Welcome

I'm Stephen Schenkenberg, an editor, writer, and digital communicator living in St. Louis, MO.

Understandable Questions
Q. Wait, who are you? (A)
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Q. What books have you edited? (A)
Q. What are you reading? (A)
Q. What wines are you drinking? (A)
Q. What kind of stuff do you like? (A)
Q. What technology do you use? (A)
Q. What websites do you like? (A)
Q. What's that William Gass site you run? (A)
Q. Do you also have a Tumblelog? (A)

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Sunday
07Feb2010

Game-Day Predictions

From Shane Ryan's "Famous Authors Predict the Winner of Super Bowl XLII," published today at McSweeney's:

The Coach wears a bone around his neck. It is hung from dead sinew. Other bones he has ground by pestle and mortar. In the ancient caves he swallowed white dust.

I am here to erase you.

The boy squints at the arroyo bed. The earth is scorched in jagged lines.

It ain't no kind of life, he says.

Overhead, the sun is a wrathful god. It will bake the world.

Prediction: Patriots 27, Giants 6

I'm guessing you don't need help with that author's name. 

Thursday
28Jan2010

Six Degrees & The Catcher in the Rye



Regarding today's news... As it happens, I just re-watched Six Degrees of Separation -- from which this Salinger/Catcher scene comes -- a few days ago. It's got two or three scenes I wish were done differently, but much of the writing and the acting is terrific. I wish I had the chance to see the play.
Wednesday
20Jan2010

"Conan, it's yours."


Plus quotes like this one: "I'll be 59 years old five years from now... and I said to myself, There's really only one person who coulda done this into their 60s, and that was Johnny Carson. And I think it's fair to say: I'm no Johnny Carson."

That is fair, yes.
Thursday
14Jan2010

Now That's a Set of Stairs

From "Flat #1 by Ecole" at the Contemporist, where several more photos await.

Saturday
09Jan2010

Roger Ebert and Suttree's Frosted Mug

In his widely noted blog post "Nil by mouth" -- about life without eating or drinking -- Roger Ebert nods to one of my favorite novels:

I dreamed. I was reading Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, and there's a passage where the hero, lazing on his river boat on a hot summer day, pulls up a string from the water with a bottle of orange soda attached to it and drinks. I tasted that pop so clearly I can taste it today. Later he's served a beer in a frosted mug. I don't drink beer, but the frosted mug evoked for me a long-buried memory of my father and I driving in his old Plymouth to the A&W Root Beer stand (gravel driveways, carhop service, window trays) and his voice saying "...and a five-cent beer for the boy." The smoke from his Lucky Strike in the car. The heavy summer heat.

For nights I would wake up already focused on that small but heavy glass mug with the ice sliding from it, and the first sip of root beer. I took that sip over and over. The ice slid down across my fingers again and again. But never again.

Wednesday
06Jan2010

"A Book Lasts Longer Than a Building"

From an interview with American architect Peter Eisenman in Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books:

Without The Four Books on Architecture of Palladio no one would have cared about Palladio. A book lasts longer than a building: books are more important in the world than buildings. Without Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture there would be no Bob Venturi. Without Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York there would be no Koolhaas. Without Le Corbusier's Toward an Architecture, etcetera. That's why I have them on my top ten list. The books that I mentioned in the list made those architects. Without those books, they wouldn't exist for us. So for me, architects live beyond their time through the book.

Visit Yale University Press' site to watch a video preview of this small but handsome volume (which, sadly, must now return to the libraries' shelves, not ours). 

Monday
04Jan2010

The Road Director's Diary

From "The Road: John Hillcoat's diary," published today at the Telegraph:

February
I then got Kodi to record the entire script so that Charlize could listen to him on her iPod and get to know how he sounds. I encouraged Viggo to hang out with Kodi as much as possible, and Viggo took him to the Bodies exhibition in Pittsburgh, which is made up of hundreds of specimens of dead human bodies. They later found packages of edible dried insects in a local shop – crickets and maggots in either chilli or salt and vinegar flavours. We decide to use the chilli crickets for the movie.

Later: 

November 6
Today was the day of reckoning. Joe Penhall and I went to New Mexico to show the movie to Cormac McCarthy, who lives in Santa Fe. Cormac pulled up in an old beaten-up Cadillac and we went into this strangely empty massive hi-tech studio. When the lights came up afterwards, Cormac didn’t say a word. He excused himself to go to the men’s room and was gone for 20 minutes, and we were thinking, 'This is not good…’ Finally, he came back and said, simply, 'It’s really good. This is like nothing we’ve ever seen.’ When I started to press him for details, he cut me off, saying, 'Look, I didn’t come all this way to blow smoke up your ass.’ Then he took us out for a seven-hour lunch. The only thing that he missed from the book was four lines of dialogue, which luckily we had filmed, and put back in. He loved the movie.

I loved this book, but I still don't think I'll see the movie.

