They Wouldn't Give Us Cash For It
We bought a chainsaw this weekend. It was all part of Phase I, which is clearing out our girlfriend’s back yard. You have never seen vines like these; they must be related to the kudzu contagion. We’re sore, but happy. But accomplishment is not restricted to us alone. Nick Hornby is an accomplished writer. Wagner’s accomplishments continue to be schismatic. Success in independent publishing — impressive. Accomplished authors usually have their final works penned by another hand, posthumously. And finally, stupidity is the main requirement for accomplishment in soccer. Now it’s time for us to get back to work, where overdue accomplishments await. P.S. It’s random photo day! – Andrew Geer
– Writer Nick Hornby is gearing up for a busy fall. He wrote the screenplay for the much anticipated film An Education, which will be released next month, and his newest novel, Juliet, Naked, hits bookstores this week. — Nick Hornby on NPR
I Just Felt Like Putting It In Here Today
– There is only one composer who incites as much repulsion as he does reverence, as much adulation as he does suspicion. He is Richard Wagner, the composer of operas so ambitious that he decided the genre was insufficient to accommodate them. Instead he called them music dramas, and their gigantic explorations of Germanic legend were supposed to change the world. — Wagner in The Times Online
– I lied about my age to get my first job. I just couldn’t hold out until I turned 12 to become a paperboy. I doubt the delivery driver I met that first Sunday before dawn cared much for such trivial details either. I was committed, competent, lived nearby, hit puberty early, and had a father who would do my route for me when I was sick – what more could he ask for from an 11-year-old paperboy. — Ari Phillips in The Rumpus
– After author David Foster Wallace committed suicide last September, his longtime agent, Bonnie Nadell, found herself lost in a maze of words. Scattered on two different computers and in hard copies stashed around the cluttered garage where Mr. Foster Wallace had worked in Claremont, Calif., she discovered multiple versions of his final, unfinished novel. She had no idea which draft he preferred. Mr. Wallace’s novel about I.R.S. agents, due out next fall, is being assembled based on the author’s notes. “A great deal of it is a puzzle,” she said of the novel, titled “Pale King.” — Posthumous Ghost Writers in The Wall Street Journal
We've Always Wanted To Post This
– “Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.” Well, football may not spend billions of pounds actively seeking out stupidity, piping, refining and selling it, but as Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski demonstrate over and over again in Why England Lose, it is certainly swimming in the stuff. — Soccer in The Prospect
Video: Soccer’s Classic Red Cards
