Web Urbanist selected the letterhead of seventeen celebrities from a larger catalog at Letterheady. This is Leonard Cohen’s. Make sure you compare it to Richard Simmons’.

(via @gary_hustwit)

Although I don’t mind them, I feel cut off from all the other people in this country — to mention only this country.

— Lydia Davis (@lydia_davis) November 2, 2009

I would need something like a cowboy in order to get away from thinking.

— Lydia Davis (@lydia_davis) November 2, 2009

I AM SIMPLY NOT INTERESTED, AT THIS POINT, IN CREATING NARRATIVE SCENES BETWEEN CHARACTERS.

— Lydia Davis (@lydia_davis) November 2, 2009

To be exhaustive is, of course, an infinite task: more events can always be inserted, more nuance in the narration…

— Lydia Davis (@lydia_davis) November 2, 2009

Fuck bitches. Get money.

— Lydia Davis (@lydia_davis) November 17, 2009

Of course, there are other ways to read Lydia Davis.

What is it like living sparely and simply, something you have mentioned to me, having a simple life as a creative person in all the ways that you do…

I wish I could live even more simply. I guess it all started twenty years ago when I started getting geographically restless. Moving lots of things around gets really boring (not to mention heavy and time-consuming), so I started divesting. About five years later I bought and moved into a travel trailer for the first time and started living in RV parks. One simply can’t pile up a lot of stuff if one has only 200 square feet to live in. And then several years after that I switched to a trailer with less than 100 square feet, so… Having a Nook helps in the book area, and using an iPod helps musically. I’ve long since gotten to the point that things feel like a terrible burden to me, something to care for and worry about. If a university somewhere would give me an office to work out of, then I would almost certainly let books start piling up again, even against my own will, in that office, and still keep my living space light. I tend toward the thought, though I haven’t quite attained the reality of it, that I don’t want to own anything that anybody would want to steal from me.

Cooper, however, mostly talks about his writing with a rather nice hat tip to clusterflock’s creator, Deron Bauman:

Because I didn’t go through the MFA (or any comparable) system, most of my learning about writing has come through reading (mostly older) writers and from contacts with editors (generally writers themselves) who published my poems, notably Gordon Lish and Deron Bauman. I also had long and encouraging correspondences with Donald Hall and Guy Davenport, though we didn’t necessarily discuss my work all that much. We wrote about books, writers, all sorts of things.

I doubt many Christians believe that God is unfairly helping Tebow win games in the AFC West. I’m sure a few hardcores might, but not many. However, I get the impression that especially antagonistic secularists assume this assumption infiltrates every aspect of Tebow’s celebrity, and that explains why he’s so beloved by strangers they cannot relate to. Their negative belief is that penitent, conservative Americans look at Tebow and see a man being “rewarded” for his faith, which validates the idea that believing in something abstract is more important than understanding something real. And this makes them worried about the future, because they see that thinking everywhere. It seems like the thinking that ran this country into the ground.

I don’t think I’ve read such a straight-forward and correct explanation for why I get so nervous in a culture preoccupied more with feeling something than knowing anything. Also, I’m fairly convinced that some of the best writing happening today is on Grantland, the little sports website that could.

I wrote these:

Young Adult
We Need to Talk About Kevin

Other people wrote these:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
New Year’s Eve
The Sitter

The biggest shock to their increasingly delicate systems occurs when they actually see Big Name Writer’s copy emerge from the hands of an editor. How disillusioning to discover that BNW’s article doesn’t arrive in perfect form, that thoughts may be muddy, that insights may be unobserved … and that an editor actually pushes the writer to think, to make the changes, or wades in and makes the changes on his/her own, usually after discussion with said BNW. It is a bruising business, and only the highly articulate need apply. The goal, after all, is to say something worth killing a tree for.

Review your hardware-store shopping list. Arrange the items in two categories: things that must be fixed before they break something else, and parts for projects you will never start. Stop choosing tools based on whether you think they will outlast your span of years. Do not synthesize memories and likely scenarios as you did last time.

Pet the dog’s head. It’s such a small thing for you to do but means so much to him. Look at his cow eyes. He is able to see into your soul—or rather, he would if you had one. Say a few kind words to him. Something with the nice rising pitch at the end. It will make him so very happy, costs you nothing, and is a reasonable replacement for that absent soul.

Gaze into the bathroom mirror. Use a finger to etch your name on the steamy glass. Write at least ten other names: people you have not yet met, places you may visit someday. Shave your whiskers. Do it again to save time tomorrow. Part your hair the opposite way, so that you view yourself as others do. Use clippers to take it all down to the scalp. Now you can be anyone.

Make some decisions, the kind that move your life forward. How can you know if it is in a positive direction? Staying in one place is the same as losing ground. If you stay here you will die. This won’t happen suddenly; it takes about thirty years or so.

Go to bed. Lie there in suspension beneath the sheets. Space exists between you and the Egyptian cotton above, yet you leave no imprint below. Arise after six sleepless hours and reenter your waking dream. Walk away from the bed. It is as if you were never there.

I’m making a lot of notes next to your names in my spreadsheet.

And so. This is how the uprising began. How in the towns of that country under the cobalt vault of the sky impassive and immutable the villagers took to arms under the banner of the halfeaten taco. What was to come was not man’s doing but of some celestial machinery. Who are we to ask why? For once the taco was eaten it could not be uneaten nor could the tragedy looming be diverted or waylaid.

Excerpt from “Taco Bell, 2nd Review”, Yelping with Cormac

(via Coudal)