bookmobility: Archive

Feb 21st

3 tags

Feb 10th

20 notes

Feb 10th

5 notes

4 tags

Feb 7th

“The electronic image of a book is still a few gigabytes worth of information,...”

– John Browning, “Libraries Without Walls for Books Without Pages,” WIRED (1993)

Feb 2nd

Jan 31st

“Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless,...”

– Marshall McLuhan (with Quentin Fiore), The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)

Jan 29th

4 tags

Jan 25th

3 notes

4 tags

“The former shrink, plague-blind, sat in her requisite lounge chair, feet up on...”

– Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011) [A favorite passage, as it captures in miniature both one of Whitehead’s key cultural critiques as well as the play with temporality, narrative, cadence, and structure that make the novel as a whole so consistently enthralling. The clauses pile on one...

Jan 24th

Jan 20th

880 notes

Jan 6th

93 notes

2 tags

Jan 3rd

13 notes

“People hate these shows, but their hatred smacks of denial. It’s all...”

– John Jeremiah Sullivan, “Getting Down to What is Really Real,” Pulphead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 201) [ht to James Wood’s meditation on the essay, which prompted me to read Sullivan’s excellent collection]

Dec 31st

1 note

3 tags

Dec 28th

3 tags

Dec 26th

Dec 25th

55 notes

Dec 24th

41 notes

2 tags

Dec 23rd

2 notes

“The idea is to get a horse, a Central Park workhorse. A horse who lives in a...”

– Anna McDonald, “Horse Piano,” New Yorker (December 19/26, 2011)

Dec 23rd

4 tags

Dec 22nd

4 tags

“Once I’d mastered those skills, it didn’t take me long to discover...”

– Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (Crown, 2011)

Dec 20th

6 notes

5 tags

Dec 17th

12 notes

2 tags

"God is Not Great"--But Bookmobiles are

Amidst the extensive outpouring of eulogies for and reminiscences of Christopher Hitchens, I was not expecting to see bookmobiles pop up. And I certainly wasn’t expecting a Christian Science Monitor editorial by Danny Heitman, headlined “Christopher Hitchens: ‘Got is not great’-but bookmobiles are.” But then, I apparently didn’t know Hitchens’s background...

Dec 17th

1 note

3 tags

Watch

A cat encounters information technology. It doesn’t go well.

Dec 17th

49,023 notes

3 tags

“I had come to Mexico in search of another language, and found myself thinking of...”

– Alexandra Fuller, “Her Heart Inform Her Tongue: Language Lost and Found,” Harper’s Magazine (January 2012)

Dec 15th

20 notes

4 tags

Dec 15th

2 notes

4 tags

Dec 14th

51 notes

3 tags

Dec 13th

6 notes

4 tags

Dec 13th

8 notes

"I thought Atlas would shrug."

As I may have suggested with my post the other day, I have a soft spot for cattiness among the literati. So along similar lines: Over on Slate, David Haglund has an amusing piece on dismissive, bitchy replies to letters to the editor at The New York Review of Books. Joan Didion, for example, replied to a critique of her 1979 bad review of Woody Allen’s Manhattan with just two words:...

Dec 9th

4 tags

Dec 9th

17 notes

3 tags

Dec 8th

1 note

3 tags

“I agree with everything Mr. Wilder says but I will fight to the death against...”

– Dwight Macdonald, on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (via Louis Menand’s “Browbeaten”)

Dec 7th

4 tags

Dec 4th

29 notes

3 tags

Dec 3rd

10 notes

5 tags

Dec 2nd

14 notes

4 tags

Dec 1st

1,205 notes

Everything is ███ fine. ██ ███ trust your...

[I’m waitingwaitingwaiting for a response to a FOIA request I submitted to the National Archives (top secret bookmobile stuff…?), so this seemed appropriate.]

Nov 26th

23,537 notes

4 tags