A toast to the late crime writer Jim Crumley – Eddie Muller in today’s Chron
October 5, 2008
October 1, 2008
The Last Tour by Wm. Finnegan
The Last Tour by Wm. Finnegan. A New Yorker essay on brothers Travis and Willard Twiggs. Their lives. Their deaths.
Sad, sad, sad.
“I just don’t get that. I’m having a real hard time with it. I can’t believe he would leave me, can’t believe he would leave us, leave our girls.”
She took more deep breaths. “But he really left us a long time ago. He tried to come back. But he couldn’t. That was not my husband out there.”
August 27, 2008
Nora Ephron on Hillary, HillRaisers, and "narcissistic mortification"
Ephron doesn’t have as rosy a take on Hillary’s speech last night as I do:
[...]
“My favorite part of Hillary Clinton’s speech last night was when she admonished her followers not to put their affection for her over the issues. When she reminded them that what’s at stake is far more crucial than their loyalty to her. When she reproved them for thinking for even a moment that her historic thrilling campaign was more important than the real campaign to defeat the Republicans.
“Where any of her followers could have gotten the idea doesn’t seem to have crossed her mind. The fish stinks from the head down. The Clintons’ narcissism (and yes, I know, it’s an overused term but if there was ever a moment for it in our national life, this is it) perfumed every bit of Hillary’s campaign, and it leaked down to her contributors and followers. “Were you in it for me” was her funniest line of the night.”
[...]
August 18, 2008
FORA.tv – Videos Covering Today’s Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues
FORA.tv – Videos Covering Today's Top Social, Political, and Tech Issues
FORA.tv is advertising for unpaid interns on CraigsList.
Toddled off to see what’s up with that. I’d seen a stack of FORA.tv lit over at the Commonwealth Club offices on Saturday.
Long Now talks. Aspen Institute talks. Commonwealth Club talks. …
Here’s a Roger Rosenblatt interview with Amy Tan at the Chautauqua Institution on July 10, 2008. The interview is broken out in sections. If you only want to hear Tan speak on “Writer’s Memory” you can click straight to the spot.
E.L. Doctorow on the Problematic Nature of Writing Novels
The indexing is superb. You can select one of the broad subject ranges and then one of the sub-sections. You can search for subjects. You can find all videos from the Hoover Institution.
Brilliant stuff.
August 16, 2008
California License Plate 2GAT123
Here is my “find out something new every day” for today courtesy of a post Dangerous Bill (Penrose) made to misc.writing.
Read the Wikipedia entry about California license plate 2GAT123.
(I knew about 555-0100 to 555-0199, but this license plate biz is news to me and news to his nibs as well.)
August 10, 2008
Orwell’s Diaries
The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.
Orwell’s ‘domestic’ diaries begin on 9th August 1938/2008; his ‘political’ diaries (which are further categorised as ‘Morocco’, ‘Pre-war’ and ‘Wartime’) begin on 7th September 1938/2008.
The diaries are exactly as Orwell wrote them. Where there are original spelling errors, they are indicated by a ° following the offending word.
[via Laughing Squid]
August 9, 2008
Strothman Agency
The Strothman Agency (of which I’ve written before) dropped a line to say
“The Strothman Agency is moving. As of July 28th, we will be located at 6 Beacon Street, Suite 810, Boston, MA 02108. This will also be our new mailing address.”
June 12, 2008
[URL] Corpus of American English
Brilliant app.
The Corpus of American English (not to be confused with the American National Corpus) is the first large corpus of contemporary American English. It is freely available online, and it is related to other large corpora that we have created.
The corpus contains more than 360 million words of text, including 20 million words each year from 1990-2007, and it is equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic texts (more information). The corpus will also be updated at least twice each year from this point on, and will therefore serve as a unique record of linguistic changes in American English.
