Monthly Archives: November, 2009
Mark Twain on YouTube
I’ve become so accustomed to seeing Mark Twain being done by actors, mostly Hal Holbrook, that it’s somewhat strange to see the man himself caught on film—who is that walking like Charlie Chaplin? But it is indeed him, strutting around his Connecticut home and taking tea with his daughters Clara and Jean, a hundred years [...]
The Rick Moody Twitter Fiction Project
Twitter’s staccato bursts always give the impression of being spontaneous, no matter how well plotted-out or scheduled in advance. It’s their brevity, coupled with a lack of adjectives, I guess, along with the impluse-friendly format. Dan Baum’s tweeting the story of his New Yorker hiring and firing over a few days last May felt a [...]
Cue the Holiday Music
Ah, the letdown. The tail end of November is upon us; the fun holiday is over and the next one is in our faces full-blast. I’m neither religious nor much of a consumer, so Christmas/Hanukah/Kwanzaa doesn’t do much for me personally. But I realize that faithful Like Fire readers might be primed to spend some [...]
Pocket Review: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith
As a young reader, Zadie Smith approached books one way; as a writer, she’s taken a somewhat different path. Changing My Mind is a collection of 17 essays grouped into five brackets: Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and the last, Remembering, which contains a single excruciating remembrance of David Foster Wallace, by far the longest piece [...]
Poems for the Table
Whether in addition to or instead of saying Grace, you can’t go wrong with a good poem at the Thanksgiving table. It’s one of those few occasions when declaiming isn’t totally inappropriate, so go for it! Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver would not be out of place, and the Poetry Foundation has been kind enough [...]
Politico-Fanfic
Who says the Trekkies and Buffy people should have all the fanfic fun? You could argue that the stories contributed to New York‘s Political Fictions Project And then again you could wonder who is more of an invented character than a political figure, fashioned as they are for public consumption with careful attention paid to [...]
Review Redux 11-23-09
There’s little better in a bibliophile’s life than a ramblingly brilliant New York Review of Books piece that takes a page or two (or even three) to finally get around to the book under consideration. Sometimes, as in this instance, there’s a personal connection between reviewer and writer that enriches the review voluptuously. Paula Fox’s [...]
Peripatetics
If anyone else has been as tempted as I have over the past week to close out the 401k, give notice, put the keys in the mailbox, and generally throw up your hands and skip town, be advised that it is possible to do so gracefully. Just make sure you have enough book boxes—it took [...]
Everyone is Special
While I was hanging on the National Book Awards coverage tonight with the devotion most people reserve for the Oscars, it was still good to know that for everyone who didn’t win one of the season’s coveted prizes—or didn’t even get nominated—there’s still an award with your name on it, somewhere. According to Salon‘s Laura [...]
Hand Made
Although I am in no way opposed to technology in general and eBooks specifically, neither am I particularly taken by them. I haven't thought long and hard about this—it's just how I roll, and there's no need at present to worry about it. But this video flipbook by Abigail Uhteg, documenting the creation of her [...]
