Monthly Archives for June 2002
Preparing for Re-Entry
The last day in Hawaii, alas. Packing up the suitcase, hunting for the items lost beneath the bed. Realizing that I only took 8 pictures while I was here, and now this roll of film will languish in my camera … Continue reading
Lessons I Wish I’d Learned Sooner
1. Just because you read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn five years ago doesn’t mean you’ll remember its details during your orals. 2. When told in the early stages of a relationship the excruciating details of your blameless partner’s last … Continue reading
Influence, Part II
Previously, on Planned Obsolescence: the book list, not as designator of “quality” or “greatness,” but rather of “influence,” which one intrepid reader understood to be the fluidity with which a book’s central concept made itself available to cocktail party chatter. … Continue reading
Dept. of Musical Revisionism
Earlier that day, over lunch: Me (hearing “Born in the U.S.A.” over the restaurant P.A. system): How on earth did those Republican knuckleheads hear this song and decide it was a patriotic anthem? He: It makes total sense. Their whole … Continue reading
Hey, Where’s the Joy of Cooking?
In the spirit of two years ago, I’ve recently been directed to this list of the 100 Most Influential Books of the Century. The shift in directive—influence rather than “quality”—from all those other lists that came out in 1999-2000 makes … Continue reading
Hawaii Is Good
for many things. For getting up at 4 am since your body can still be fooled into thinking it’s 9. For catching up on that reading you meant to do years ago but could never quite get to. For keeping … Continue reading
Mining the Backlist
I’m one of those folks whose first introduction to Richard Powers was Galatea 2.2, which I suppose is the place that a lot of people start with him. Like White Noise is the place to start reading DeLillo, and The … Continue reading
True Confessions
Okay, time to come clean. I’m in (what I most sincerely hope to be) the end stages of writing a book that focuses on this question of obsolescence, particularly the anxieties that literary culture seems to exude any time it … Continue reading
Opening Day
Here’s the main issue: obsolescence. A forum for exploring it, and for producing it. A space in which to think about the intimate interrelationship of new media and old media, and the ways in which newness and oldness are inevitably … Continue reading
