Our man Werner Herzog reads Curious George in a tone that only the German filmmaker can muster:

hats off to @jeremyryancarr for this tasty tidbit

Sycamore Review: Winter 2010 featuring Zach Falcon

ZACH FALCON was born and raised in Alaska. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Quiddity, the 2009 Bridport Prize Anthology, and the Bear Deluxe Magazine. He lives in Iowa City where he is working on a novel.

Author Michael Pollan says:

The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow more of it and plant more of it. The potato, by gratifying our desire for control, control over nature so that we can feed ourselves has gotten itself out of South America and expanded its range far beyond where it was 500 years ago. And the apple, by gratifying our desire for sweetness begins in the forests of Kazakhstan and is now the universal fruit. These are great winners in the dance of domestication.

The five months of furious short-story writing in 1923-24 had left him with a stake of $7,000. In Great Neck, that would only cover two and a half months of expenses. How could he stretch the $7,000 to gain the time to finish Gatsby? Earlier, as he was struggling to save, a friend wrote from France to suggest that Fitzgerald join the many Americans living well in Europe on the strong American dollar. The friend wrote that it cost one-tenth as much to live in Europe: he had just finished “a meal fit for a king, washed down with champagne, for the absurd sum of sixty-one cents.” Fitzgerald thought, based on the friend’s recommendation, living expenses on the off-season Riviera would be low enough to let him finish Gatsby without any short-story interruptions.

Thanks to Jason Kottke for posting on such good stuff. Cheers.

Spike Jonze worked with Lance Bangs on this new documentary about Maurice Sendak, who wrote and illustrated Where The Wild Things Are, which is in post-production having been directed by Jonze. Click on the image to see the trailer for the documentary.

Errol Morris is arguably one of the great filmmakers of all time. I especially hold Vernon, Florida as one of the pinnacles of documentary filmmaking. I watch it at least once a year, twice this year.

Morris holds a discussion about lying on his hosted NYT blog, specifically on Genesis 37:29-34 regarding the story of Joseph.

Now, some pals of mine wondered why he chose to use the story of Joseph. It’s difficult to say. There are surely many stories that would have been fit for his purpose, detached from any sort of potentially touchy, dogmatic ties.

Personally, I think it’s interesting he chose the story he did. Having grown up in a fundamentalist environment, these stories are quite familiar to me and I see what value he was trying to bring though using it as his example.

However, I wouldn’t have chosen it. Instead, I would have chosen from a massive assortment of films and novels, stories that aren’t so charged with a belief system, opening the value of his thoughts up to more people without alienating them.

This point, alone, makes for an interesting debate.

Thus, it is only for our speculation.

Regardless, it’s an interesting meditation on lying and worth the time I spent reading it.

Tangent: In this age of seemingly infinite access to information, it goes without saying that it is easier than ever to be manipulated. Especially while we don’t exercise our *discerning* muscles. Teaching a child to be discerning may be the single greatest challenge of them all in this context.

For example, if collectively we only just agreed that the world is round, there would still be sites up all over the Web saying it’s flat.

Just sayin’.

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I received one of the most beautiful SMS’s ever today. Is that how we say SMS in the plural?

Doesn’t really matter. Case in point: “I received one of the most beautiful SMS’s ever today.”

It was from my father, who’s never cared much about his spelling, only about the message:

Cheers, Pop.

Happy Birthday, by the way.

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Ordinary Affects is an exercise, not a fact. I like this very much.

Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail, and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and the lingering resonance of passing events. While most of the instances rendered are from Stewart’s own life, she writes in the third person in order to reflect on how intimate experiences of emotion, the body, other people, and time inextricably link us to the outside world.

Stewart refrains from positing an overarching system—whether it’s called globalization or neoliberalism or capitalism—to describe the ways that economic, political, and social forces shape individual lives. Instead, she begins with the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life to bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. Ordinary affect, she insists, is registered in its particularities, yet it connects people and creates common experiences that shape public feeling. Through this anecdotal history—one that poetically ponders the extremes of the ordinary and portrays the dense network of social and personal connections that constitute a life—Stewart asserts the necessity of attending to the fleeting and changeable aspects of existence in order to recognize the complex personal and social dynamics of the political world.

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Jim Rossignol is an interesting fellow, particularly in the context that he writes in a unique way about gaming and its influence on culture. Not to mention, the trajectory and contrast of his own story against what he writes makes him an authentic source IMO.

I am anticipating the arrival of his book, This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities published by the University of Michigan Press.

Amazon’s product description reads like this:

“In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game.

It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

So begins this story of personal redemption through the unlikely medium of electronic games. Quake, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and other online games not only offered author Jim Rossignol an excellent escape from the tedium of office life. They also provided him with a diverse global community and a job—as a games journalist.

Part personal history, part travel narrative, part philosophical reflection on the meaning of play, This Gaming Life describes Rossignol’s encounters in three cities: London, Seoul, and Reykjavik. From his days as a Quake genius in London’s increasingly corporate gaming culture; to Korea, where gaming is a high-stakes televised national sport; to Iceland, the home of his ultimate obsession, the idiosyncratic and beguiling Eve Online, Rossignol introduces us to a vivid and largely undocumented world of gaming lives.

Torn between unabashed optimism about the future of games and lingering doubts about whether they are just a waste of time, This Gaming Life also raises important questions about this new and vital cultural form. Should we celebrate the “serious” educational, social, and cultural value of games, as academics and journalists are beginning to do? Or do these high-minded justifications simply perpetuate the stereotype of games as a lesser form of fun? In this beautifully written, richly detailed, and inspiring book, Rossignol brings these abstract questions to life, immersing us in a vibrant landscape of gaming experiences.

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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a book about randomness and uncertainty by epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The Black Swan theory refers to a large-impact, hard-to-predict and rare event beyond the realm of *normal* expectations or logic. His theory refers to events of large consequence and their dominant role in history. Black Swan events are a special category of outliers.

From the prologue:

I am drawn to his book so much these days that, DURING the days, while often spending thought energy on the arbitrary, I crave returning to read more of Nassim’s words in the wonderful and whimsical evening to help balance against, as he writes so eloquently, naive empiricism.

That’s the trouble with good work like this : such ideas find us re-examining our immediate environment, our time-investments, priorities, the whole can of worms, all-the-while identifying every detail both aligned and misaligned with our freshly-evolved perspective and motivation.

Tough? Sometimes.

Highly recommended? Indefatigably.

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