“Say what you will about The New York Times, but covering the obvious is something the publication never fears.”
Also on a digital note: building a career in the digital age.
If you’re still pondering what’s good for you in the new year, perhaps you’re wondering what it’s all about.
“During the early years of the twentieth century, every modernist poet and critic seemed to take a ritual swipe at Longfellow, the symbolic corpse of what Santayana called the ‘genteel tradition.’ T. E. Lawrence told Robert Graves that Ezra Pound had ‘spent his life trying to live down a family scandal: he’s Longfellow’s grand-nephew.'” (via Books Inq)
Hype for books of 2008. Yes, already. (Also for 2007)
“Clearly, the logic and semantics of fiction will face all sorts of difficulties, not least of which is the problem of metaphor, irony, translation, interpretation and all that.”
Maud on Malcolm “Hack” Gladwell.
“‘Most of all, I wanted to be wicked,’ Susan Travers wrote, looking back at herself at the age of 16. ‘A wicked lady, flirting with danger and scandal.'”
Adverbs versus adjectives: one more way the English and the Americans differ.
“Mr. Stone, who is himself an emblematic ’60s figure – perhaps the only member of Ken Kesey’s famed Merry Prankster bus trip of 1964 who can still remember what happened – is 69 now, and he and Janice, his wife of 47 years, recently decided to take a break.”