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If you loved me, I mean really loved me, you’d buy me the velociraptor enclosure from Jurassic Park.


An oral history of Gawker, by Reddit.


Where is the oral history of Dune I want? This has only whetted my appetite!


I know there’s some kind of backlash against oral histories because they’re just interviews where you don’t have to do any other work, but I love them.


We have decided to stop paying our freelancers so we can send that money to the Queen. I haven’t checked with Mallory yet, tho, so, um, don’t start FedExing corgis until I report back.


Quietly crumples draft of novel, just reads The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie again (do that!):

There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character. I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photographs. You know the style: “My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable. My father, however, is in his element, irrepressible as ever, and has on his head that grey velvet trilby from Prague I remember so well from my childhood.” The unpractised novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile: it is getting these people out of the aspic of arrest and mobilised in a scene that is hard.


I am biased because I LOVE Ben Jonson, but you can read all his stuff for free online now, and you should do it!


Here is a Middlemarch contest with a PRIZE.


Elon Green and Buzz Bissinger in the newest Annotation Tuesday:

Did you ever interview Callaway? It’s not clear.

I did interview Callaway. I constantly see in stories in such august publications as theNew Yorker where the writer says “…told me.” I assume it is put in there so the reader knows where the information is coming from. But there is also a certain amount of chest bleating — you’re a journalist for fuck sakes, people are supposed to “tell” you things — and it completely fucks up narrative. It is also why I try to use as few direct quotes as possible in narrative pieces. Nonfiction writers fall in love with their quotes: Most quotes are really not that good, hardly showstoppers. They are terribly utilized. As a young reporter I, like everyone else, came back to the newsroom to tell my editor I got some great quotes. Until I realized the quotes weren’t great but (for) the information contained within them.


YES, Boyd Crowder! Best husband or boyfriend in a show full of shitty ones.


Let’s be enemies! (def. read this)


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