Last night, I had dinner with pals in Brooklyn and walked in the door at 1:15 a.m. (at least 40 minutes of my lateness was due to a two-car collision in the Lincoln Tunnel and two separate construction zones near the Meadowlands that turned magically turned three lanes of Rt. 3 into one). This morning, I drive down to suburban Philadelphia to deliver a flatscreen TV to the winner of a raffle at my annual conference. Because my publisher doesn’t want it to get damaged in shipping.
So while you read these links, I’ll be cruising along the highway, checking out the foliage, trying to stay awake, and wondering how this ever became part of my job description.
Oh, just click “more”!
Via The Awl, here’s a story the most forbidding place in the world. With mind-blowing photos!
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Will no one think of the penthouses?!
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A new Blowhard writes about Literary Signaling. (That’s why I keep this list of every durned book I’ve finished since 1989: so’s you can see the “highs” and the “lows”. But not the comic books, or the list would go on forever.)
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How exactly do you write a revisionist take on Thucydides and avoid the Melian dialogues and Pericles’ funeral oration? My pal Homayoon didn’t cover the Melian dialogues in his graduate thesis at St. John’s and he still ended up getting into an argument about it during his oral defense.
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My new pad? It’s the bomb! (shelter)
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So that’s what happened to Mr. X!
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I know a lot of people think Andy Warhol’s work was bullshit, but I think he had a neutron-bomb effect on how art (and I don’t just mean “fine” art) is perceived. This piece on the question of authenticating “An Andy Warhol” does a great job of exploring his impact.
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Peter Paul Rubens may have been a good graphic designer, but I’m still mad that Pee-Wee Herman postponed his stage show in LA.
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I haven’t watched these yet, but it’s Philip Roth interviewed by Tina Brown, so bam!