Dave Eggers Remembers Salinger

In a brief piece on the late author, Dave Eggers touches on the idea that J. D. Salinger had been writing for the last 50 years, as some have hoped, and just hadn’t published anything. He doesn’t sound hopeful.

To me the question of whether or not he continued to write strikes at the heart of the nature of writing itself. If he indeed wrote volumes and volumes about the Glass family, as has been claimed, it would be such a curious thing, given that the nature of written communication is social; language was created to facilitate understanding between people. So writing books upon books without the intention of sharing them with people is a proposition full of contradictory impulses and goals. It’s like a gifted chef cooking incredible meals for forty years and never inviting anyone over to share them.

01.31.2010Tagged with:    

Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

“There will never be another voice like his.” Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it’s just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.

The Onion honors J. D. Salinger.

01.30.2010Tagged with:    

A Narrow Garage

The garage I park in every day is old and pretty narrow, and the car doors only open about half way to get in and out. But that’s nothing compared to this guy, whose garage is only 6 centimeters wider than his vehicle.

I love how he has to open the door to his house to get out of the car.

(via cynical-c)

01.29.2010Tagged with:    

J. D. Salinger Dies at 91

But writing in The New York Review of Books in 2001, Janet Malcolm argued that the critics had all along been wrong about Mr. Salinger, just as short-sighted contemporaries were wrong about Manet and about Tolstoy. The very things people complain about, Ms. Malcolm wrote, were the qualities that made Mr. Salinger great. That the Glasses (and, by implication, their creator) were not at home in the world was the whole point, she said, which said as much about the world as about the kind of people who failed to get along there.

RIP.

01.28.2010Tagged with:    

Jacket + Bookmark

Jacket and Bookmark by Igor Udushlivy

Created by designer Igor Udushlivy, these playful dust jackets and bookmarks work in tandem to give the book a unique look that breaks the normal plane of the cover.

01.28.2010Tagged with:    

Why ‘Avatar’ is actually the 26th biggest movie

Yet one respect in which boxoffice reporting is pretty odd — emphasizing ticket grosses yet rarely mentioning ticket sales. That would be like always reporting how many ad dollars sold off “Lost” and not mentioning the number of viewers that actually watched the show. With everybody reporting how “Avatar” is The Biggest Movie of All Time based on grosses ($1.859 billion and counting), it’s important to remember how rising ticket prices skew the returns.

Totally agree. Counting tickets sold is the only way to go. And until you get 200 million people to leave their house to go see your movie, Gone With the Wind is going to be number 1.

01.27.2010Tagged with:    

Wes Anderson’s Stop Motion Acceptance Speech

Wes Anderson received a Special Filmmaking Achievement award for Fantastic Mr. Fox from the National Board of Review. He accepted the award as a stop motion animated character.

01.27.2010Tagged with:    

Woman Collides With a Picasso

From the NY Times:

On Friday afternoon a woman taking an adult education class at the Metropolitan Museum of Art accidentally lost her balance and fell into “The Actor,” a rare Rose Period Picasso, tearing the canvas about six inches along its lower right-hand corner.

With the amount of traffic through those galleries, it’s a wonder that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.

01.25.2010Tagged with:    

Do You Eat Crap?

Great satire to promote the healthy fare of The Pump restaurant in New York.

01.22.2010Tagged with:    

Auto-appendectomy in the Antarctic

When Russian surgeon Leonid Rogozov fell ill while on an Antarctic expedition in 1961, he was one of twelve people stationed at a remote polar outpost, and the only physician of the group. He knew the symptoms; he was suffering from acute appendicitis. To survive, his appendix would have to come out, and he would have to perform the operation on himself.

When Rogozov had made the incision and was manipulating his own innards as he removed the appendix, his intestine gurgled, which was highly unpleasant for us; it made one want to turn away, flee, not look—but I kept my head and stayed. Artemev and Teplinsky also held their places, although it later turned out they had both gone quite dizzy and were close to fainting . . . Rogozov himself was calm and focused on his work, but sweat was running down his face and he frequently asked Teplinsky to wipe his forehead . . . The operation ended at 4 am local time. By the end, Rogozov was very pale and obviously tired, but he finished everything off.

(via kottke)

01.21.2010Tagged with:    

Would You Have Spotted the Fraud?

A skimmer is a little device that fits over the slot on an ATM and steals credit and debit card information when you swipe your card. They’ve been around for a while, but they are getting more and more technologically advanced. Consider this one, found in California, that even includes a little camera:

It’s hard to know whether this was a homemade skimmer, or one that was purchased from online criminal forums. Some of the skimmers sold on these forums are extremely sophisticated, incorporating features such the ability to send an SMS text message to the thieves’ mobile phone whenever a new card is swiped.

This type of fraud is actually far more common that you might think: A quick query on Twitter for “ATM skimmer” usually brings up plenty of local news reports about these devices being found on ATMs.

