I’m off the east coast to spend the holidays with family, so it’s unlikely that I’ll post anything here for a couple weeks. But be sure to stop by after the new year, when my first order of business will be to post photos of the various craft projects I made and gave as gifts. You won’t want to miss it.
Thanks to Maud for linking to this scoop:
The long road to make Sendak’s 1964 classic “Where the Wild Things Are” into a movie is on a new and decidedly hip track. Sendak says he and director Spike Jonze (“Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation”) are talking about bringing the book to the screen for Universal, with a screenplay by Dave Eggers (“Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” “You Shall Know Our Velocity”).
Sounds like good fun to me.
LanguageHat describes and links to GlossPost, “a searchable database of glossary URLs”:
looks like an excellent resource. Just the top few items include nautical dictionaries, economic glossaries, law, forestry… Check it out; there’s something for everyone.
Very cool one-stop shopping for any definition hunter.
Why didn’t somebody tell me that another collection of recordings from This American Life had been released? (Perhaps I haven’t adequately expressed my interest.) Crimebusters & Crossed Wires: Stories from This American Life was released over a month ago and would surely have been on my holiday wish list had I known of its existence. At any rate, it’s on my wish list now, and I’ll be recommending it to everyone I see over the holidays.
Dylan fans will appreciate this great Dylan bootleg site. Of particular interest are outtakes from the official release of The Basement Tapes (one of my favorite albums, especially since it features The Band, another of my favorites), which itself is an “authorized” collection of previously unreleased bootlegs:
The result of Dylan’s most reclusive stage are “The Basement Tapes” — Volumes 1 – 5. Columbia released 24 of the 105 recordings on their Basement Tapes. While Columbia’s sound is superior, their song choice is questionable. The provided material is not on Columbia’s Basement Tapes.
For bringing this find to my attention, Ben Hammersley might perhaps be forgiven his unkind critique of “Bob Bloody Dylan.”
Return of the Reluctant reports on entries added to the OED last week, singling out the following new words for special attention:
I also found these interesting:
The new Winter Fiction Issue of The New Yorker features a short nonfiction piece by David Sedaris to add to the links (see here and here) I’ve been collecting and posting in anticipation of his forthcoming (eventually, supposedly in June) Untitled Collection. (Thanks, Maud.)
Last night, my indoor soccer team (the Professionals) ended our season with a 5-2 loss in the playoffs. You can check out our final stats and standings (not including the playoff game) here. Here’s a summary of our games this season (also not including our playoff game):
My outdoor team (the Black Knights United F.C.) continues off-season, indoor training here. I’ll post updates on our next outdoor season in the spring.
Though it’s already been posted in a variety of places (I believe I first saw it at Bookslut), I couldn’t resist directing attention to “The Barnes & Noble Experience,” which is quite funny and makes for a fine workday diversion:
One of the first things I learned while working at Barnes & Noble was that you should never, ever pay for a book. You can read an entire goddamn novel in the store and we won’t bug you once. If you’d rather the convenience of reading at home, simply pay for the book, keep the receipt, and finish it within fourteen days. Even if you say “I didn’t like it.” they’ll take it back. If this surprises you, then you should be even more surprised to learn that this is B&N’s version of a strict return policy; recently changed from ‘If we carry it, you can return it; no questions asked.’ You’d be surprised at the number of people who do this; many seemingly consider Barnes & Noble a library that just happens to require safety deposits.
From these introductory insights, the piece gets funnier with detailed accounts of encounters with customers. Anyone who’s ever worked anywhere in retail is sure to appreciate it.
In a piece entitled “Entertainment, Weakly: My Evening with the Nice Believer Kids” in the online edition of today’s Observer, Choire Sicha bashes the bash hosted by the staff of The Believer:
If there were gay marriage, the gang that publishes The Believer could pass for the adorable adopted Malaysian children of Kurt Vonnegut and Garrison Keillor. Well, almost. True if Mr. Vonnegut had never seen war; I imagine the only war to penetrate the Believers’ middle-class upbringings was the nightly assault of Three’s Company and Alice and, similarly, a really expensive East Coast education….
Is it a fair criticism that the Believers, despite their fine if flawed principles and good manners, have expressed little sense of a personalized relation to the pain of the world? (No, probably not.) And is it wrong to wish they would reconsider the meaninglessness of the entertainments “we” make? Love your entertainments or reject them, oh no doubt, but get on with the show.
This seems to me to be pretty harsh (if self-admittedly unfair) and unwarranted criticism for a new magazine (which, incidentally, I’ve come to love) whose editorial focus is book reviews, thoughtful interviews, writers’ current projects, and philosophers’ ideas. Perhaps you just had to be there. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it, and this piece is really just an attack on the magazine’s staff (perhaps I’m just not hip enough yet to hate Eggers and company, as so many people it seems now do, but then, I’ve never met them) and not the magazine itself, which I can’t see as deserving it. (Thanks to Bookslut for the link. Also seen at TMFTML.)
Update
For interesting perspectives on the whole McSweeney’s-bashing phenomenon (of which Believer-bashing is a direct descendent), check out the comments to “An Open Letter to Sara Bauer” at Return of the Reluctant. This thread is in response to Bauer’s original “An Open Letter to Young Women Who Work at Chain Bookstores” in McSweeney’s. (Thanks to Maud for the links.)
