It was the first font, and perhaps originally the only font that came with the engraver, so it suffered a nameless fate, familiar later to many bespoke bitmap fonts adorning the screens of early computers.
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
Our “present” does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us.
How far does this bubble extend? It depends on the precision with which we determine time. If by nanoseconds, the present is defined only over a few meters; if by milliseconds, it is defined over thousands of kilometers. As humans, we distinguish tenths of a second only with great difficulty; we can easily consider our entire planet to be like a single bubble where we can speak of the present as if it were an instant shared by us all.
Nickel Boys
I’d Rather Go Blind by Etta James
So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
‘Is there anything you would not give me?’ she had once asked.
‘Nothing,’ he had said, instantly. ‘There is nothing.’
For some reason, she had kept looking at him, and had waited.
‘Well,’ he had said, clearing his throat. ‘Maybe the land. I wouldn’t want to give you the land.’
Oh, Mary!
Have you ever had a great day? The kind of day so great it imbues every single sad or boring or terrible day that came before it with deep meaning because from where you stand on this great day, all those days were secretly leading to this one?
Somebody Somewhere
A good friend recommended this series and it did not disappoint. Raising a teeny ’tini to one of the most sincere and moving shows I’ve watched in a long time.
Smithereens
Slung low, charmingly frantic, seaweed everywhere (in a good way).
Conclave
Balthazar
“22 Hours in Balthazar,” New York Times:
Alvino is flying, his left hand’s fingers imperceptibly rotating the potato between upward strokes of the peeler, blindly flipping the naked spuds over his shoulder into the tub. I pull up my phone’s stopwatch to time him for a minute, treating each potato as a lap: his slowest is 10.7 seconds, his quickest 6.4. Alvino, a shy man from the Dominican Republic, has been doing this same job for 15 years. “Like anything else, it was difficult at first,” he says, but he caught his rhythm after a couple of months. Peralta has been at it for 14 years.
Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing:
My idea of a perfect night is a good play and dinner at Orso.
Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally…:
Restaurants are to people in the eighties what theater was to people in the sixties.
Ephron’s last line here (delivered through two characters) is pitch-perfect irony. You can visit a Parisian brasserie in many cities that are not Paris. Is that theater? No: a play is theater; a french fry is just a potato. But on their best days, restaurants like Balthazar deliver a tiny portion of theater’s magic.
A Complete Unknown
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
A student asked Donald Barthelme how he might become a better writer. Barthelme advised him to read through the whole history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up through the modern-day thinkers. The student wondered how he could possibly do this. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping,” Barthelme said. “Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature.” Also art, he amended. Also politics.
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue
Bar / bear
Q: Hola, quería saber el significado de esta frase que escuche en la película The Big Lebowsky:
Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you.
¿Que quiere decir exactamente bar en ese contexto? Gracias por vuestro interés
A: Creo que quieres decir bear, no bar. Bear significa oso, y el dicho quiere decir que algunos días vences los obstáculos en la vida y otros días te vencen a ti.
Why I don’t miss bluefin sushi
[P]rior to about the 1920s, no self-respecting Japanese person would eat any kind of tuna at all if they could possibly avoid it. Tuna was so despised in Japan that all tuna species qualified for an official term of disparagement: gezakana, or “inferior fish.” In the old days in Japan, if you had no choice but to eat tuna you’d do everything you could to get rid of the bloody metallic taste of the fresh red meat. One trick was to bury the tuna in the ground for four days so that the muscle would actually ferment, which led to tuna being called by the nickname shibi—literally, “four days.”
The Barthelme Syllabus
Kevin Moffett in The Believer:
Then, in my last year of college in Gainesville, Florida, I was given secondhand a list of eighty-one books, the recommendations of Donald Barthelme to his students. Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books “in no particular order, just read them,” which is exactly what I, in my confident illiteracy, resolved to do.
I had heard of this syllabus and was thrilled that someone had preserved it. As Moffett notes, there is something of a theme connecting the books on this list:
If the list’s books are skewed toward Barthelme’s particular obsessions—one of the entries is “Beckett entire”—this is only to its credit. Most are novels. All but two of the books, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Flaubert’s Letters (numbers 15, 40), were written in the twentieth century, most in the past thirty years. And all have that dizzying sense of otherness and surprise common to great books, an affluence of vitality. There’s not a dull read in the group….
I’d refine this further by saying that each book on the list speaks in a voice that is astonishingly original. How appropriate: Barthelme, early in his career, was obsessed with finding a “cool sound” of his own. What better way for aspiring writers to find their own voice than to hone an ear for perfect literary pitch?
This is again echoed in an anecdote from John Barth in Further Fridays:
“How come you write the way you do?” an apprentice writer in my Johns Hopkins workshop once disingenuously asked Donald Barthelme, who was visiting. Without missing a beat, Don replied, “Because Samuel Beckett was already writing the way he does.”
Originality does not guarantee delight, of course, but it usually ensures that the author is paying close attention to how the story is being told. As readers, we can only benefit.
I’ve returned to this list many times over the years, usually when I am in desperate need of something to remind me why I love fiction. Some of these books are continuously in print while others require spelunking in used book stores. Either way, it’s worth the effort.
