Do you like novellas?
John Madera has just published a massive list of recommended novellas, recommended by folks like Daniel Borzutzky, Blake Butler, Michael Kimball, Gary Lutz, Michael Martone, Carole Maso, William Walsh, even yours truly. The intro essay contains direct links to the contributors’ lists and comments, but the main entry gives the entire list, alphabetically by title, with the names of the recommenders underneath.
Easter Postscript with Commentary
Are those bunnies making the pastry for the pies in which they will be put? How cool would that be!
A bit like digging your own grave, I guess.
– Phil Bebbington. 10 April 2009.
Me and Easter
Like Jennifer’s family, mine was not churchgoing. But that didn’t work on me as it may have done on her.
I hate Easter. Easter makes me crazy, as perceptive and close-reading ‘flockers and friends may have discerned over the past few days.
Easter’s Follies
I believed in The Easter Bunny a lot longer than I believed in Santa Claus. For some reason, the Easter Bunny just made more sense. He didn’t get talked about as much, for one thing, so there were fewer loose lips to sink that particular ship. Plus I read the hell out of The Country Bunny And The Little Gold Shoes (which still makes me cry) and my mom always took me to “Breakfast With The Easter Bunny” events at the local mall wherever we happened to be living at the time, and The Easter Bunny seemed like a good egg, so to speak. Since he didn’t actually talk, there was an ethereal, other-worldy quality that appealed to me more than the phony-hale-fellow-well-met thing Santa had going on. And instead of worrying about what toys you might or might not receive, you always knew you would get candy, with the dyed eggs (never eaten) and piles of fake plastic grass, so it was less stressful. (Although a couple of times I got to go to some fancy egg hunts with rich friends at their country clubs and if you found a gold-wrapped egg, you won money or sometimes a chocolate bunny the size of a small child. The competition was intense. I usually became severely anxious, as I also did whenever there was a pinata involved, that I might not get the big prize.)
When I was six years old, I woke up very early on Easter Sunday because I had to go to the bathroom. I was about to get up and go, but then it struck me that The Easter Bunny might be in the house at that very moment. (We usually did indoor egg hunts.) What if I disturbed him? What if I scared him away–and I didn’t get my FAIR SHARE of Easter treats? (I have always been very concerned, a la Sally from The Peanuts, that I get what is coming to me.) So that left me stuck in bed, paralyzed with indecision. Eventually, I made up my mind that wetting the bed was the superior option. I am fairly certain that I made the right decision.
Looking back, the guys in giant Easter Bunny costumes were kind of creepy. But at the time I found it all so delightful. Maybe it’s because we didn’t go to church.
I met the Archangel Gabriel
We were in France on holiday and were travelling back from the south to the UK. We decided that an overnight stay in the city of Lisieux seemed perfect. We found a hotel and checked in. We didn’t know at the time but a party of pilgrims or whatever you wanna call them were also staying on their way back from Lourdes. We called for the lift to get to our room. The bell tinged and as the door opened we were presented with a young girl, probably in her mid 20s. She was alone, stood in the centre of the floor, both hands at about chest height forming a cross. She said, “I am the Archangel Gabriel.” With that, the doors closed, and the lift ascended!
Spoken in Tongues
Ico metot hegarde nalo ne
Whi leth edewiss tillon theros es
Andth evo icei he arfal lingon mye ar
Theso nof godd isclos es.
Hespe aksandt heso undof hi svoi ce
Iss oswe et theb irds husht heirs ing ing
Andt heme lodyth ath egavet ome
Wit hin myhe arti srin ging.
Ids tayint hegar denwi thhim
Thought henigh taro und mebef al ling
Buth ebidsme goth rought hevo ice ofwo e
Hisvo ice tome iscal ling.
An dhew alkswi thme an dhet alkswi thme
An dhet ell smei amh is own
An dthe jo ywes hare aswet arryth ere
No neo ther hase verk nown.
Just click the link.
It may not be useful to you, but Prezi is worth at least two minutes of your time. (via @thinksmith)
I thought dogs didn’t see color
On the way to the train, I passed a man with a pitbull puppy, spinning loops under its leash, tail wagging, ecstatic to be outside on a beautiful spring day. An older lady walked up to the pair and smiled down at the dog. The puppy looked up, wagged even more frantically, and let out a small yet throaty bark.
The woman drew herself up, and said in a thick Caribbean accent, “I didn’t hear you bark at that white woman, bitch, so you best cut that out!”
Say I Am (Tommy James and the Shondells)
via @_JesusChrist: Let the scriptures be fulfilled. It is as the prophets wrote. I am who you say I am.
Religulous
A rather odd review of the film which turns into a scathing critique of the New Atheism:
This Easter, as an atheistic editor rather than God-fearin’ altar boy, I’ve had to endure something even more bottom-numbingly dull, hectoring and pious than those Stations, and without even the promise of redemption that is contained in the phantom ‘Fifteenth Station of the Cross’ (which is very occasionally included in some Catholic churches’ décor: ‘Jesus rises from the dead’): that is, I watched Religulous. In a cinema in Covent Garden. In my free time. Surrounded by people who, I’m convinced, were not really laughing at the jokes (there weren’t any) but rather were audibly guffawing as a way of sending smug signals to one another: ‘I hate religion, too!’