Saturday
02Jan2010

When George Saunders Met David Foster Wallace

The Guardian has published "Living in the memory," writers remembering writers who died in the past decade. This is from George Saunders' entry on DFW (via AK, who says it's a version of the talk Saunders gave at the memorial in New York):
I first met Dave at the home of a mutual friend in Syracuse. I'd just read Girl with Curious Hair and was terrified that this breakfast might veer off into, say, a discussion of Foucault or something, and I'd be humiliated in front of my wife and kids. But no: I seem to remember he was wearing a Mighty Mouse T-shirt. Like Chekhov in those famous anecdotes, who put his nervous provincial visitors at ease by asking them about pie-baking and the local school system, he defused the tension by turning the conversation to us. Our kids' interests, what life was like in Syracuse, our experience of family life. He was about as open and curious and accepting a person as I'd ever met, and I left feeling I'd made a great new friend. And I had. We were together only occasionally, corresponded occasionally but every meeting felt super-charged, almost – if this isn't too corny – sacramental.
Friday
01Jan2010

My Favorite Stuff of 2009

So I've updated my Annual Favorites page with a new entry: 2009. Happy New Year to all.

Thursday
31Dec2009

My 31 Favorite Movies of the Decade

Everyone else is doing it, so I thought I'd play along. (One note: It's likely at least a few of the YouTube URLs will go bad, but I won't be tending to them if they do. Sorry.)

1. Russian Ark (2002)




2. Once (2006)




3. Heaven (2002)




4. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)




5. Man on Wire (2008)




6. Wall-E (2008)




7. The Diving Bell & The Butterfly (2007)




8. The Best of Youth (2005)




9. High Fidelity (2000)




10. Downfall (2005)




11. Where the Wild Things Are (2009)




12. I Heart Huckabees (2004)




13. The Barbarian Invasions (2003)




14. Little Miss Sunshine (2006)




15. The Bourne Supremacy (2004)




16. The New World (2005)




17. Juno (2007)




18. The Darjeeling Limited (2007)




19. There Will Be Blood (2007)




20. Paranoid Park (2007)




21. Gerry (2002)




22. Zidane (2006)




23. The Lives of Others (2007)




24. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days (2008)




25. The Return (2003)




26. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)




27. Spellbound (2002)




28. A Serious Man (2009)




29. Away From Her (2006)




30. Milk (2008)




31. Before Sunset (2004)



(1/2/10 Update: So my system failed, and I totally forgot to include these three, all of which I loved: Yi Yi, In the Mood for Love, and Waking Life.)
Wednesday
30Dec2009

David Foster Wallace Defends His Endnotes

From a paper by Zac Farber called "'Neurotic and Obsessive' but 'not too Intransigent or Defensive': Editing David Foster Wallace'" (PDF), as found at Howling Fantods:
Wallace also rejected Pietsch’s qualms with the inclusion of endnotes [in Infinite Jest]. Pietsch preferred the easier to read footnotes. But Wallace said that endnotes let him 
make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence. 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically ‘back and forth’ in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns ... 5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.
He later told Charlie Rose that 
There is a way, it seems to me, that reality is fractured right now. ... The difficulty about writing about that reality is that text is very linear, it’s very unified. I am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disoriented. You can take the lines and jumble them up, and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s going to read it.
Tuesday
29Dec2009

Sketches for Website Prototypes

From "10 Beautiful Sketches for Website Prototypes," from Woorkup. This one's from Vimeo. (Via

Monday
28Dec2009

What Books Can You Live Without?

At the New York Times, Francine Prose is one of seven authors to take part in a 'debate' about "Books You Can Live Without":
Two years ago, I re-organized my library, and gave away 20 cartons of books, culled according to the following general principles:
  • Unless you are an Egyptologist, you only need one, at most two, enormous coffee table books on the Art of the Pharaohs.
  • If a country, like Czechoslavakia, no longer exists, it’s unlikely that you’ll want to take the travel guide along with you when you go.
  • If the reproductions in an art book are so fuzzy and blurred that you can’t tell the work of the Impressionists from that of the Pointillists, or even from the Surrealists, get rid of it.
  • Ask yourself the following hard question and answer honestly: If I live to be 100, will I read this book again?
Sunday
27Dec2009

Where the Wine's Consumed (and With Whom)

From "The Mysterious Heart of Deliciousness," by husband-and-wife wine writers Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher (who I first heard about here):

The most delicious wine we ever tasted was a Cabernet we drank on our honeymoon in a vineyard near where it was made. Close behind is a 1959 Latour we drank during a rare visit to New York by John's older brother; the first great Riesling we ever tasted when we thought Riesling was plonk; a 1963 Port we drank, in the first apartment we owned together, while an epic snowstorm hit the city; and a bottle of Champagne with which we welcomed our first daughter into the world. Add to that lineup a different Champagne that we served at our wedding and with which we welcomed our second daughter. Did they taste better to us because of the circumstances? Of course they did. We first wrote more than a decade ago that the same exact wine will taste different if you have it at lunch with your boss or on the beach with your loved one. Does that make the more-delicious experience less genuine? Of course not.

In fact, this is, in many ways, what great wine is all about: It is all about you. By allowing other people to ridicule any wine you like or criticize the way you enjoy it, or by allowing others to decide for you what is and is not a fine wine, you are genuinely missing the point of wine, which is this: Your enjoyment of any wine is an extension of yourself, your emotions, your experiences and your circumstances when you drink it. A truly fine wine is like a truly fine poem: It's not just about what the poet thought or felt when he or she wrote it, but what you thought or felt when you read it. Different people will experience the same exact wine differently, and vive la différence.

Thursday
17Dec2009

Digital Magazine Reading from Bonnier

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

A very thoughtful prototype from Swedish company Bonnier, presented by its design partner BERG. (Via the NYT's Media Decoder blog.)