake.
Freedom is “sweeping,” meaning it explains characters’ personalities by sketching the biographies of their great grandparents....
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retraction
A while ago I slammed an excerpt from Jonathan Franzen’s book Freedom because it was so slanted in favor of the rape victim character. Now I’m reading the book and it turns out I was wrong to judge. Although the segment is in the third person, it’s supposed to have been written by the rape victim herself. That makes it understated and wry.
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if you work late then you are a good person
The Times has a big piece about foreclosure profiteers in Florida. One of the more humungously rich lawyers defends himself:
“Should I feel ashamed that I have built a successful practice? No one references how committed I am, how I built my firm and how I work 20 hours a day.”
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August 2010
5 posts
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Bill Simmons becomes relevant again →
Counter theory: Jennifer Aniston dates instead of getting married because she prefers dating to marriage. Occam’s Razor; revealed preference theory. (Nobody messes with Jennifer Aniston on my tumblr stream.)
pollexistaken:
…by explaining Jennifer Aniston’s seeming inability to land a man. I’ve thought about this more than I’d prefer to admit.
I mean, how could Jennifer Aniston, of all...
“he was too disdainful to lie and might denounce everybody instead”
– Bellow
“Well-endowed men are being called overrated and “lazy.” But...”
– Text on Salon’s front page right now linking to this article. I hope I don’t get insomnia tonight because then I’ll probably read it.
July 2010
4 posts
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Friday Night Lights: where bad things happen to...
I abuse drugs for the good of the team.
In Friday Night Lights’ first season, Tim Riggins was a racist, Buddy Garrity was a predator, and Julie was a misanthrope. Now Tim counsels pregnant teenagers, Buddy refuses to hang out with overly competitive football dads, and Julie volunteers for Habitat for Humanity. All of the main characters always have good intentions. This show has turned...
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good writing
“In her blue dress, with her cheeks lightly flushed, her blue, blue eyes, and her gold curls pinned up as though for the first time—pinned up to be out of the way for her flight—Mrs. Raddick’s daughter might have just dropped from this radiant heaven. Mrs. Raddick’s timid, faintly astonished, but deeply admiring glance looked as if she believed it, too; but the...
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good writing
“I got my first job, and now if someone said, Hey, look at Benji’s right arm, it’s bigger than his left because he jerks off so much, I could say, No, that’s from scooping ice cream.”
Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor
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movie recommendation: Gia
I’m immune to most tearjerkers because I don’t empathize with heterosexuals. So the lesbian biopic Gia caught me off guard. When Elizabeth Mitchell said to Angelina Jolie, “I thought we’d have more time,” and she was referring to their tea date but didn’t realize Angelina was dying of AIDS, I became very upset.
June 2010
10 posts
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bad writing
“He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs.”
E. M. Forster, Maurice.
Or maybe this is great writing, “mingling” is the perfect word to describe what most humans want to do with each other, and I am heartless?
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stop making up arguments why the constitution... →
Noah Feldman rallies the law professors
rooting for the US to destroy Ghana made me feel...
BEAT DUKE is more in my comfort zone
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bad writing
“there is an appropriateness”
Supreme Court, can’t you budget for an editor?
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if the Kagan family weren't so liberal, they would...
New York Magazine reported a while ago that Elena Kagan liked to torment students when she taught civil procedure. Today the Times reports that browbeating subordinates is a Kagan family trait.
On her mother, an elementary school teacher:
“I did talk to her about calming down and told her that they are still children and have a ways to go,” said Dr. Seidman, who is now director of the private...
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book recommendation: A Visit from the Goon Squad
Each chapter of Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a story about someone who showed up on the sidelines of an earlier chapter. Some of the stories take place in the 1970s and some in the 2020s, they’re out of order, and the characters’ motivations change. But at the end I felt as satisfied as the first time I watched Wizard of Oz.
The patterns are more important than the points in...
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gay marriage debate: keeping the spark alive
On Wednesday lawyers in the Prop 8 trial will make their closing arguments. The judge has come up with 39 questions for them to address. Some of them bring up issues that we partisans haven’t turned to cud yet:
How does the Supreme Court’s holding in Michael H v. Gerald D […] square with an emphasis on the importance of a biological connection between parents and their...
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“In Utah, after a pregnant 17-year-old paid a man $150 to beat her in an effort...”
