What to Write Next | Tomorrow Museum

This is an aside titled 'What to Write Next' dated 10/31/09

“What is more visually appealing, (a) a Pall Mall butt floating in a coffee mug, or (b) those new Pop Art place mats in the Crate & Barrel catalog? If you answered (a), do we have a genre for you.” – My favorite tweeter, Colson Whitehead, on what to write next.

Posted by Joanne on Oct. 31, 2009

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- I am not a Rick Moody fan, so calling his Twitter story for Electric Literature the best thing he's done isn't saying much. While I like updates like this, I try not to cringe over ones like this. But atmosphere is everything. More than the actual prose, I'm charmed by the way Moody's updates interrupt the everyday Lady Gaga and death of print fuss that otherwise takes up my main page. WSJ's Speakeasy has a pretty good post explaining another layer of nuttiness -- The bookstore Vroman's and several other partners are co-publishing the story. So you may see each update several times at once. I follow a girl who cuts and pastes every new update, and I imagine she's not the only one doing this. It is so weird. A storytelling conga line. This is why I love the Internet.
  2009-12-01 23:52:56
- NYT on "destination memory," why it's so hard to remember if you told that story already to someone or not. "The main finding by Dr. Gopie and Dr. MacLeod — that destination memory is relatively weak — helps explain several embarrassing, and annoying, kinds of social interaction... The study authors concluded that outgoing information 'was less integrated with its environmental context — i.e., the person — than was incoming information.'”
  2009-12-01 08:50:05
- Foer is the kind of adult for whom a pre-Huggies life was rudderless.
  2009-12-01 07:38:32
- Emily Gould reviews Christina Nehring. This was (almost) worth Dreamhost's unfortunate delay this evening, "for Nehring, truly loving means embracing pain. She disdains Valentine's roses, cozy snuggling, even vibrators—all the sappy rituals and pathetic artifacts our culture has produced to compensate for an epidemic lack of passion. By contrast, Nehring's old-style 'love' is "a religion, a high-risk adventure, an act of heroism ... ecstasy and injury, transcendence and danger, altruism and excess." Today's 'love' is commodified and ordinary and perpetually available. It can no longer ennoble our souls." I really love Nehring's essays about boring essayists, but I can definitely see where the book turned into a "book-length version of the famous SNL 'My Lovahhhh' sketch... She becomes less a defender of love than a defender of herself in love, which is different."
  2009-12-01 00:25:25
- Seems the only anyone ever clicks "in a relationship" on Facebook is three weeks or so after they break up with someone ... and meet another guy. Lux Alptraum confirms this in Jenna Wortham's Internet etiquette column, “Personally, I would say the appropriate time to update Facebook status is never—for me, relationship status is a private thing that I choose to keep off of Facebook entirely.”
  2009-12-01 00:16:36
- In case you missed it, Maira Kalman's latest.
  2009-11-28 19:08:35
- For the first time in my life I had pursued my own end, not through an assignment or a project but the pursuit of my own passions. I felt the glance of light and flew up and through it and it was then that I finally opened my eyes.
  2009-11-28 19:06:40
- 101 year old Oscar Niemeyer has returned to work just weeks after surgery for gallstones and an intestinal tumour. What is your excuse?
  2009-11-25 01:03:35
- Significant Objects had its 100th and final auction. Now they've posted a list of all the objects, what they cost and what they sold for. And the stuff from the famous writers didn't always go for the highest bids. As Sarah Weinman points out, it "emphasizes the randomness that is publishing and reader taste, which is actually kind of cool."
  2009-11-24 20:35:43
- Holiday shopping? Don't forget the Tomorrow Museum gift store is open 24 hours!
  2009-11-24 16:18:10
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