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Congrats to our acquaintance Sherman Alexie for winning this year’s PEN/Faulkner award for fiction.
The Wash. state legislature’s in session, trying to somehow resolve the perfect storm of fiscal bad news. With fewer beat reporters covering state politics in Olympia (KIRO-TV’s “South Sound bureau” mostly covers crime-and-mayhem stories from that subregion), two online resources have emerged.
Let’s give a warm MISCmedia welcome to the independent nonprofit Olympia Newswire, and to the state-owned cable channel TVW’s cutely named blog, The Capitol Record.
The Elements of Style, that ubiquitous writing guidebook, turned 50 last year. I didn’t notice. But linguistics prof Geoffrey Pullum did notice. He took the opportunity to rant against “Fifty Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.”
My ol’ pal and sometime colleague Doug Nufer looks back at a decade in which he got four books out somehow amid an ever more confused book industry and an ever more precarious alternative-literature subsegment within that industry. He offers no solutions, but I will:
From that addicted-to-verbiage NYTimes, here’s graphic designer Phillip Niemeyer with a handy chart illustrating and categorizing the past 10 years in logos and buzzwords.
As self-help author Eckhart Tolle proclaims the beneficial Power of Now, essayist Pico Iyer grumbles about “the tyranny of the moment .”
The NYTimes has a handy list of the top buzzwords of 2009. You know, and probably look forward to forgetting, many of them (“birther,” “tea party,” “cash for clunkers,” “sexting,” “public option”). Now if we can only get rid of “jobless recovery.”
(via Rosa Blasi at HuffingtonPost):
Show me any man who has sick amounts of money and power, and I will show you a man playing musical vaginas.
Blogger Jim Linderman cites our longtime fave Sherman Alexie on a big failing of e-reader machines’ “content”: its lack of textual permanence. Then Linderman adds an aside of his own: If KIndles had been around 50 years ago, would we ever remember that the Hardy Boys didn’t use to be rock musicians?
As a wickedly haunting holiday offering, the New Yorker offers a fictional remembrance of childhood wonder, excerpted from David Foster Wallace’s posthumous last novel.
The NYTimes opinion section’s former token far-rightie and well-regarded grammar snoot had previously written some of Nixon and Agnew’s most infamous lines, in a speechwriting staff that also included MSNBC’s token wingnut Pat Buchanan. But by modern standards, he was an example of that rapidly dwindling species, a sane Republican who believed in rational persuasion rather than X-treme demagoguery. He’s already missed.
PASSAGE (from Radley Metzger’s 1976 film The Image “I remembered clearly the look Claire had given her. It was the look of one viewing a rerun of a successful film one had directed oneself, whose plot couldn’t possibly have any surprises.”
…a long, scathing anti-Bush essay to the UK paper The Observer. It’s not online (which means the American masses on whose behalf he speaks won’t get to read it). But a short summary of it sez he calls for a big investigation (by whom?) into whether the administration knew about 9/11 in advance and chose to do nothing, because it would further the Bush gang’s anti-freedom domestic agenda. The summary also includes the following quotation:
“We still don’t know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.”
(Of course, it should be noted the “popularly elected President” in Vidal’s quotation is his own distant cousin.)
…to enjoy this short list of “Slightly Less Common Latin Phrases.” “Is that a scroll in your toga, or are you just glad to see me?”
WE’RE NOT REALLY POETRY PEOPLE HERE, but can’t help admire UW prof Richard Kenny’s versified thoughts about the “timorous Congress” acceding to war-fever.
