Now that I have a family of my own, we do observe the changing of the calendar year in our own tepid way. A glass of champagne at midnight on New Year’s Eve, a few mince pies—that sort of thing. My wife, being English, also likes to scare up a few Christmas crackers to pull open, for the amusement of our son, who quite likes having a reason to stay up late.But, on the whole, it is still a minor observance for us, and nothing to compare to the celebrations we like to hold on Twelfth Night, the eve of Epiphany, when the last of the Christmas presents are opened, games are played, and the decorations come down from the tree. (I know many Americans think of Christmas as a single day and like to clear away the trappings of the season well before the fifth of January, but that is sheer barbarism, if you ask me, morally only a few steps removed from human sacrifice, cannibalism, or golf.)
posts unwritten, end-of-year edition, part 2
posts unwritten, end-of-year edition, part 2
How interesting would it be to have a writer’s every keystroke recorded and played back? Pretty interesting, perhaps, but I don’t want it to happen to me.
Though I think Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon…
From the Atlantic’s Kodachrome gallery
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kD_M50-V6s?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
Just extend each shot by 10x and you’ll have a Tarkovsky film.
opting out, revisited
Regular readers, if I have any regular readers, will know that this is the kind of thing I strongly disagree with:
Overwhelmed by all the noise, some have simply chosen to block it out — to opt…
In the late ‘90s I started an awkward—some might say excruciating and as-yet incomplete—transition from graduate student to freelance journalist. For the young, lordly know-nothing, this might seem like a natural progression: it’s not. Early on in your new career, you discover that no one gives a fig about your soon-to-be-former pretensions. They want your prose to be precise and matter-of-fact; they want you to get to the point, and briskly; and they don’t as a rule find you charming. Every word you write for a general interest publication is examined through the anticipated experience of an imagined ideal reader, leaving no eye whatsoever trained on your genius. It’s the best capstone to a liberal education one could ask for.
A justly famous scene from Tarkovsky’s The Mirror
Bruce Herman, “Little Gidding”, oil on wood
Research has been done on how the internet affects us, but because I don’t use the internet much now, I can’t google those experts’ opinions and reproduce their wisdom here. What I can report is how being disconnected has changed the pattern of my day and my life. Take my morning: I used to turn on the computer when I got up; with two children to get ready for school, what else could one squeeze into the craze of breakfast-cooking, lunch-packing, tooth-brushing, homework-hunting, but a few minutes of surfing the internet over a becalming cup of coffee? How happily surprised I was when I was proved wrong. The five or seven minutes spent reading some publishing gossip or an acquaintance’s acquaintance retweeting a joke turned out to be just the right amount of time for a chapter of War and Peace or an intense battle in the Iliad… .There is a downside of staying disconnected — I have accumulated too many emails, unread and unreturned; I have neglected people from time to time. I have relaxed my schedule a little, though if the internet functioned before as an addictive distraction, I now have the opposite problem: more than ever, I am addicted to reading, and the moment I have to get on to the internet I become impatient. But these symptoms, at least in my case, are happily relished.
does anything change anything?
does anything change anything?
Marshall Poe says that “the Internet changes nothing”:
The media experts, however, tell us that there really is something new and transformative about the Internet. It goes under various names,…