Thursday, October 07, 2010

Rachel Aviv tops "20 Top Nonfiction Writers Under 40"!

Yes, I know, the list (at the New Haven Review) is in alphabetical order, but still! (Hold onto your hats—R.A. could qualify for the top 20 under thirty.) Here are some Avivian Blvr. pieces.

The list also includes Ta-Nehisi Coates, Josh Glenn who turned 42 yesterday, Lindy West (whom I started reading this year, hilarious), Brendan Koerner, and many authors who have written for The Believer, some of whom I've edited: Tom Bissell, Eula Biss, Chuck Bissterman I mean Chuck Klosterman, Joshua "Witz" Cohen, John D'Agata, Touré...Gideon Lewis-Kraus...I am probably missing some...

...the writer behind the list, NHR editor Mark Oppenheimer, is also a Believer contributor—check out his great piece on Evan Connell from 2005.

Labels: , , , , ,

Monday, January 19, 2009

On the air NOW...

...or rather later this hour, Dzyd Ta-Nehisi on Fresh Air.

Perhaps you can listen using this headset. (Via L.G. Thos.)

Labels:

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Ouroboros-Fortified Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 15, 2009

I. New York magazine gives the nod to Light Industry proprietors (and, most importantly, Dzyds) Ed and L.G. Thos. — as does Artforum! This pic is from Artforum (that's Thomas and Ed on the left...other dudes are Michael Azerrad and Jeff Krulik):






{{{Heyyy—they'll take it!}}}


II. Defunct parks! Pantoums are from Malaysia!
(Via L.G. Thos.)

III. The Atlantic this month should be retitled "THE DIZZIES"??? Hua has the cover story, "The End of White America?"—two quotes for today:

A) “Have I read The Great Gatsby?” Combs said to a London newspaper in 2001. “I am the Great Gatsby."

B) Similarly, Smirnoff struck marketing gold in 2006 with a viral music video titled “Tea Partay,” featuring a trio of strikingly bad, V-neck-sweater-clad white rappers called the Prep Unit. “Haters like to clown our Ivy League educations / But they’re just jealous ’cause our families run the nation,” the trio brayed, as a pair of bottle-blond women in spiffy tennis whites shimmied behind them. There was no nonironic way to enjoy the video; its entire appeal was in its self-aware lampooning of WASP culture: verdant country clubs, “old money,” croquet, popped collars, and the like.

And Dzyd Ta-Nehisi writes on Michelle Obama:

There has been much chatter about Barack Obama as the answer to America’s racial gap, as a biracial black man whose roots stretch from Hawaii to Kenya, with an Ivy League pedigree and the seal of the South Side. But he is not the only one entering the White House who has seen both sides, who intuitively grasps the heroic American narrative of work ethic and family, and how that narrative historically failed black people. He is not the only one who walks in both worlds. Indeed, if you’re looking for a bridge, if you’re looking for someone to connect the heart of black America with the heart of all of America, to allow us all to look at the American dream in the same way, if you’re looking for common ground, then it’s true, we should be talking about Obama. But we should make sure we’re talking about the right one.


III. Have you read enough about Gordon Lish & co. yet? Dzyd Carla weighs in on (former Lish student) Christine Schutt.

IV. Only hyperconnect?

My brain has developed a little differently from most other people’s. Aside from my high-functioning autism, I also suffered from epileptic seizures as a young child. In my book, I propose a link between my brain’s functioning and my creative abilities based on the property of ‘hyper-connectivity’. —Scientific American


V. Hare-o-boros!



And, um....another one.
(Via Erasing)

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 6, 2008

I. Dzyd Dennis on David Fincher:

There is also the matter of his technical virtuosity, which tends to inspire both admiration and suspicion. A teenage apprentice at George Lucas’s effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, and then a hotshot director of commercials and music videos (including a brace of enormously influential ones for Madonna, at the height of her image-making powers), Mr. Fincher has always been in the business of expensive illusion and manufactured beauty. To call him a superficial stylist misses the point; in many of his films the surface is the substance. It is easy to get lost in — and perhaps as a result, to underestimate — the sheer sensory pleasures of his movies: their dynamic compositions and kinetic rhythms, sinuous camera movements and seamless digital wizardry. —NYT

II. The NYT's Education Life features pieces by PTSNBN EdSupp mainstays Rachel and Christine...niiiice....

III. My sources tell me that new New-York Ghosts have been sighted...

IV. The smell is back! (Via Jane)

V. Forthcoming from Knopf—what if it had been about the drink?
APR 1: Three Hundred Tang Poems.
A new translation of a beloved anthology of poems
from the golden age of of Chinese culture.
Edited and translated by Peter Harris.
An Everyman's Library title.
256 pages. $13.50 ISBN 978-0-307-26973-7

Labels: , , , ,

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Call it courage

Dzyd Ta-Nehisi on Obama's grandparents, Frederick Douglass and Helen Pitts, and more.

