Entries from August 2010
Aug. 30, 2010
Experimental Writers vs. Conceptual Writers
Economist David Galenson posits that there are two types of writers: experimenters, a group that includes Dickens, Twain, and Virginia Woolf; and visionaries, such as Melville, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. Experimental innovators are seekers. Their most basic characteristic is persistent uncertainty about their methods and goals: they are typically dissatisfied with their current work, but have [...]
Tags: David Galenson · Malcolm Gladwell
Aug. 23, 2010
Hemingway’s standing desk
I’ve always wanted a desk like Papa’s (photo).
Tags: Ernest Hemingway · Portraits of Writers · standing desks · writing tools
Aug. 23, 2010
“Perfection Wasted” by John Updike
And another regrettable thing about death / is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, / which took a whole life to develop and market — / the quips, the witticisms, the slant / adjusted to a few…
Tags: John Updike · poems
Aug. 22, 2010
Why the novel will survive the disappearance of the book
Media evolution, of course, does claim casualties. But most often, these are means of distribution or storage, especially physical ones that can be transformed into digital bits. Photographic film is supplanted, but people take more pictures than ever. CD’s no longer dominate, as music is more and more distributed online. “Books, magazines and newspapers are [...]
Tags: ebooks · technology
Aug. 20, 2010
Fitzgerald Repackaged
Penguin Classics will publish new editions of six major works by F. Scott Fitzgerald in stunning new designs. Gorgeous. More here. (Via.)
Tags: book design · F. Scott Fitzgerald
Aug. 16, 2010
Hanging Up
This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It [...]
Tags: technology
Aug. 13, 2010
Rooting for the laundry, 109 A.D.
Even in ancient Rome, according to Pliny the Younger, sports fans were rooting for the laundry.
Tags: Lapham's Quarterly · Pliny the Younger
Aug. 10, 2010
Vita Brevis, Ars Brevior
A good but not great movie from 1965 is a reminder how short-lived most art is.
Tags: featured posts · John le Carre · video · writing life
Aug. 7, 2010
Richard Ford: “make something good”
“I don’t think of characters as people. I think of them as made objects of language. And their only purpose is to be pushed outward toward the reader.… There’s never a time in writing stories at which the characters do what some writers say, which is to take over from me and become the person [...]
Tags: quotes for writers · Richard Ford
Aug. 7, 2010
FontFonter
A very neat tool: FontFonter allows you to see any web site with different fonts substituted for the defaults. Here is how this web site looks with different fonts (very handsome, if I do say so myself). And here is the New York Times refonted. Great tool for web designers, great toy for everyone else. [...]
Tags: Typekit · typography · web design · williamlanday.com
