Michael Joyce Remembers DFW
Tue, June 23, 2009 at 10:07 PM What an interesting interview, from September 2008 but new to me:
I just remember he had kind of a dark sense of humor. I remember he was very soft spoken and he didn’t really press me for much information. He really just observed everything and I never felt like he was really around that much. He ended up actually spending more time with my coach since he kind of respected the fact that I was playing and concentrating on what I needed to do which kind of made it easier to work with him. A couple of weeks later he called me and was very upset that Details had decided not to run the article. They had decided that after he had finished the whole thing that his writing was too good for their audience.
Wallace's extraordinary July 1996 essay on Joyce and the professional tennis tour is available here. (Via Straight Sets.)
The Demands of Fruit in a World of Abundance
Mon, June 22, 2009 at 9:03 PM From Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, which I've just begun and which I'm already digging:
It is early December and in a central aisle, twelve thousand blood-red strawberries wait in the semi-darkness. They flew in from California yesterday, crossing over the Arctic Circle by moonlight, writing a trail of nitrogen oxide across a black and gold sky. The supermarket will never again let the shifting axis of the earth delay its audience's dietary satisfactions: strawberries journey in from Israel in midwinter, from Morocco in February, from Spain in spring, from Holland in early summer, from England in August and from the groves behind San Diego between September and Christmas. There is only ninety-six hours' leeway between the moment the strawberries are picked and the moment they start to cave in to attacks of grey mould. An improbable number of grown-ups have been forced to subordinate their sloth, to move pallets across sheds and wait in rumbling diesel lorries in traffic to bow to the exacting demands of soft plump fruit.
A few pages later:
Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order -- and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface.
Yes, But It's a Dry Heat
Sat, June 20, 2009 at 7:53 AM 
At Jetson Green, a tour of "the ultimate modern desert shed," designed by Lloyd Russell and built in Pioneertown, CA. Looks sweet, as most things at Jetson Green do. But the one drink offering, right there in the desert, is hot tea? In cinematic terms, this is the El Guapo opening his birthday gift from the banditos: "It's a sweater!"
Harold Bloom on the Judge
Thu, June 18, 2009 at 7:03 AM The Onion interviews Harold Bloom about Blood Meridian, one of my very favorite books:
The violence is the book. The Judge is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature. The Judge is violence incarnate. The Judge stands for incessant warfare for its own sake.
Michael Eastman at Work
Sun, June 14, 2009 at 10:00 AM 
I tagged along with the photographer at a recent shoot of his.
McSweeney's To Hop on the Newspaper Bandwagon
Tue, June 9, 2009 at 8:51 PM Via Kottke, a new Dave Eggers interview with two especially interesting items: he's got a new non-fiction book coming out in July (man, did I love What is the What), and McSweeney's is building some kind of newspaper prototype.
Rumpus: Could you talk a little more about this newspaper you’re putting together? What’s involved?
Eggers: I come from a newspaper background, and I still get most of my news from newspapers and magazines. So we’ve been spending a lot of time at McSweeney’s just running numbers and starting to make a prototype, trying to prove that there can be a way to run a newspaper in 2009 without losing your shirt. And so far we’re pretty sure we can create a workable model. It’ll look different in some ways, but it’ll be a true newspaper, where journalists are paid well to hold their government accountable, where they have time to do enterprise journalism, to seek out stories all over the world and write them well and at length. But we’re just doing a prototype. It’ll just be a one-off thing, but we’ll be providing all the information you’d need to replicate it, in terms of the economics of it. The hope is that, for example, the folks formerly at the Rocky Mountain News might band together and put out a print newspaper again. It doesn’t have to be a billion-dollar enterprise. We’ll have a business plan included in the issue, hoping to prove that there’s an opportunity for smallish newspapers of high quality to exist and stay in business. The business model will be a bit different than some of the bigger papers, but the emphasis on investigative journalism, and great writing, on the best photography and design and all the things that newspapers can and should do—all that will still be there.
Touch-Screen Art
Mon, May 25, 2009 at 7:17 AM The NYT reports: Artist Jorge Colombo created this week's New Yorker cover on his iPhone, using a $5 app called Brushes. Good for Remnick & Co. for being adventurous.
"Content Status" in Basecamp
Sun, May 24, 2009 at 10:24 AM At St. Louis Magazine, which I edit, we use 37signals' Basecamp to manage the development of each monthly issue. Everything's in there -- story ideas, editorial line-ups, art lists, deadlines -- but one of the most critical elements each month is what we call the "Content Status" page. I created this element a few years ago, using HEX colors within Textile to create a color-coordination system for where each article is: Assigned; With Copy Editor; In Typescript; In Place (the server folder where the Art Department collects it); In Layout Rounds; Holding With Explanation; Ready to Rip; in PDF; and GOOD TO GO!. (An example of what one looks like in Textile: "%{background:#0099ff}Layout Rounds%".) This allows everyone on staff from the art, editorial and production departments to know what the status is of each piece of the hundred-page puzzle, without loads of individual emails. 37signals' recent introduction of optional email-notifications when Writeboards are updated has been an extra help in the process we've built.
Here's what the Content Status page looked like about two-thirds of the way through our June issue's production:
To Look Pretty
Sun, May 17, 2009 at 6:27 PM Just one oddly compelling passage from Mary Robison's oddly compelling new novel, One D.O.A., One On the Way:
This isn't as pretty as I planned to look to go see my husband. There's just no time to make the big improvements that looking pretty would entail:
• fat camp.
• the swimsuit I wore at seventeen.
• Bach Suite Number 3 in D major played on the cello by Yo-Yo Ma.
• a walk through the carwash.
• my grandfather, back from the dead.
• a motorcycle.
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Sat, May 16, 2009 at 7:03 AM 
From a Flickr set of last week's trip out east.
Rands Takes a Meeting
Mon, May 11, 2009 at 7:47 PM From his post "The Screw-Me Scenario":
There’s an article to be written about the different kinds of meetings you’re going to be exposed to, but for now I want to talk about the executive cross-pollination communication clusterfuck.
Ways in Which the Publishing World Will Change
Thu, April 30, 2009 at 7:28 AM From "The World's Foremost Consultant on the Future of Publishing," at The Rumpus:
1) Money. The economics of publishing are about to change, which means the enormous sums of money are going away. So everyone who got into to poetry, short fiction, or editing for the money, I’m afraid that’s over. No more will literary quarterlies bid each other into the sky over the latest terse, Carveresque masterpiece. No longer will small presses offer their massive signing bonuses to every newly minted MFA. I’m told New Directions is already considering canceling their “daily table” at Le Cirque. Sources also tell me Melville House is leasing their helicopter. My own publisher, Grove, has sold off both their Nantucket and Cote d’Azur properties, and is no longer offering free summer stays to their interns.
Jean Baudrillard on Death
Wed, April 29, 2009 at 9:47 PM Quoted in Lewis H. Lapham's "Notebook" in the May 2009 Harpers: "Death orders matters well, since the very fact of your absence makes the world distinctly less worthy of being lived in."