Aspen Anomie

Letters of Note: 1984 v. Brave New World

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:49:16 -0400

Letters of Note: 1984 v. Brave New World:

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war — in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

nevver: Taylor Mead

Thu, 09 May 2013 16:05:27 -0400

nevver:

Taylor Mead

bostonreview: David Foster Wallace’s famous graduation speech...

Wed, 08 May 2013 18:18:05 -0400

bostonreview:

David Foster Wallace’s famous graduation speech to Kenyon College has been turned into a great short video.

youmightfindyourself: Brautigan fastidiously controlled each...

Thu, 02 May 2013 10:39:24 -0400

youmightfindyourself:

Brautigan fastidiously controlled each novel’s jacket, typography, layout, and even promotional materials. Such powers, rarely bestowed on any author, resulted in the Brautigan brand, arguably more famous than anything in the books themselves. The cover photo for Trout Fishing in America is exemplary: in front of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco’s Washington Square Park, Brautigan appears like a Gold Rush prospector, his girlfriend at his side in style. For his friend Keith Abbott, the photo displays “His open, cheerful, confident expression … characteristic of his belief in his prospects, while his blue work shirt displays the uniform of artistic poverty”. The increasingly beautiful girlfriends, who always joined the author on his covers, were integral to his mystique. (via)

Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America

bostonreview: Happy May Day! (via Beth Schwartzapfel)

Wed, 01 May 2013 17:15:38 -0400

bostonreview:

Happy May Day! (via Beth Schwartzapfel)

"There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:53:32 -0400

““There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.””

- Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (via goldiejefferson)

theparisreview: Nigel Van Wieck

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:19:02 -0400

theparisreview:

Nigel Van Wieck

nevver: Robert Weingarten

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 16:26:52 -0400

nevver:

Robert Weingarten

"News of the world. Formalistic experimentation and an ineluctable sense of the human. I love to be..."

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:26:50 -0400

“News of the world. Formalistic experimentation and an ineluctable sense of the human. I love to be brought to wonder when I read, to be shaken, to be reminded of what it means to be a person. But most of all I want to leave my skull and be in communion, intimately, briefly with another living mind. Something we don’t often do outside of art and love.”

- BR Fiction Editor Junot Díaz answers the question “What, in your opinion, makes for a powerful piece of writing?” in his interview with Pubslush. (via bostonreview)

theparisreview: So white was the morning, soObviously of a good...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:26:19 -0400

theparisreview:

So white was the morning, so
Obviously of a good fabric, so pale
And useless, that I asked you, what
Have they hidden behind it.

—Steffen Mensching, “So white was the morning”
Photography Credit Dominik Smialowski, “The Pilot’s Melancholy.”

Video

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:04:06 -0500

The Perils of Perfection

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:44:13 -0500

The Perils of Perfection:

The dominant ideology of Silicon Valley today is: what could be disrupted should be disrupted — even death.

"The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of..."

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:48:47 -0500

“The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past, which can be projected into the future as realistic images”

- Kenneth Boulding

First Listen: Josh Ritter, 'The Beast In Its Tracks'

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 22:45:42 -0500

First Listen: Josh Ritter, 'The Beast In Its Tracks':

Gone so long, came back to share this with you, anyone who is still listening/reading. This album is more than worth your time.

abelson: #972: wilco - new madrid (irving plaza, 1997, hbo...

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 09:30:15 -0400

abelson:

#972: wilco - new madrid (irving plaza, 1997, hbo reverb)

history’s most moving country song about charlatan geology, with a bonus point for lines about new york sung in the city itself, a second for full footage of the irving plaza concert online, a third for getting a nice long look at the late great jay bennett, and, after that, a bonus bonus point for jeff tweedy’s mid-90s shirt on top of a mid-90s shirt.

the past is a foreign country, people wear ill-fitting clothes there.

Photo

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 21:31:07 -0400

Podcast: D. T. Max on David Foster Wallace

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 16:11:18 -0400

Podcast: D. T. Max on David Foster Wallace:

newyorker:

This week, D. T. Max has been writing on Page-Turner about documents and artifacts he drew on for “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,” his recently published biography of David Foster Wallace. Here Max talks with Sasha Weiss about the challenges of writing about Wallace, and how Wallace, who once described himself as “an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding” might feel about his biography. Listen now: http://nyr.kr/Ph747o

"I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a..."

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 15:07:32 -0400

“I live on Earth at present,
and I don’t know what I am.
I know that I am not a category.
I am not a thing—a noun.
I seem to be a verb,
an evolutionary process—
an integral function of the universe.”

- R. Buckminster Fuller (via nevver)

newyorker: At the end of 1989, David Foster Wallace was...

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:00:31 -0400

newyorker:

At the end of 1989, David Foster Wallace was admitted to McLean Hospital, the psychiatric hospital associated with Harvard University, for substance addiction. He was twenty-seven years old and increasingly desperate for help. He had already experienced literary fame with his college novel, “The Broom of the System,” and sunk into obscurity with his postmodern short-story cabinet of wonders, “Girl with Curious Hair” (twenty-two hundred copies sold in hardcover). His most recent stop, as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard, had lasted only a few weeks. His private life was hardly less uneven. He had attempted suicide the year before, in his family home, and had also gone from being a marijuana addict to an alcoholic, mostly drinking alone and in front of the television. Most dreadfully, he felt that he could no longer write well. He was unsure whether the problem was lack of focus, lack of material, or a lack of ambition. Granada House was to be the improbable solution to this problem, altering his approach to his work and putting him on the road to producing, in remarkably short order, his masterpiece, “Infinite Jest.”

Click-through to read an excerpt from “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace,” by D.T. Max: http://nyr.kr/Shl6ZD

"Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, that processes of co-ordination and disintegration..."

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 09:48:44 -0400

“Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, that processes of co-ordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the co-ordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved.”

- John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)