I felt far more preached at by American comedian Bill Maher’s road movie-style atheistic documentary than I did by that priest who made me follow him around the church like a candle-carrying muppet a quarter of a century ago. Religulous – a hilarious mixture of the words ‘religious’ and ‘ridiculous’! – confirms what today’s shrill opponents of religion, variously described as ‘New Atheists’, ‘Darwin’s pitbulls’ or ‘Dawkinites’, really hate about religion: its humancentricity. Never mind its authoritarianism or obscurantism, it is its treatment of man as special – as more than a biological being; as capable of rapture; as having, in the words of Genesis, ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and every other living thing that moves on the Earth’ – that really gets their goat.
Chocolate Jesus
How to block the Diggbar
Gruber did a nifty guide on blocking the Diggbar. Here is Gruber’s take on why you should care about this:
…[U]nlike normal URL shortening services, when you load these Digg URLs, rather than redirect you to the original URL, Digg loads a page which frames the content of the original site. As a user, what you see is that the URL in your browser’s location field remains digg.com/1234, and the content of the destination site loads underneath a Digg-branded toolbar.
This, of course, is total bullshit.
All sorts of sites tried this sort of trickery back in the mid-’90s when Netscape Navigator 2.0 added support for the tag. It did not take long for a broad consensus to develop that framing someone else’s site was wrong. URLs are the building block of the Web. They tell the user where they are. They give you something to bookmark to go back or to share with others.
Also, Andy Baio noticed the article has over 600 Diggs and is still climbing.
best headline of the day, so far
Evidence shows wearing UGG boots can cause long-term pain
Objectified
Jason has some notes from last night’s screening of Gary Hustwit’s design documentary Objectified. It’s moments like this I wish I lived in New York.
Dan Formosa of Smart Design, echoing Walker’s marketing idea, said that some designers in the future will shift from designing new products and start to design experiences for people to make better decisions about the objects they introduce into their lives or to better utilize the products they already have. The sales and support process at many many product companies are ripe for a designer’s guiding hand. It’s mind-boggling to me that companies spend billions and billions of dollars designing and building products and then leave the selling of those products to sales people who are largely untrained and unmotivated and the support to a call center in Bangalore. Zappos, Apple, Amazon, and similar companies have realized this with spectacular results.
The Long Good Friday
Could this become a holiday tradition?
your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries
There is no reason to say that I’m the illegitimate grandson of an alligator.
tweet the passion
In a marriage of Christian tradition and digital technology, Wall Street’s Trinity Church is using the micro-blogging service Twitter to perform the story of Jesus Christ.
The main characters will tweet the Passion play for three hours beginning at noon on Good Friday. The feed also can be delivered to mobile devices or e-mail addresses.
North Texas Is Burning
I saved Derek Jacobi’s life.
Have you ever saved anyone’s life? Or at least saved them from serious injury or worse?
It was in the mid 1980s. I live in a city full of antique shops and loved to browse them on a weekend. I was entering my favourite one, more of an antique market really with large glass doors. I was close to these doors as I saw Derek Jacobi enter. The doors had been swung open by the previous person but as he walked in he was looking back and the door was closing quickly towards him. I reached out and stopped the door as it was about to hit him in the face.
I saved Derek Jacobi’s life, perhaps his career, certainly his looks. So, when you browse the endless list of wonderful parts he has played since about 1985 – I made all that possible – I saved a national treasure.
I want no praise, just your stories. So, on this Easter weekend when our heads are full of death, crosses, chocolate, rabbits and perhaps Jesus, tell us who you saved, for better or worse!
Charles Dickens: Our Mutual Friend (for Cooper Renner)
Silas Wegg negotiates the price of his services (reading aloud) with Noddy Boffin.
‘Half a crown,’ said Wegg, meditating. ‘Yes. (It ain’t much, sir.) Half a crown.’
‘Per week, you know.’
‘Per week. Yes. As to the amount of strain upon the intellect now. Was you thinking at all of poetry?’ Mr Wegg inquired, musing.
‘Would it come dearer?’ Mr Boffin asked.
‘It would come dearer,’ Mr Wegg returned. ‘For when a person comes to grind off poetry night after night, it is but right he should expect to be paid for its weakening effect on his mind.’
Folk Typography
Via dj denim’s Flickr photostream.
The Flickr Folk Typography group collects “outsider typography.”
Surprising, original letterforms created by people who are not designers, typographers, calligraphers, or graffiti artists– in other words, people outside of all traditional schools of typographic influence.
Charles Dickens: Our Mutual Friend
“For I ain’t, you must know,” said Betty, “much of a hand at reading writing-hand, though I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.”
(p. 192, Modern Library, 2002)
Mise en abyme
The Droste effect in porn (NSFW).
United States of Neuroses
Check out the other personality traits by geography. (Via Marginal Revolution)
The Ultimate Con-Job: Sold into Slavery in Dubai
An incredible article over at the Independent. It’s quite long, but investigative journalism at its best. Dubai has lured a bunch of people from all over Asia to work there as construction workers. Only, they are basically working there as slaves. The construction workers’ passports are seized by their companies and they make about 25% of what was promised to them.
Another incredible fact is that you cannot go bankrupt in Dubai. If you don’t pay your debts, you go to jail. Something that a lot of expats are learning. (via siege)
