Barthelme's syllabus

I was happy to find out that Barthelme liked Isaac Babel. (Via Vanessa)

Change your perspective

Click to see it bigger.

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At the same moment the Santa Teresa police found the body of another teenage girl, half buried in a vacant lot in one of the neighborhoods on the edge of the city, and a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano's shirts and pants and slipping into his daughters underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geometrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of the streets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind.

- Roberto Bolaño

Strange Places

Baldwin Street in New Zealand is the steepest street in the world.




North Korea attempted to build the world's tallest hotel, but had to stop when they ran out of money. Ryugyong Hotel is 105 stories high and has no windows, fixtures, or fittings. There's still a construction crane sitting at the top of the building.





A mine fire has been burning under Centralia, Pennsylvania since 1962.

How nice is this?

From the NYT Obituary for George Carlin:

"Offstage, he was a kind man who was unusually generous with young comedians. Liz Miele, who is now 23, was 15 when she wrote to 45 comics seeking advice. Two responded: Judd Apatow urged her to study English. Carlin called. He told her to keep writing, always. Four years later, they met for a soda in the lobby of the Carlyle, where he opened his laptop and showed her how he organized thousands of idea files. She sent him progress reports, and he cheered her on until two days before he died."

Parachute

From LIFE Magazine

Today in Punctuation

From my Eats, Shoots & Leaves desk calendar:

"It is a measure of George Bernard Shaw's considerable monomania that in 1945 he wrote to The Times on the issue of the recently deployed atomic bomb to point out that since the second "b" in the word bomb was needless (I'm not joking), enormous numbers of working hours were being lost to the world through the practice of conforming to traditional spelling."

Flower

Another from the Savage Detectives

"I told him that when I was a biologist I would have time to see those cities and countries, and the money too, because I didn't plan to travel around the world hitchhiking or sleeping just anywhere. And then he said: I don't plan to see them, I plan to live in them the same way I've lived in Mexico. And I said: well good for you, then, I hope you're happy, live in them and die in them if you want; I'll travel when I have money. Then you won't have the time, he said. I will have the time, I said, you're wrong, I'll be the mistress of my time, I'll do what I like with my time. And he said: you won't be young anymore."

This is the longest post I've ever made