Mar 23 2013
The noise in the blogosphere has long surpassed the signal, which may explain the decline in relevance of the “personal blog.” Where once the platform was largely about personal writing and exploration, blogging now is a vehicle for competitive foodieism, personal branding, and all forms of marketing. This shift was inevitable, so there’s no point [...]
Aug 05 2011
Recently, on Twitter, @Audrey_Sprenger tweeted that Jack Kerouac’s favorite snack was “Med rare cheeseburg on Engl muf w mayo & fried onions” because “it reminded him of poutine.” My bullshit detector immediately sounded, and I replied saying so. After a bit of back-and-forth, I backed down, deferring to Sprenger’s expertise, because, as it turns out, [...]
Jan 18 2011
As I’ve done every January since 2004, I present here a list of the books I’ve read in the previous year, with commentary. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe The Stranger, by Albert Camus (translated by Matthew Ward) My Antonia, by Willa Cather Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon Utz, by Bruce Chatwin Enemy at [...]
Dec 05 2010
Because I am a masochist at heart, I sometimes spend my lunch break eating at my desk and reading discussion threads on Linked In. In a recent thread, some poor sap was asking for help coming up with a promotional tagline that connected the idea of volunteering with the concept of “winners” or “winning.” Having [...]
Aug 15 2010
The subtitle of this post, if there were one, would be “Why I’ll Never Write that Novel, # 132.” A few weeks ago, Hollywood screenwriter Shane Salerno, who is working on a documentary about J.D. Salinger, released a low resolution image of what he called a “never seen before” photograph of the famously reclusive late [...]
Mar 16 2010
Forgive me while I carve a rather meandering path to my point, but it begins last spring when I received in the mail a flyer from the Humber School for Writers. It indicated that Martin Amis would be the headliner, the star instructor, at Humber’s summer workshops for 2009. Martine and I both wondered what [...]
Feb 28 2010
This morning, Martine found the following sentence in a recent Vanity Fair magazine article: “The couple still fly separately.” There are two problems with that sentence; first, “the couple” is a singular object, so the verb should be “flies” not “fly” (Bob flies, Bob and Fred fly). So the immediate reaction is to change the [...]
