Gil Roth
—2mg051513b
Testing out my new microphone (Blue Encore 200) for a new Two Minutes’ GREAT! mini-podcast. (Also, telling you a little about going to Toronto for TCAF and a friend’s neat gift awaiting me when I got home.)
Back to Buchmendel
He read as others pray, as gamblers follow the spinning of the roulette wheel, as drunkards stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary mortals has seemed a pastime. This Galician second-hand book dealer, Jacob Mendel, was the first to reveal to me in my youth the mystery of absolute concentration which characterizes the artist and the scholar, the sage and the imbecile; the first to make me acquainted with the tragical happiness and unhappiness of complete absorption.
—Stefan Zweig, “Buchmendel”
Gil Roth
—2mg050313
Just a quick update on work-life, podcasting, etc. I should’ve mentioned the really great suit I bought during the Chicago trip. Booo…
(That picture is me, like 12-14 years ago, in the apt. of Samuel R. Delany.)
Coming soon(ish)!
During a Chicago trip for my day job, I sat down with cartoonist, author and professor Ivan Brunetti for an upcoming episode of The Virtual Memories Show! We talked comics, influences, Chicago, emigrating from Italy at 8 years old, his new book, Aesthetics: A Memoir, and more! Check back for that one!
Suburban Bliss?
“I had neither the wisdom of country boys, who knew beasts and the axioms of hardware stores, nor the real toughness of the city.”
—James Salter, Burning the Days
American Mystery
What if good institutions were in fact the product of good intentions? What if the cynicism that is supposed to be rigor and the acquisitiveness that is supposed to be realism are making us forget the origins of the greatness we lay claim to — power and wealth as secondary consequences of the progress of freedom, or, as Whitman would prefer, Democracy?
—Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books
Gil Roth
—2MG033013
Two minutes on the Asbury Comicon and the two comics I bought there!
Sam Cooke, 1963.
“Sam Cooke was the best singer who ever lived, no contest.” - Jerry Wexler
(Source: tekena)
I read this on a comfy chair in my library at 6 in the morning
More and more, I sense that focused reading, the valuing of the kind of scholarship achieved only through years spent in libraries, is no longer central to our culture. We absorb information, often in bits and pieces and sound bites; but the slow, steady interaction with a book, while seated quietly in a chair, the passion for story that good novels generate in a reader, what has been called the pleasure of the text — this entire approach to learning seems increasingly, to use a pop phase, “at risk.” Similarly, even a basic knowledge of history, classical mythology, and the world’s literatures now strikes many people as charmingly antiquarian. Or irrelevant. Or just sort of cute.
— Michael Dirda, “Millennial Readings: Dec, 5 1999,” Readings
Bros Before Prose
Over at Virtual Memories, I wrote a post about GQ Magazine’s 21st century literary canon: http://t.co/qPuYHBy8Pb
