Category: words

“That was the whole point. I did not wish that my book were Eat, Pray, Love. As the only journalist to live undercover in North Korea, I had risked imprisonment to tell a story of international importance by the only means possible. By casting my book as personal rather than professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best. It was a subtle shift, but one familiar to professional women from all walks of life.”

“A middle-aged woman who’s not preoccupied with handling herself or taking care of someone else is a dangerous, erratic being. What is she up to? And what’s the point of her being up to anything? She has no children, she has no family, the only thing she has is her own life and what good will that do anyone.”

“After voluminous research, Dickey came to the conclusion that the venom of the haters, who themselves possess the uncontrollable obsession with violence they ascribe to their canine target, is aimed not at these dogs but rather at the cypher of their stereotyped owner.”

“I’m mildly obsessed with the modular story because I like not having to tell a linear story all the time. I also love white space, and jumping around in time, place, or character point of view.”

“There’s an awful word that Western media folk sometimes use to describe my kind of journalism that’s meant to be flattering but always makes me cringe precisely because it expresses so well this gap between audience and subject, and the conflict therein. The word is “humanizing.” By my own standards, if my article has succeeded, if I’ve done what I set out to do, I have to some degree “humanized” a situation—a conflict, a crisis—for the reader. But of course the subject doesn’t feel any more human for the experience; the subject, in most cases, doesn’t even realize he’s been made more human in the eyes of the subscribers to the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine.”

“Sadly, the parks rarely get much attention on the national stage unless some knucklehead displaces a cute little baby bison or tries to feed a grizzly bear. But in this year when the Park Service is celebrating its centennial with all sorts of hand-wringing about the future, it’s instructive to remember how language can save landscape. Powerful prose has been put to good use in the cause of America’s Best Idea.”

“There’s more than a little irony to the impending collapse of Barnes & Noble. The mega-retailer that drove many small, independent booksellers out of business is now being done in by the rise of Amazon. But while many book lovers may be tempted to gloat, the death of Barnes & Noble would be catastrophic—not just for publishing houses and the writers they publish, but for American culture as a whole.”

In Ben Lerner’s account, poetry is the perfect medium for failure. Even great poems, he claims, perform this failure by suggesting the transcendent in their absence. “You can only compose poems that, when read with perfect contempt, clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.”

“The school says acclaimed writer Steven Galloway was suspended in November of last year while an investigation was completed over what it said were serious allegations of misconduct. Addition complaints were also received after he was suspended and former B.C. Supreme Court justice Mary Ellen Boyd was appointed to conduct an investigation.”

“The manufacture of typewriters in India might have come to a halt, but in Goa, as in the rest of the country, there are plenty of machines still going clackety-clack. Government-run offices, village schools, and other rural administrative offices still use typewriters for work such as drawing up contracts or bills.”