July 2010
69 posts
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'Super Sad' And Satiric, Two Stories Of Doomed... →
What can I say — the hype worked on me. I really want this book.
(from NPR.com)
“The surprising and brilliant third novel from Russian-American satirist Shteyngart is actually two love stories — and while they’re both, as promised, super sad, they’re also incredibly (but very darkly) funny. The first love story chronicles the affair between Lenny Abramov, a shlubby...
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“When I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.”
– Barney (How I Met Your Mother 2x01)
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“Long-distance is a lie teenagers tell each other to get laid the summer before...”
– Ted (How I Met Your Mother 1x16)
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Return of the ellipses.
TG: i like how you type your ellipses like a chinese person
SL: i have no idea what that means
TG: oh
TG: you know how the punctuation on a chinese keyboard is kind of different looking
TG: idk how to describe it but my ellipses are ...
TG: as opposed to the ones with the spaces
SL: ooh right
SL: you mean my spaces
SL: yeah someone made fun of that the other day
SL: it's because i type .space.space.space
SL: because of MLA
TG: hahahhah
TG: so english major
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Yeah.
DK: long ass story that i'll probably have to tell you tomorrow because i'm so tired right now
DK: but the first part was ridiculously stressful
SL: :(
SL: is this a happy ending story or a sad ending story?
DK: there are no such things in life
DK: it's a tired ending story haha
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“Runaway” — The National, on...
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WatchJake & Amir: Taxes
“Yeah, I think I gave a boatload of money to the Amir Blumenfeld Foundation for NOT GIVIN’ A SHIT… . Invented in 1983, by me, when I sort of decided to dedicate my life to NOT GIVIN’ A SHIT.”
This has had me laughing the entire weekend.
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Paradoxes.
SL: I was thinking today if my life deserves this treatment from me
SL: and i came to the conclusion that it doesn't
CH: eh, our lives never deserve the shit we put them through
CH: but it's that shit that ultimately makes them our lives
CH: quite the paradox
SL: so inspirational
CH: what can i say, i'm deep
CH: but i'm only deep because of the times i've been shallow
CH: quite the paradox
SL: . . .
CH: (okay, that one wasn't so great)
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Loyalty.
Whenever my friends are loyal to me, I’m always a little shell-shocked. I’m reminded that friendship actually means something, that it expresses itself in tangible reactions, that it creates a bias — and, unbelievably, that bias is toward … me.
They change the whole fabric of life for you, the people you decide to let into your microcosm. Sometimes this change is subtle,...
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The 25 Best Opening Lines in Western Literature →
fwriction:
Brought to my attention by friend and writer I Eat My Pigeon.
My favorite from this list? Here:
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” -Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
My personal favorite of these:
“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.” (Notes from the Underground)
Oh, Dostoevsky. Man after my own...
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“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border...”
– Milan Kundera (in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
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The fine art of recommending books →
(from Salon.com)
“So many books, so little time, as coffee mugs are always telling us, so how do you decide what to read next? Most people rely on word of mouth from trusted friends. The seldom-acknowledged advantage to this method is that you can chew your friend out if she steers you wrong, whereas your recourse with regard to the New York Times Book Review is a lot less...
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“Right in the middle of Prague, Wenceslaus Square, there’s this guy...”
– Milan Kundera (in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
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Conversations with middle-aged Bulgarian men.
SL: Do you agree that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else?
KT: Yes.
SL: Why?
KT: It's the cheapest way. You don't put any feelings. You're happy.
SL: Wait. Why?
KT: He has to be just a functional male, more beautiful than a monkey. Just a distraction. If he's a handsome guy, you'll have a problem. You'll have two men to get over.
AT: Ew! I don't want to sleep with ugly men! That's gross!
KT: Not gross. Everyone's fuckable.
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“DiCaprio’s only 35, but he’s become a vastly different actor in his...”
– Andrew O’Hehir (for Salon.com’s bashing of “Inception”)
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“‘It seems to me,’ said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer...”
– Zadie Smith (in White Teeth)
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Friday night.
Cooking dinner and crying to early Ben Folds.
Hell. Yeah.
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“I Have Loved You Wrong” — The...
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“I’m not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the...”
