Posts by author
Daniel Gumbiner
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Anything to be Liked, to be Reassured
This Recording has a feature on Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter correspondences circa 1930. Fitzgerald appears insecure, liquored and thoroughly nostalgic while Zelda’s letters detail her consumption of sedatives and her struggle with Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and periodic inattention.
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Re: The Rest of the World
A grounding letter to the editor by Tony Skalicky of Jersey City, NJ, regarding David Pogue’s review of David Kirpatrick’s The Facebook Effect, reminds us that, “Until Facebook starts growing crops and irrigating fields, most of humanity will remain outside…
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On Saving Letters
PBS Newshour’s Zoe Pollock holds an epistolary interview with New Yorker editor Ben Greenmen concerning his new collection of epistolary fiction, What He’s Poised to Do. Things get epistly real quick: Greenman, the former New Times film critic, discusses the…
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The Ascetic Fetish
Check out Flavorpill’s list of the 20th Century’s “most reclusive authors.” Is anonymity, as Salinger once said, “a writer’s greatest gift?” How limiting is the idea that writers are, by definition, hermetic? It seems that writers who like to promote themselves…
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Standardized Redactions
“What could be the purpose of an exercise testing students on such a lacerated passage — one which, finally, is neither mine nor true to my lived experience?” -Annie Dillard I can’t say I’m surprised that the standardized testing cosmos…
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A Man We Would Very Much Like to Cut Our Hair
Swan Songs offers three vignettes of America’s increasingly scant tradesmen. From Mr. Rogers ex-barber to the last standing champion of mechanical based typesetting, the Americana-drenched series from True/Slant makes us think about what we lost when we stopped using our…
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On Beating Writer’s Block
“It operates in marginal subcultures and it stars determined though hapless dreamers… It pits the art of violence against the violence of art.” Katherine Dunn – who ostensibly dematerialized after her 1989 novel Geek Love (which was nominated for a…
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Michael Chabon on Mavi Marmara
“This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of Goodbye, Columbus from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid…
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The Diaries of Cesare Pavese
“I should be perfectly happy if it were not for the fleeting pain of trying to probe the secret of that happiness, so as to be able to find it again tomorrow and always. But perhaps I am confused and…
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BPGlobalPR
“Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no- profits, image, then safety, but still- it’s right up there.” “You don’t go drilling 5000 feet underwater with the tools you want, you do it with the tools you…
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DHS Does Not Approve
“I had wanted to make an interpretation of me giving all of myself to my work… I wanted to convey that the cans were exploding with color, and that’s how my art was being created.” – Rene Gagnon, street artist…
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Daniel Gumbiner: The Last Book I Loved, The Savage Detectives
When does writing about ourselves become narcissistic? Are we ever not writing (or reading) ourselves? Some Thoughts After the Mezcal Ran Out: