Grateful to have received a copy of this beautiful 928-page collection, out for readers everywhere November 6.
William T. Vollmann on WWI — A fantastic and original new historical/personal essay in Smithsonian.
“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
Hadn’t seen this Camus quote before. (It appropriately closed a new profile on Sam Mendes in TNY.)
Saunders on Tweedy — Yes to both.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” — Annie Dillard, " The Writing Life
David Mitchell: “Start With the Map” — Good fiction-writing advice from one who knows.
“This Architect Built A Home Office Out Of A Shipping Container” — CONTEMPORIST — Svelt and elegant.
Jessie Greengrass: “Sight”
I’ve been knocked over by the beauty and control of Jessie Greengrass’s short debut novel, Sight, about becoming a parent and losing one. (I’d seen coverage in The Atlantic and The New Yorker.) I was impressed and absorbed by the very first page:
The start of another summer, the weather uncertain but no longer sharply edged, and I am pregnant again. In front of me is all the ordinary and useful disarrangement of my desk and beyond it the rain-smudged window with a view across our garden to where my daughter plays, watched over by Johannes. She has begun to lose, lately, the tumbling immediacy of toddlerhood. I notice it when we walk together, our strides separate, or when we sit face to face across a table—how she is taller now and straighter, and inflects her actions with intent. Once her thoughts broke like weather across her face, but that readable plasticity is gone and she is not so transparent: complexity has brought concealment. The weight of her body when I lift her takes me by surprise, its unfamiliarity a reiteration of the distance between us. She used to clamber over me, her legs, around my waist, her arms around my neck, as though I were furniture or an extension of herself, unthought-of or intimately known. Now she stands apart and I must reach for her, on each occasion a little further until it seems her progress towards adulthood is a kind of disappearing and that I know her less and less the more that she becomes herself. This is how things out to be, her going away while I remain, but still I think that if I could then I might reach across to where she stands, outlined against the violent yellow mass of a forsythia bush, and pull her back to me, to keep her always in my sight so that she might be nothing more than the sum of what I know of her.
Every 20 pages or so after that, reading at night in bed, I would tell my wife, This book is incredible — I’m stunned.
Don’t miss it.
“Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change”
Nathanial Rich’s whole-issue article in the NYT Magazine. I read it in one punch-in-the-gut gulp on a car trip unusually free of kids and other responsibilities. Can’t recommend it more highly.
Actor André Holland on “Freh Air” — Wonderful. Need to rewatch Moonlight.
“20th-Century Women” — Really enjoyed this original, sensitively made movie. Poignant, yet fun and funny.
“Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change” — Nathanial Rich’s whole-issue article in the NYT Magazine. Can’t recommend it more highly.
Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy, by Ben Sonnenberg — Just re-read this oddly satisfying, culture-steeped, self-scathing memoir. The book had long been a favorite of mine. Nice to fall back into its pages.
Swisher on Zuckerberg — Sharply drawn, from a place of knowing.
“An Account of My Hut” — Memorable and personal climate change essay by Christina Nichol, published in n+1.
The Ringer’s “100 Best TV Episodes of the Century” — Great stuff, slickly presented. Delighted to see the “Party Down” Guttenberg episode make the cut.
“Academics explain David Foster Wallace to me” — Not surprised to see online pal Matt Bucher make an appearance here.
“To White Noise” — Exquisite parenthood poem by Carrie Fountain.
At the recent 2018 American Marketing Association Nonprofit Conference, each speaker (myself included) had the benefit of the team from Williams Whittle live-illustrating the key points. Here’s the resulting board from my presentation on the Forest Park Forever rebranding project.
At least once a week, Day One reminds me of an ‘On This Day’ journal entry from a past year. Sometimes poignant, sometimes frustrating, sometimes (as with kid quotes) smile-producing. Glad it’s part of my life.