A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
“You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.”
—Henrik Ibsen
“A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down.”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay
“I like being a woman, even in a man's world. After all, men can't wear dresses, but we can wear the pants.”
—Whitney Houston
“Sex stops when you pull up your pants,
Love never lets you go.”
—Kingsley Amis
“I grow old...I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
—T.S. Eliot
See the connections? Write your guesses in the comments — and feel free to leave your own "pants" quotes — and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: ABC News, India Times, MTV.com, yourtango.com, New York Times
Answers to last week's installment:
- "We can no longer say the replacement referees didn't directly impact the result of a game" (faniq.com)
- "Iran’s President Spreads the Outrage in New York" (New York Times)
- "App offers peek into Einstein's brain" (sfgate.com)
- "The Sin of Sowing Hatred of Islam" (New York Times; image:atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com)
- "New Caledonian crows reason about hidden causal agents" (pnas.org; image: pbs.org)
Once a week, Black Balloon's editorial assistant Kate Gavino chooses the best Q and the best A from one of New York's literary in-store events. Here, Kate draws from Michael Chabon's reading at Greenlight Bookstore on September 17.
Tell us about your research process, especially using the Internet.
Michael Chabon: [The internet] is very tempting, encouraging you, whispering insidiously into your ear to indulge the need to know something immediately. Sometimes I feel like I actually pose those research problems to myself just so I have an excuse to check my email. Like say, how many spark plugs were in the engine of a standard issue US army truck that was used by the troops in Europe in 1944? You know you can find that. You know there's a whole spark plug website or military spark plug archive. It's there waiting for you, and it's very tempting right then to just get that information because a lot of the times you go looking, you find out way more than you bargained for. It's a great thing. Many times I've made important discoveries about books I was writing that I would not have know if I hadn't gone and done the research.
But usually, you can just put “tk” and leave it and go on and that took me a long time to learn. Most of the time it's just a lame excuse to go on Gilt.com and just waste time. Now I actually try to shut off the Internet, and that's really increased my productivity to a terrifying degree. I used to blame the fact that I have kids for the fact that I wasn't getting much done but it turns out it wasn't their fault. Well, it's partly their fault.
Are you on the list of things Morissey hates? Congratulations, you're in good company.
Even the sainted writer that is J.K. Rowling could end up on the list if the Moz finds her latest book not up to snuff.
Perhaps if he kept his firey hatred a secret, the world would be a better place.
In fact, whole galaxies, even newly discovered ones, could benefit from the occasional act of decency.
Or maybe they can just copy Ghana and even make funerals a joyful affair.
If anything, it's a better idea than building an underground park with no natural sunlight.
Then again, the idea could work if you had the right cocktail and novel at hand.
And while we're on that note, why not introduce the pay-what-you-want model to bars as well?
If brevity is truly the soul of wit, then your Twitter feed is the Algonquin round table of today's digital Dorothy Parkers and Ogden Nashes. Here's a selection of our favorite tweets from the week; nominate yours by submitting to @blackballoonpub with #twitwit.
A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
“Hell is other people.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre
“Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why use them?”
—Dong Zhongshu
“The mythology of Einstein shows him as a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as of a function analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.”
—Roland Barthes
“Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.”
—Samuel Johnson
“Man has great power of speech, but the greater part thereof is empty and deceitful. The animals have little, but that little is useful and true; and better is a small and certain thing than a great falsehood.”
—Leonardo da Vinci
See the connections? Write your guesses in the comments — and feel free to leave your own "uncomebackable" quotes — and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: faniq.com, NYTimes, sfgate.com, NYTimes, pnas.org
Answers to last week's installment:
- "The Many Garbs of Gaga" (InTouch)
- "Letter to a Young Critic: William Giraldi Defends True Criticism" (The Daily Beast)
- “'I’m Dreaming of a White President': Randy Newman on His New Song" (Slate)
- Brooklyn Book Festival Official Site (Facebook)
- "Riff Raff’s Got a Record Deal: Making Sense of the Most Viral Human Being in Music" (Gawker)
Got a group of lit-minded friends who love whaling? Why not join the Moby Dick Big Read?
And if you need a soundtrack for your reading, you could always go with the new Philip Glass production.
Unfortunately, you can't go around digging through the archives of Kim Video for any good listening.
But you could always try repurposing your current collection into works of art.
And if you have to do so in the buff, more power to you.
In fact, you'd be riding a bit of a literary trend, should you have the inclination.
Even then, you wouldn't be embroiled in as much controversy as Salman Rushdie at the moment.
So you can relax and wander the streets of Melbourne, looking for a good book to pick up.
If brevity is truly the soul of wit, then your Twitter feed is the Algonquin round table of today's digital Dorothy Parkers and Ogden Nashes. Here's our favorite tweets from the week; nominate yours by submitting to @blackballoonpub with #twitwit.
A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
“Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together”
—Anaïs Nin
VLADIMIR:
Moron!
ESTRAGON:
Vermin!
VLADIMIR:
Abortion!
ESTRAGON:
Morpion!
VLADIMIR:
Sewer-rat!
ESTRAGON:
Curate!
VLADIMIR:
Cretin!
ESTRAGON:
(with finality). Crritic!
—Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot)
“The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.”
—Oscar Wilde (The Importnace of Being Earnest)
“Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.”
—Lorrie Moore
“Strange how potent cheap music is.”
—Noël Coward
Do you see the connections? Write your guesses in the comments — and feel free to leave your own "uncomebackable" quotes — and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: InTouch Weekly, The Daily Beast, Slate, Facebook, Gawker
Answers to last week's installment:
- Einstein on the Beach (TimeOut New York)
- "Bob Dylan: Slavery's Legacy 'Holds Back' America" (Newser)
- "New Breed of Robotics Aims to Help People Walk Again" (NYTimes)
- "Pat Boone and Sheriff Joe’s Arizona ‘Birther’ Party Scrapped" (ABC News)
- "Most Offensive Protest Sign Ever Prompts Rahm Emanuel To Clarify He Doesn't Like Nickelback" (Slate)
What was your favorite writer like in the the sack? Are you sure you really want to know?
After all, shouldn't you be paying attention to the one-sided feud between Bret Easton Ellis and David Foster Wallace?
Perhaps if Ellis stopped to read one of these love-centric stories, some of that aggression would die down.
Even an episode or two of Reading Rainbow could melt the heart of such a literary Grinch.
Though, I don't think Molly Ringwald's collection of stories, rife with depression, melodrama, and divorce, would be a good fit for the show.
But if a writing career doesn't pan out for her, we hear the jingle-writing business is rather lucrative.
Just make sure to rid yourself of all crutch words before setting your lyrics down.
Because you never know when Philip Roth will pen an angry letter to you, putting you in your place.
And when that happens, you may find yourself as the very definition of a literary failure.
Illustration by Bianca Stone.
If brevity is truly the soul of wit, then your Twitter feed is the Algonquin round table of today's digital Dorothy Parkers and Ogden Nashes. Here's our favorite tweets from the week; nominate yours by submitting to @blackballoonpub with #twitwit.
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