– John Green (in Paper Towns) (via fuckyeahliteraryquotes)
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On Language, The Web Is At War With Itself →
(from NPR)
“The Internet is hacking into our language. More and more, we hear onlinese words and phrases in day-to-day conversation — epic fail, full of win, newbs.”
More and more hilarious.
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Worst joke ever.
Q: What is the saddest animal?
A: A bat with diarrhea.
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Intentions vs. reality.
My intention was to read 15 books during the last two months of summer. So far, I have gotten halfway through one book. And I have somehow acquired four more.
Ugh. The sad, sad story of my life.
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“And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like...”
– Mark Haddon (in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) (via fuckyeahliteraryquotes)
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“Love, love is like a stubborn youth.”
– La Roux (“I’m Not Your Toy”)
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My English nerd is showing.
JL: lol why are your spaces so space-y
SL: oh my dot dot dots
SL: because it's .space.space.space
SL: . . .
SL: that's how the MLA does it!
JL: ...
JL: you're kidding
SL: . . .
SL: WHAT
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“Reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost.”
– Flannery O’Connor (in Mystery and Manners)
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“Broken Horse” — Freelance...
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Oh boy.
So you did something you shouldn’t’ve but couldn’t’ve helped. So now what?
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“Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism,...”
– Zadie Smith (in White Teeth)
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“I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as...”
– Joyce Carol Oates (in I Am No One You Know: Stories) (via fuckyeahliteraryquotes)
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“We need neither neurology nor philosophy to tell us that human beings are hardly...”
– Ellen Spolsky (in “Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory As a Species of Post-Structuralism,” Poetics Today 23.1 (2002).)
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The Cruelest Study: Why Breakups Hurt →
(from Time)
“As any reader of mass-market romance novels could probably tell you, the brain areas associated with the pain of romantic rejection were the same ones involved in reward, motivation, physical pain, craving and addiction. (For instance, looking at photos of exes lit up regions that are activated in cocaine addicts’ brains — which may help explain quite a lot of the...
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Human condition →
(on Wikipedia)
“The human condition encompasses the experiences of being human in a social, cultural, and personal context.”
This phrase is ridiculous. It actually means everything and nothing at the same time: too vague and broad of a definition to actually represent anything, precisely because it’s meant to involve everything.
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Beware of Blurbs →
(from Salon.com)
“The conventions and excesses of blurbology do invite mockery… . Like anything that people would rather not do, blurb-writing usually isn’t done very well. So why is it done at all? Because you, dear reading public, persist in giving credence to it. Please stop.”
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Can 'Neuro Lit Crit' Save the Humanities? →
(from The New York Times)
“Does this research — ‘neuro lit’ is one of its nicknames — energize literature departments, and, more broadly, generate excitement for the humanities? Is it yet another passing fad in liberal arts education? If the answer is both, why does theory matter, even if we sometimes don’t understand what the scholars are saying.”
= my research for...
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Top Writers Star in World's Strangest Book Trailer →
(from The Atlantic)
“‘Gary has managed to escape the anxiety of influence by the sheer fact that he has never read a word…I really admire that state of pure, pure ignorance,’ deadpans best-selling Pulitzer-prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides. He’s speaking, of course, of novelist Gary Shteyngart, whose new novel Super Sad True Love Story has given birth to the strangest...
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The UK Effect.
DK: watching the game last night = epic fail
SL: haha what happened?
DK: somewhere somehow
DK: i ended up getting shitfaced, again
SL: LOL whaaat
DK: im locking myself up in my room tonight
DK: what the hell
DK: its just too easy to grab a pint .. and another .. and another
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Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters →
Why is this headline so impossibly good? Why didn’t I hear about it until now?
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Ch-ch-changes.
So many differences every day. Said goodbye, possibly forever, to a friend I’ve had since middle school. Then said goodbye to my family, which is an occurrence I find strange only because it happens so often. Now in a familiar-yet-foreign city on the brink of academic discovery, or maybe not.
It’s not just that I’m leaving — it’s that everyone’s leaving, and we...
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“‘For fuck’s sake, what more do you want?’
‘Oh...”
– Zadie Smith (in White Teeth) 