Ramblings & ephemera
Man, these are beatiful, evocative lyrics by Johnny Mercer:
When an early autumn walks the land and chills the breeze
and touches with her hand the summer trees,
perhaps you’ll understand what memories I own.
There’s a dance pavilion in the rain all shuttered down,
a winding country lane all russet brown,
a frosty window pane shows me a town grown [...]
Posted on January 26th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Dwight Garner’s “We Are In a State of Three-Alarm Emergency” (The New York Times Paper Cuts Blog: 11 September 2007):
In his brooding and kaleidoscopic introduction to the new “Best American Essays 2007” – a 5,000-word chunk of it is online – David Foster Wallace doesn’t write so much as shred (in the Jerry Garcian [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Foster Wallace’s “Introduction” (The Best American Essays 2007):
Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place—not to mention extraordinary renditions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the
passage of the Military Commissions Act—if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way. ‘We’ meaning [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Wiley’s interview of David Foster Wallace, “Transcript of the David Foster Wallace Interview” (The Minnesota Daily: 27 February 1997):
But Plato and John Stuart Mill both take books to talk about different types of pleasure. In my own personal life, I like really arty stuff a lot of the time. But there’s also times [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steve Paulson’s interview with Robert Wright, “God, He’s moody” (Salon: 24 June 2009):
Do you think religions share certain core principles?
Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn’t originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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Image by Esther_G via Flickr
From Josh Olson’s “I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script” (The Village Voice: 9 September 2009):
It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you’re in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you’re dealing with someone who can’t.
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Posted on September 16th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Josh Olson’s “I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script” (The Village Voice: 9 September 2009):
There’s a great story about Pablo Picasso. Some guy told Picasso he’d pay him to draw a picture on a napkin. Picasso whipped out a pen and banged out a sketch, handed it to the guy, and said, [...]
Posted on September 16th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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Read this article about Paul Krassner’s experiences with the Manson Family & note the emphasis I’ve added – is this not the greatest sentence out of nowhere you’ve ever seen? How in the world did that ever seem like a good idea?
From Paul Krassner’s “My Acid Trip with Squeaky Fromme” (The Huffington Post: [...]
Posted on August 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Robert Darnton’s “Google & the Future of Books” (The New York Review of Books: 12 February 2009):
As the Enlightenment faded in the early nineteenth century, professionalization set in. You can follow the process by comparing the Encyclopédie of Diderot, which organized knowledge into an organic whole dominated by the faculty of reason, [...]
Posted on July 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
You’re probably right about appreciating limits. The sixties’ movement in poetry to radical free verse, in fiction to radically experimental recursive forms—their legacy to my generation of would-be artists is at least an incentive to ask very seriously [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Operator No. 9’s “That decorating touch” (Interactive Week: 24 April 2000): 100:
Dan Sweeney, general manager of Intel’s Home Networking division, says that when the company showed consumer focus groups the AnyPoint Wireless home networking system …, people became very confused, because there wasn’t a visible antenna. The desktop version of the wireless adapter — [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: hans s
From Errol Morris’ “Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 2)” (The New York Times: 28 May 2009):
[Errol Morris:] The Uncanny Valley is a concept developed by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori. It concerns the design of humanoid robots. Mori’s theory is relatively simple. We tend to reject robots that look too much like [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Rock music itself bores me, usually. The phenomenon of rock interests me, though, because its birth was part of the rise of popular media, which completely changed the ways the U.S. was unified and split. The mass media [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Minimalism’s just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem’s still the one of the mediating narrative consciousness. Both minimalism and metafiction try to resolve the problem in radical ways. Opposed, but both so extreme they end [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
If you mean a post-industrial, mediated world, it’s inverted one of fiction’s big historical functions, that of providing data on distant cultures and persons. The first real generalization of human experience that novels tried to accomplish. If you [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
One thing TV does is help us deny that we’re lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It’s an anesthesia of “form.” The interesting thing is [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: newneonunion
From Roy Kesey’s piece in “Remembering David Foster Wallace” (Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits: 15 September 2008):
The first story of David’s I ever read was that one Brief Interview that he had in the Paris Review maybe ten or eleven years ago. For me it was paradigm-altering, quietly fantabulous, in exactly the way [...]
Posted on May 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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