Chad Taylor

You're talking about memories

I wanted to find a passage I remembered from a novel I'd read in 1993. I had the book -- first edition, hardbound. I got it down from the shelf and flicked through it for a good 10 minutes but couldn't find the passage. But I could remember a phrase from it, and I had a copy of the book as an epub. So I opened the epub on my Nook, searched for the phrase and found the passage in seconds.

Digital beats paper.

Later that week I wanted to find a newspaper article about a person which I had saved as a PDF but I couldn't remember the person's name. After searching my laptop for every related phrase I could think of I looked in the Moleskine I've kept since 2010, in the last pages where I always put names, and found the person, and was able to locate the article on my hard drive immediately.

Paper beats digital.

From a late night train

INTERVIEWER
How much rewriting do you do?

HEMINGWAY
It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

INTERVIEWER
Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you? 

HEMINGWAY
Getting the words right.

-- Ernest Hemingway interviewed by George Plimpton for The Paris Review, Spring 1958

It is not dying

Shirley Halperin: Are you worried about artists making a living in the near future?

Trent Reznor: Absolutely I am.

Jimmy Iovine: We all should be.

Reznor: I've dedicated my whole life to this craft, which, for a variety of reasons, is one that people feel we don't need to pay for anymore. And I went through a period of pointing fingers and being the grumpy, old, get-off-my-lawn guy. But then you realize, let's adapt and figure out how to make this better instead of just complain about it.

-- Eddy Cue, Robert Kondrk, Trent Reznor and Jimmy Iovine interviewed by Shirley Halperin of Billboard magazine, June 14 2016

Dualisme





Family plot



I read pissy things about season two of Bloodline but they're wrong: it's terrific. The first season was a complete and compelling noir; the second is a nasty bookend that stands without the narrative insecurities that have become standard for modern sequels / prequels / series. The writing is twisted and the performances are great -- never showy, but never too cool. The direction and editing is just plain solid. Bloodline has the bones of Jim Thompson and the flavour of a Barry Gifford. Go watch it. Best thing you'll see this year.

Mabou

Kate Beaton on moving to Nova Scotia:
"I wasn't sleeping well in Toronto, and I was paying a lot in rent. I needed to get out of the city. Most people leave here because they have to. I can take my job with me."
And on writing a book about Fort McMurray:
"Part of the reason I wanted to tell stories from [Fort Mac] is that that place altered my world," she says. She was sick of reading "exposés by some fucking guy who worked for Rolling Stone, bummed around for two weeks, and wasn't connected to anyone or anything. It grossed me out. They're like 'the smoke peeled back and I saw this wasteland,' and I'm like, 'fuck you, you rich asshole. You stayed in a hotel for two weeks. Cool. Thanks for coming.'"
Full interview by Julia Wright for Vice is here.

@BundleofMIRVs


Rose was clever, spiky, dark, pretty, delicate, tough, inventive, connected and young.

I miss her.