The interface allows you to search for exact words or phrases, wildcards, lemmas, part of speech, or any combinations of these. You can search for surrounding words (collocates) within a ten-word window (e.g. all nouns somewhere near chain, all adjectives near woman, or all verbs near key).
The corpus also allows you to easily limit searches by frequency and compare the frequency of words, phrases, and grammatical constructions, in at least two main ways:
* By genre: comparisons between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic, or even between sub-genres (or domains), such as movie scripts, sports magazines, newspaper editorial, or scientific journals
* Over time: compare different years from 1990 to the present time
You can also easily carry out semantically-based queries of the corpus. For example, you can contrast and compare the collocates of two related words (little/small, democrats/republicans, men/women), to determine the difference in meaning or use between these words. You can find the frequency and distribution of synonyms for nearly 60,000 words and also compare their frequency in different registers, and also use these word lists as part of other queries. Finally, you can easily create your own lists of semantically-related words, and then use them directly as part of the query.
June 7, 2008
William F. Buckley
Hillsdale College – William F. Buckley: “This website contains the complete writings of William F. Buckley, Jr. Transcripts from his long-running TV show, Firing Line are available at the Hoover Institution.”
June 4, 2008
Artists’ notebooks
MOLESKINE — DETOUR: SPECIAL EXHIBITION OF ARTISTS’ MOLESKINE NOTEBOOKS
Intriguing what folks have done with their Moleskine notebooks.
Eric Hoffer used Boorum & Pease Memo Books, 4 1/2 x 7 1/4, 98 pages. There are 131 notebooks in the archives, dating from 1949-1977. Hoffer used his notebooks as places to stash his thoughts, which he would later retrieve and craft into his published writings. In all, the Hoover Institute, which holds the Hoffer archives, has seventy-five feet of Hoffer work.
Paul Madonna uses yet another type of small notebook, sketchbook. Neither Moleskine nor B&P, I don’t think.
I am an obsessive note-taker, carrying a book on me at all times. I have a theory that we have only so much space available in our brains to remember thoughts. A small percentage of ideas are realized, and if we waste energy holding onto what may later turn out to be a trite idea, we may have missed or forgotten the one of gold. he says.
He revisits his notebooks frequently looking for ideas for his work. In his studio, he has a shelf holding all his notebooks since he began his journey. All his drawings … he can go back and find something he drew three years ago and remember the angle of a gable or the detail on a portico. Or he can go back to when he first started drawing faces and see how he’s changed. He can find snippets of conversation he’s overheard or ideas of something to draw. I look at his notebooks and think, wow. This guy is really focussed on what he does. This guy has an archive of thoughts and sketches that will feed his muse for a long long time to come.
I always intend to keep a notebook that captures it all. I have a few Moleskine notebooks that I’ve bought (because I like blank, bound books) and which the younger nib has given me (accompanied by “Write, Mom!” sorts of notes). I usually wind up, though, with scatterings and scraps of paper with dates and notes and words I need to look up, meanings known but not really, allusions known but not really, quotes that appeal. … The scraps of paper are often the tab end of a full-page ad on non-magazine stock. Know what I mean? You tear out the ad and there, at the back end of the magazine, is a strip of paper stock about 3″ wide and the height of the magazine.
I sorted and stacked Monday for the FirstMonday meeting at my place that night. I wound up with a large envelope (picked out of the daily mail, ‘natch) filled with these scraps of paper. (And that’s just the bits and pieces lying around uncaged.) Later I’ll re-copy them onto blank notebook pages but … where’s the retrieval mechanism except for thumbing through old notebooks?
When world famous author Sal dies, there will be some archive of what made her tick besides the unreachable archives of what she wrote on a computer and posted to the Web lo’ these many years past. There will be dozens of half-used notebooks where Sal started thinking about keeping track of her thoughts and where she was and where she thought she was going and then …
Do you use a notebook to stash and store anything? Pictures? Notes? Thoughts? Do you draw in your notebook? Have a grid that you adhere to? Add color. Write lies?