(via cynical-c)

01.21.2010Tagged with:    

Back to the Future, 2009

Says Jason Kottke:

If Back to the Future were made today, Marty would have travelled back in time to 1980.

Damn.

01.19.2010Tagged with:    

Big Dig House

The structural system for the Big Dig House was built from concrete and steel salvaged from Boston’s Big Dig project.

Planning the reassembly of the materials in as if it were a pre-fab system, subtle spatial arrangements are created. These materials however are capable of carrying much higher loads than standard structure, easily allowing the integration of large scale roof gardens. Most importantly, the project demonstrates an untapped potential for the public realm: with strategic front-end planning, much needed community programs including schools, libraries, and housing could be constructed whenever infrastructure is deconstructed, saving valuable resources, embodied energy, and taxpayer dollars.

Beautiful.

(via contemporist)

01.18.2010Tagged with:    

Deep Discount on Space Shuttles

In the market for a space shuttle? NASA has a deal for you.

Here is a recession bargain: the space shuttle. NASA has slashed the price of the 1970s-era spaceships to $28.8 million apiece from $42 million.

The shuttles are for sale once their flying days are over, which is scheduled to be this fall.

I bet they’re full of wood paneling and orange carpet.

01.17.2010Tagged with:    

Why Light Makes Migraines Worse

I don’t get migraines, but bad headaches always make me want to bury my head under a stack of pillows. Scientists may now know why:

Of the 20 blind individuals who volunteered for the study, six couldn’t perceive light at all; they lacked eyes or had a severely damaged optic nerve, which connects the eye to the brain. The other 14, who suffered from genetic and other conditions that lead to blindness, couldn’t see, but they could sense certain shades of light.

Not surprisingly, the six people who had no vision at all didn’t experience pain from light when they had a migraine. But the other 14 did. This was an interesting clue, because these individuals had faulty rods and cones, cells in the retina that do most of the work of light detection. They did, however, have other retinal cells that functioned fine, particularly those with a type of receptor called melanopsin. Melanopsin doesn’t help people see shapes, but it does react to light–specifically, blue light.

At this point, says Burstein, “we needed to follow the melanopsin,” to see whether the cells expressing it might link up with cells that transmit pain. And indeed, in the rat brain, axons from the light-sensitive melanopsin cells hooked up to specific nerve cells in the thalamus that play a role in pain sensation, the team reports online this week in Nature Neuroscience.

01.14.2010Tagged with:    

570-Megapixel, Intergalactic Camera

A giant digital camera is being built by an international team of scientists at Fermilab in an attempt to solve the mystery of dark energy.

Of course, we don’t really know whether dark energy even exists. What we do know is that the universe has been expanding since the big bang. But rather than slowing down like everything else fighting gravity’s pull, this expansion seems to be speeding up. Something must be causing this, and astronomers call that something dark energy. The hope is that scientists can use detailed photos to chart the light from galaxies and supernovas, which will show the growth of the cosmos and at least give them more evidence for the existence and effect of dark energy.

01.13.2010Tagged with:    

Kenner Star Wars Toys Commercial ’77

Speaking of Star Wars, here’s a commercial from 1977 for a collection of movie tie-in toys. For some reason, I very clearly remember the part with Han Solo and Chewbacca on the potted plant from when I was a kid.

That Death Star playset is one of the best toys I ever had.

01.12.2010Tagged with:    

Star Wars Made in France

Part of me wants to know what’s going on here, but most of me doesn’t really care.

(via coudal)

01.12.2010Tagged with:    

Miep Gies, Anne Frank protector, dies at 100

When the Gestapo arrested Frank’s family and 4 others who had been hidden from the Nazis in a secret room, Miep Gies kept Anne Frank’s diary safe until Otto Frank returned after the war.

The girl had chronicled two years of the emotions and fears that gripped her during hiding, as well as candid thoughts on her family, her feelings for friend-in-hiding Peter van Pels, and dreams of being a professional writer. Mixed into the entries were the names of the Dutch helpers, who risked their lives to keep the family’s secret.

“I didn’t read Anne’s diary papers. … It’s a good thing I didn’t because if I had read them I would have had to burn them,” she said in the 1998 interview. “Some of the information in them was dangerous.”

01.12.2010Tagged with:    

2010: Living In the Future

Daniel Sinker:

Back when I was a boy, I bought a children’s book at my town’s library book sale called “2010: Living in the Future” by Geoffrey Hoyle. Written in 1972, it had been withdrawn from the library’s collection by the mid-80s, when I picked it up. I’ve somehow managed to hang onto it for 25 years and now, suddenly, here we are: 2010. I’m reproducing this long out-of-print book here to see how we’re doing. Are we really living in the future?

01.11.2010Tagged with:    
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