I took my watch out of my pocket and held it in my hand like a pair of dice.  

+ +

     "What am I going to do with these pennies?" he said to the cashier. "Do you know what an inconvenience it is to have all these pennies in your pocket?"

+ +

        "Rrrrrrr!" Samson growled, as if he had been cornered by a big dog. 

+ +

     It was getting late and we hadn't eaten anything all day. By the time we reached the campus, I was limping and pinching my side in order to suppress a hunger cramp. 

 + +

    Ferdinand continued talking about unrelated subjects.

New York gossip website Gawker was launched in 2002 by an internet entrepreneur and a naïf new to the city—Professor Henry Higgins and his Eliza Doolittle. Founder Nick Denton, a former Financial Times reporter, had helped start the early social networking site First Tuesday, which arranged for web and media entrepreneurs to go for drinks together. Elizabeth Spiers, the 25-year-old writer he hired, was a recent New York arrival who had kept a blog about her life in finance. It's hard to believe that at first Gawker, which we now know for "knowing everything" about local media and celebrity culture, didn't even know what to read. But in her very first posts (from March 2002), Spiers writes blurbs to herself about what she's read or should be reading. Read More

Where I live I try to read. I have time, and there's a library here, so I go and I look at the books on the shelves. Many of them I've heard of and many of them I would want to read, but I don't seem to have much interest. I've read books before, and I'm usually glad when I do, so I start browsing the shelves. Do I want to entertain myself or do I want to improve myself? Those seem to be the possibilities, and for me, there's enough entertainment already, enough stories in the world, so I try to find the self-help section. Unfortunately there is no self-help section in this library, so I pull out a book, almost at random. It's a book by Spalding Gray. I've heard of him, and I sit in a red chair, and the parts I read were about a narrator who went from a zen dojo to a porno theater, and his responses to the situation, and his responses to himself in the situation, seemed recognizable. I liked the fact that someone was brave enough and sane enough to venture out into the world and see what happens.

Directed and produced by relative newcomer Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema is above all a vehicle for the ideas of its oddly charismatic presenter, Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian intellectual billed in this film's opening credits as "philosopher and psychoanalyst," who has risen to prominence for his deft fusions of popular culture and Lacanian theory. Touching here on a number of his favored directors including Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Andrei Tarkovsky, Zizek moves through an idiosyncratic cross-section of film history in three parts: focusing on the unconscious, the libido, and the realm of appearances, respectively.

Whatever happened to the war on terror? As recently as the 2004 election, it was considered political disaster for a candidate to question its premises. Now, attacking the war on terror and "the politics of fear" has become a liberal cause. Zbigniew Brzezinski, sage of liberal diplomacy, tells us in the Washington Post that "The ‘war on terror' has created a culture of fear in America." Barack Obama calls for "a politics of hope instead of a politics of fear." John Edwards has become the only front-running Democratic presidential candidate explicitly to call for an end to the war on terror. He has leveled the now commonplace charge that the war on terror is just a "political frame and political rhetoric," which the President and his people use "to justify everything they do." Read More

 

In the early eighties, Lish published Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison. Schutt was part of a later cohort whom he found in the early nineties. This later group included Gary Lutz, Schutt, Lily Tuck, and Diane Williams. Like his earlier writers, most of them have been associated with the idea of literary minimalism. Lutz and Williams present among the most extreme examples of what Lish seems to have emphasized in his famous writing classes: a compulsive focus on language (the idea that each time a word is used, anywhere, by anyone, it becomes slightly diminished) and straightforward confessionalism (Lish is said to have started workshops by asking his students to tell him a secret). The result was a lot of exceptional writing that often seems to have a wounded quality, as though the writer felt forced to return to the same hurts and same sentences constantly and dig what was already there even deeper. Read More

I've just arrived in Berlin to begin a year-long research fellowship at a well-known Institute for Philosophy. All the really smart philosophers left here in the 1930s, but Berlin retains an unmistakable luster. Come here as a philosopher, and you are assumed to be thinking some very profound thoughts. 

Day 1

n+1: Steve! Game-time.

Steven: Let's go!

n+1: Steven Ovadia, thanks for coming on the internet with us today. What happened during the off-season?

Steven: With the new CBA [collective bargaining agreement], teams can't afford to hang on to their best players—because paying them what they deserve will put those teams over the cap—so we saw a lot of movement.

Chris Drury and Scott Gomez, two of the best players in the Eastern Conference, going to the Rangers was probably the biggest splash. Interestingly, since the Rangers weren't weighed down with huge superstars and their contracts the way they used to be, they actually had the money to make a run at Gomez and Drury. Read More

As hockey fans emerge from the long slumber of summer into the new NHL season (exciting! fast-paced! shootouts!), they will find that much has changed. There are new, tighter-fitting uniforms that supposedly make it harder for opponents to pull your jersey over your head when you're fighting. The Canadian dollar, for the first time ever, overcame its American counterpart. And the second post-lockout off-season was unprecedented in its activity. Buffalo and New Jersey now lie in ruins; the New York Rangers are being picked to win the East; and everyone but everyone is mad at Edmonton.

The pathos of the NHL off-season is second to none. Baseball players switch teams as often, but baseball is played in warm, relatively pleasant places—Baltimore, San Diego, Seattle. There are two teams in sunny Los Angeles and two in the lovely Bay Area. Whereas here are some places a hockey player might wind up: Ottawa, Buffalo, Edmonton. To make matters worse, these depressing destinations often lie at the end of a long, long road. Because hockey players mature early, and because the places where hockey is played are sparsely settled, the young aspirant makes a fateful choice at the tender age of, usually, 14: if he wants to keep improving his game, he must leave his home and his family and travel to a small city in Canada or the northern US to play in the so-called junior leagues. There he will live with a host family, eat dinner with them, go to school, and, of course, dream of being drafted by the NHL. Read More

Rock and roll is a music of mechanized sexuality. That's why ninety percent of it sounds like clocks fucking.

What does rock and roll mean? For the purposes of this little disquisition, it does not mean "white people with messy haircuts." It means the tyranny of the backbeat: Boom, bat, boom, bat, boom, bat. It means all things boom and bat. It means: Why is it so much easier to goose-step to supposed anthems of freedom like AC/DC's "Jailbreak" than to the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde? It means: How did the drum become the drum machine? Read More