it's like sputnik! mostly spherical but quite pointy in parts.

at first it seems insubordinate and stupid for a sports team owner to declare in a newspaper interview that his previously emphasized intentions of not moving his team are, in fact, a bag of shit wrapped in a deadline. but then it's like, fuck. the dude's the founder of a major energy company; he described seattle as 'looking down their noses at us'; doubtless his insecurities manifest in a number of intriguing ways (eg, storing massive quantities of his semen until such a time as the final kinks are worked out of human cloning; insisting that said semen be frozen in a life-sized bust of his head [look at that enormous melon! heed! pants! now!]). so whether or not we've been aware of it, we're looking down our noses. and what we see, just past the nostrils, well within smelling range, is this gasptakingly big yet pointy-headed arrogance, so comfortable in its contradictions that it might well be called bushian. claiming things with no regard for or apparent memory of claims past.

click the title to read a truehoops piece about it.

the chinaman is not the issue here, dude. i'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, dude. across this line, you DO NOT...

..also, dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. asian-american, please.

late at night, huntsmanic dons his nuclear man outfit and pretends the wall is gene hackman.

i told those fudgepackers i liked michael bolton's music.

hey!

more saul bellow (via rob dalton)

with a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

the round mound of hut.

you’re tall. enough to be irregular and stand out. and people define you that way. before we met i’d heard about you—and your height was always the first or second thing said.

i never worried about that. interesting that you said it that way, ‘first or second thing.’ because the obvious physical attribute is just one thing; and your perception of someone cues on more than one of something. think of, you know, a really fat dude. that’s not enough to make a soundly negative or positive judgment—he has options. there’s fat and enthusiastic—chris farley, santa, charles barkley—fat and enthusiastic is well-liked and gets away with things, because it’s funny, right? sir charles ranting is funny; santa squeezing out of chimneys gives the family a chuckle; chris farley, robed in a luchador outfit and playing the part of el nino, is one of the best three minutes ever (i am el nino. that's spanish for THE NINO). then there’s fat & imperious—most godfathers are cast in this type. and of course there’s fat & disgusting—jabba the hut and his ilk. but you have choices. you are very fat and people will remember this. but you are fat and also you are something else, and the fat part ends up simply amplifying whatever the other part is—you’re santa and people will be simply pleased by you; or they’ll be pleasantly confused if you’re barkley; or confusedly fearful if you’re brando; or morbidly nauseated if you’re jabba. choices. ‘cos you need two features to make a personality: folks say i’m tall, sure, all the time. but they say i’m tall and…dot dot dot. we have some measure of influence in the way your 1^st and 2^nd adjectives get put together. it’s your job not to be boring about it. if you’re fat, under no circumstances should you bore people—if you do, you run the risk of the ‘boring’ amplifying the ‘fat’, instead of the other way around. one of my neighbors as a boy was quiet and fat and super boring. for a long time i thought he was the fattest man i’d ever seen or heard of; but now i think he was probably just a heavy beer drinker, not extraordinarily fat or anything; but his boringness made him more fat, in my mind. people naturally want to pair things up; the reason why, i think, is as simple as you need multiple characteristics of a person to give him edges. i mean, if i get described as ‘tall…and really tall’, or ‘tall…and white’, my shit ain’t workin’. i’ve messed up one of my primary jobs. we don’t want to know just a physical dimension of a person; that’s not our natural impulse. we want to observe; to describe; to be able to predict.

moses herzog.

herzog wrote, will never understand what women want. what do they want? they eat green salad and drink human blood.

damnit, marion! stop peeking.

fyi : there's a fun thread unfolding in the comments on the previous post. fun, yes. really fun, if you enjoy unhurried conversation about the strengths and shortcomings of popular science writers and their marmot-like readers. what? that doesn't sound "fun" to you? that sounds like less "fun" than "getting tattooed on the inside of your butt"? well guess whose face is tattooed on the inside of my butt. i had enchiladas yesterday. twice.

shut your eyes, marion, and don't look at it, no matter what happens.

the venerable blighty, that silver-haired fox of a cynical gentleman, wrote a post on it's not happening about malcolm gladwell's blink. because i steal from everywhere without compunction, i've transposed the comment i left on that entry into an apsi entry -

i'm a gladwell defender, not that he, very nearly the best-selling nonfiction writer out there, needs one--but i like him as a writer. he's great at creating a juxtaposition, then teasing out the common narrative threads; he doesn't waste space and nary a sentence is over-written; and i've found both books and a majority of his new yorker pieces a pleasure to read. while i won't disagree that the gladwell-as-the-pt-barnum-of-science-journalism analogy could be made, i'm not sure it makes a useful point.

what blink has done is fundamentally enhance my thinking in a couple of ways. in the 2y since reading it, one premise that's proved a boon is the superficial point of the book: that our instictive reaction to something can be superior to a reasoned, balanced reaction. more specifically, that a snap decision can be balanced and actually is wired so it can pull from a robust set of data points. what's proved continually pleasing to my mind, and even affected the way i conceive of my own creative and intellectual ambitions, is the malleability of this pre-awareness-level of thinking: evolutionarily, we developed the ability to pattern match eons before language made the scene. pattern matching, or "have i seen this before," is one of our oldest and most-fine-tuned cognitive abilities. and naturally, we get better at it as we go along--as we see more things and witness more events.

i like gladwell's bit about the tennis pro who could predict a forthcoming double fault before the player had even released his toss: he had no idea why he was right all the time, why he could make those predictions. this guy has decades of immersive expertise in the world of tennis, and those years of attention and work have resulted in this matrix of detail; and thanks to all that data, he can decide something with an efficacy that exceeds his ability to explain the decision. isn't that just so interesting? i mean, yeah, it's a great anecdote, but what it implies is, in some ways, counterintuitive. if you want to be an expert at something, focus on the details. but not so you can write a paper and not have to look up the sources. obssess about the details so that your pattern matching gets better. practice piano and the harmonies will become more complex, the linkages between notes self-evident. read and think about all the novels so that your native sense for story develops a resonance point that gets more and more true. write everyday so that the distance between your voice and the keys will depreciate to nothing. it'll feel as though your eye for detail has become almost effortlessly attentive, crisp. and on one side that's true. but on the other side is the larger truth: detail and meaning coincide in fairly direct proportion; add detail to your mental grid so you can better and more immediately discern the whole. detail is there to help create meaning,