In 2023, I am launching a new, experimental audio experience called “Monthly Audio Newsletter, Mostly About Nothing.”
Episode 1 on Anne Sexton is now live.
Episode 2 coming soon! Please like and subscribe, etc.
I recently posted this article about Wes Anderson and Bye Bye Braverman over on simpleranger.net
One thing I didn’t mention there is that Braverman includes a scene filmed at the corner of Eastern Parkway and Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. For a while, I lived a block north of there on Bedford. That intersection has changed a lot over the years so it was very cool to see it back in 1968.
You can see the old Town Hill Restaurant in the background.
That Texaco station is long gone.
I also wrote about David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and the character of Toni Ware over on Medium. The Pale King’s Trailer Park Queen.
This has been an interesting year in reading for me. I read a lot of books, about 65. I didn’t track them all, but I reviewed 25 books for Publishers Weekly, read 6 books in manuscript form, Â 3 books for the Texas Book Festival panel I moderated in October, 6 books for our book club at work, and I got about 10 other books for free (review copies). I checked out 140 books at the library so far this year, but many of those were children’s books or books which I read only a portion of. Â Several of the books I reviewed will not be published until 2015 and many of the books I read for personal pleasure were published in years past. I’m not counting those for this list, but if I did, the blue-ribbon would go to Reif Larsen’s I am Radar. I’ll save that one for 2015. Here are some of the best things I read this year, published in 2014.
1. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
This was probably my most-anticipated book of the year. And I found it fairly disappointing. The first three fifths of the novel were excellent and Mitchell had me in thrall, gliding along on the expectation of a tight conclusion. But I could not find the urge to care enough about the science fiction angle of a supernatural battle. The first section, about Holly Sykes, sort of goes off the rails when Holly discovers a brutal murder caused by some sort of spirit or apparition. But I stuck with it for the next section, which is centered around Hugo Lamb. The story of his pursuit of Holly in a Swiss ski resort is expertly told, Mitchell at his best.
2. 10:04 by Ben Lerner
This, along with the Mitchell novel, was at the top of my list for 2014 novels. I adored Lerner’s first novel and had high hopes for his Atocha-Station-set-in-NY and there are parts of this book that are fantastic, but overall, I didn’t feel that the book had the narrative coherence Lerner was able to establish in Atocha Station.
3. My Struggle, volume 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard
4. Women by Chloe Caldwell
5. Sister Golden Hair by Darcey Steinke
6. Fancy by Jeremy Davies
7. The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley.
Honorable Mentions: The David Foster Wallace Reader, Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis
Over at The Howling Fantods, Greg Carlisle and I were interviewed by Nick Maniatis about the history of Greg’s books Elegant Complexity and Nature’s Nightmare.
Part 1:Â http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/critical-analysis/natures-nightmare-interview-part-1.html
Part 2:Â http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/critical-analysis/natures-nightmare-interview-part-2.html
Part 3:Â http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/critical-analysis/natures-nightmare-interview-part-3.html
Over at the Austin Chronicle, I reviewed this zine from Monofonus Press. It’s a companion piece to Gertrude Stein’s classic Tender Buttons, which turns 100 years old this year.
I’ve also started writing some reviews for Publishers Weekly, but I’m not supposed to reveal which ones I wrote.
I just published an essay on Google Sightseeing about the state of art projects using images from Google Street View. The essay was a long time in the making and I hope to move on now and post more location-specific stuff about Street View.
http://googlesightseeing.com/2013/11/the-past-present-and-future-of-street-view-art/
1) My essay on the “Year of David Foster Wallace” originally published in Fiction Advocate has been translated into Spanish by Maria Serrano and published online under the new title “DFW, DT, y Yo.”
2) The Found Poetry Review recently published an issue dedicated to works from David Foster Wallace and I had a small contribution titled “David Foster Wallace Titles Roughly Translated into Other Languages (and Roughly Translated Back Into English).”
Here are a few things I’ve written lately, or places where I’ve been quoted or mentioned online.
Back in June I was quoted in this ABC News article about dad blogs.
I wrote a weird little thing about what Ringo Starr thinks about while he’s drumming. It was on the blog of the Missouri Review.
My most recent piece for Google Sightseeing was about Colima, a volcano in Mexico.
Several places have mentioned my Street View blog, Apres Garde, including this Italian newspaper (TMNews) and anrick.com.
I contributed a short piece on The Pale King to an Italian DFW site for their Pale Winter project. It was kindly translated into Italian by Roberto Natalini and Andrea Firrincieli.
On my Roberto Bolaño site, I wrote an essay about his novel The Third Reich.
A lot has changed in the online world since I got my first email address in 1995. A lot has changed in my own expectations of a creative and successful career. My day job is working as a Project Manager for Pearson Assessment. My main job is being a dad to two little boys, and wooing my wife. All of my creative projects are thus relegated to “side” projects, pretty much all of them online at this point. The metrics for what makes a successful project (or even a good day spent online) are somewhat subjective and personal to me. I don’t go by pageviews or hits (unless they were all astronomical numbers & I had ads – then I would care!), so here are a few things that make me happy online:
– when one of my Metafilter comments or posts gets 100+ favorites
– when Emily Gould “likes” one of my posts on Tumblr
-when one of my Tumblr posts ends up on the Tumblr radar or Staff Blog
– when Hari Kunzru retweeted one of my tweets (though he doesn’t have as many followers as @sarahw or @goldman or @noradio who have also retweeted me). I’ve also had twitter interactions with people I admire like Craig Newmark, Anil Dash, and Rogers Cadenhead.
– any time my name appears on kottke.org
-a pic I post on mlkshk gets 1000+ views or 100+ likes
Maybe this is gauche to admit, maybe it’s not cool to admit you like “favorites” or stars or karma or whatever, but I don’t care. This is me.
I haven’t updated this site for a while because of a bizarre WordPress error, but all seems well now.
I’ve been busy the past six months! I’ve posted a lot of new things at SimpleRanger.net, tons of new images at Apres Garde, and started posting a lot over at mlkshk. I’ve started one mlkshk for Breaking Bad (new favorite show) and one for modern homes. I think I only have one new post up at GoogleSightseeing, but I have a couple more in the works.
I was quoted in this CultureMap series about the DFW archives at the Ransom Center in Austin (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5).
And just a couple of weeks ago, we celebrated Arlo’s first birthday!