– NY Times. Homicide, huh? Reminds me of the hail mary arguments I used to make on law school exams when I couldn’t figure out what the actual issue in the fact pattern was.
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from Borges' story The Aleph
I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before...
May 2010
10 posts
3 tags
bad writing
Jeffrey Eugenides in the New Yorker:
“There was something creepy about one guy’s face––it was like a baby’s face that had hideously aged”
A guy is an aged baby, so this sentence is just a lengthy version of “one guy had a hideous face.”
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I will write fiction about premature ejaculation...
Some write to make money; some write to communicate; some write because they enjoy it; Jonathan Franzen writes to prove to other writers that he is capable of writing from the perspective of a rape victim.
“When she started fighting, she fought hard, if not well, and only for so long, because she was drunk for one of the first times ever. […] Altogether, there was much to blame...
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from The Floating Opera by John Barth
“Friendship’s not a ridiculous thing,” Harrison said, solemn as an owl and full of emotion.
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NY Times writers redundantly ignore freshman comp...
“disastrously Pyrrhic”
“The bullet tore through the little girl’s head and neck. Sadly, she could not be saved.”
Mr. Blow, you should have said “disastrously, she could not be saved.”
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bad writing
“bisexual leanings”
The New Republic talking about Katherine Mansfield. That magazine literally can’t string two words together.
the law school mentality which I did not share
From New York Magazine:
“Dean Kagan called on [my friend] and he said, ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t read or thought about this, I don’t know the answer.’ She said, ‘Do you have your book?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘Do you have a brain? Open up to that page and spend the next minute figuring it out.’ He did, in a state of pure...
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don't read The Human Stain
Philip Roth symbolizes a black man’s penis with a crow “whose lustrous blackness beneath her hand was warm and sleek like nothing she had ever fondled.”
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good writing
“misleading chin”
Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow
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movie rec
All the major characters misbehave in the same ways over and over, and only two of the four seem to have a shot at redemption. The central idea is simple and cool: the teenager has to learn to see the world through his own eyes instead of his parents’. It’s nervy writing all the way through.
April 2010
8 posts
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THAT's the most ridiculous thing about Suze Orman?
SNL ran a skit about Suze Orman last night where most of the things she said had to do with how she is a lesbian. Some of the jokes technically only referred to how she was obsessed with her vagina, but judging by what preceded, it’s safe to say they were premised on her lesbianism. It ended with a photograph of her not wearing pants.
(For a reference point, imagine a skit about Denzel...
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good writing of the day
“I’m sorry, but this allegory is no ‘Animal Farm’ or ‘Watership Down.’ It’s an episode of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ In Which Piglet and Rabbit Are Hacked Apart and Eaten.”
Ron Charles
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not that there's anything wrong with being ugly
When news outlets run stories about government figures, they can either display an official-type photo of the person or a random one. Potential Supreme Court nominee and arguable lesbian Elena Kagan has a nice pic on her office’s website (there are also flattering candids out there), but blogs keep using horrible shots whenever they’re speculating about whether she’s a...
“Rowling, who is richer than the Queen, recalls a time when her accountant...”
– J.K. Rowling Rips David Cameron - The Daily Beast
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next week's lesbian civil rights issue: universal...
Gay activism’s newest front is social security benefits. Protesters and politicians are rallying in Hollywood because gay people can’t inherit their partner’s social security benefits when they die.
First: why do married people get to inherit each other’s social security benefits?
Second: this is why the gay rights movement sucks. They have located the absolute least...
Tina Fey as Lolene, the Tiny Hooker →
“Justice Stevens […] grew up white, male, heterosexual, Protestant, and...”
– Dahlia Lithwick (read the whole piece)
March 2010
9 posts
URI v. UNC
Next week my hometown team will play my college in the building where I graduated from law school in the NIT semifinals. When you laugh at the NIT now, you are laughing at my life.
stream the new MGMT album →
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the Wall Street Journal resents populist smears...
There is a new book out that blames World War I on the idiocy and cloisteredness of Europe’s monarchs. When I saw that the WSJ had reviewed it, I thought, “har har, I bet the reviewer was offended by its criticism of conservative authority figures.” I was correct.
The reviewer scorns the “popular mythology” that an arms race made war in Europe inevitable...
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“I like genre-bending as much as the next person who is not a seventeenth-century...”
– Sam Anderson
This is why I prefer book reviews by professional book reviewers to ones by freelancing novelists and experts. They have one agenda: sass.