Labels: ,

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Deconstructing Barry

Via Ta-Nehisi:

There has been speculation about this which I've ignored, no doubt because there are enough policy reasons to oppose Barack Obama and I don't want to feed into what sounds, at first blush, like Vince Fosteresque paranoia. But I've finally read Jack Cashill's lengthy analysis in The American Thinker. It is thorough, thoughtful, and alarming -- particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama's memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers' memoir.

There is nothing in Obama's scant paper trail prior to 1995 that would suggest something as stylish and penetrating as, at times, Dreams from My Father is. And when Obama speaks extemporaneously, one doesn't hear the same voice one encounters in the book. Now maybe Obama has a backlog of writing fom Columbia or Harvard that signal great literary promise, but he not only hasn't shared it, he's assiduously hidden traces of it. And, to be sure, writing is different from speaking -- in fairness, some of Obama's off-the-cuff bumbling when he speaks is certainly due to the rigors of the campaign which would cause even the most gifted communicator to faulter from time to time. But it's not unreasonable to expect more similarity between Obama the writer and Obama the orator. —National Review Online


(The "in fairness" is a nice touch.)

Labels: ,

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for August 12, 2008

I. The FedEx guy just buzzed, bearing...


—Personal Days' Italian incarnation! (Maledetti Colleghi—sounds like a campus novel!) As you can see, the cover art is taken from the Cape edition, though the spine does a little mirrory thing that is unusual and weirdly eye-grabbing:


Part I, "Can't Undo," is rendered "Impossibile Annullare"; "Replace All" is now "Sostituisci Tutto"; and everyone's favorite, "Revert to Saved," is now "Ritorna Alla Versione Salvata." Love it!

II. Eager to borrow my life coach? Listen to Jenny D on Bat Segundo, talking about her new novel, The Explosionist. (Hear her say: "He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.")

III. Maud and Levi bond over Iris Murdoch.

IV. Ta-Nehisi: Which edition of D&D should you teach your child?

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Monday, August 11, 2008

"Only built for elvish links"

Ta-Nehisi on D&D (again!)

This made me laugh, too: "I've been going through all the old rule-books and stuff—this has to be the most complicated 'game' ever invented."

Labels:

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Decoration day

This sentence, from Dzyd Ta-Nehisi's NYT/Paper Cuts playlist, is itself beautifully decorated!

...the man who stands on the corner can organize his thoughts just as beautifully as the decorated professor.


(Via Jenny D)

Labels:

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

American nerd

Ta-Nehisi: "I can draw a direct line from, say, The Labyrinth to Dragonlance to the Uncanny X-Men to Follow The Leader to It Takes A Nation Of Millions to Hold Us Back. What is Rakim's 'Microphone Fiend' if not an origin tale? And what is Rakim, if not the greatest verbal swordsman of his era?"

Plus: Fan mail from a co-author of the Dragonlance series.

Labels: ,

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Use your allusion

My Powell's bloggery continues, with a consideration of Ta-Nehisi's The Beautiful Struggle and Junot Díaz's Book So Famous That I'm Not Going To Write the Title Here....

And by the way: The book is on sale at Powell's, for $9.10!

* * *

The full Time Out review of Personal Days is now online. Rod Smith is yet another brilliantly perceptive critic, I must say!

Labels: , , ,

Thursday, May 08, 2008

A spell-book

Dzyd Ta-Nehisi's amazing memoir The Beautiful Struggle is out — read an excerpt at The Root. (Via Slate.)

Also check out this great video of TNC talking about...nearly everything!

I'll be blogging about this soon...many thoughts...Maybe I will do so next week when I'm blogging at Powell's?!!

Labels:

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Weird dice

Ta-Nehisi on Gygax:

It's hard to explain to people today—hell it was hard then--what it meant to create an entire world inside your head with only some paper, weird dice, and rule-books. But, oh man, that world was so real to me....


Also: This BBC News story features a tiny pic of the ultra-rare first version of D&D, which came in three small books. (Way back when, Cousin Andy managed to track down the similarly formatted supplements to this version—but we never found the original version itself...These supplements predated the Basic D&D set that we were using, which led to intriguing compatibility issues...)



FINALLY: Dizzyhead Regina sends us this oddly moving tribute.

Labels: ,


View My Stats