Link Salad, the Pain is the High (is the Pain) Edition
-- The Unfinished - D.T. Max, The New Yorker, Mar. 9, 2009
"In the summer of 1987, Wallace finished his M.F.A. and moved into an apartment on the edge of Tucson. His mood worsened. “Curious Hair” was largely done, and he did not know what was next. “I think he was always afraid that the last thing he wrote would be the last thing he wrote,” Amy Wallace, who is now a public defender, says. In late 1987, Wallace took a temporary job teaching creative writing at Amherst. He wrote to Bonnie Nadell that he was drinking a lot and, like Rick Vigorous, wandering around the campus “remembering disasters.” He returned to Tucson; one day, he called home and said he was thinking of hurting himself. His mother flew to Tucson and helped him close up his apartment. They rented a U-Haul and took turns driving and reading aloud a Dean Koontz novel during the sixteen-hundred-mile trip home."
-- An Addict with Friends - John Leland, The New York Times, Apr. 11, 2014
"During a phone call last Sunday, he talked generally about changing his legal strategy, about writing a book, about finding a gallery to sell the paintings he has been making in his apartment. As in previous conversations, he said he wanted the public to know the real man behind the crime reports. Why, he asked, couldn’t an article about him concentrate on his music, without the tawdry drug stuff?"
-- Nothing Is Alien: An Interview with Leslie Jamison - Merve Emre, The Paris Review, Apr. 7, 2014
"I think about that article published in the New York Times recently-that reading literary fiction makes you more empathetic-because it felt to me that there were meaningful results in those studies, but I wasn’t sure what they were. You read something for three minutes and then perform better on a test? It’s measuring something, but I don’t know what that something is."
-- Letting Go - David Sedaris, The New Yorker, May 5, 2008
"It is here that I’ll identify myself as a Kool Mild smoker. This, to some, is like reading the confessions of a wine enthusiast and discovering midway through that his drink of choice is Lancers, but so be it. It was my sister Gretchen who introduced me to menthol cigarettes. She’d worked in a cafeteria throughout high school, and had come to Kools by way of a line cook named Dewberry. I never met the guy, but, in those first few years, whenever I found myself short of breath, I’d think of him and wonder what my life would be like had he smoked Tareytons. People were saying that Kools had fibreglass in them, but surely that was just a rumor, started, most likely, by the Salem or Newport people. I’d heard, too, that menthols were worse for you than regular cigarettes, but that also seemed suspect. Just after my mom started chemotherapy, she sent me three cartons of Kool Milds. “They were on sale,” she croaked. Dying or not, she should have known that I smoked full-strength Filter Kings, but then I looked at them and thought, Well, they are free."
"In the summer of 1987, Wallace finished his M.F.A. and moved into an apartment on the edge of Tucson. His mood worsened. “Curious Hair” was largely done, and he did not know what was next. “I think he was always afraid that the last thing he wrote would be the last thing he wrote,” Amy Wallace, who is now a public defender, says. In late 1987, Wallace took a temporary job teaching creative writing at Amherst. He wrote to Bonnie Nadell that he was drinking a lot and, like Rick Vigorous, wandering around the campus “remembering disasters.” He returned to Tucson; one day, he called home and said he was thinking of hurting himself. His mother flew to Tucson and helped him close up his apartment. They rented a U-Haul and took turns driving and reading aloud a Dean Koontz novel during the sixteen-hundred-mile trip home."
-- An Addict with Friends - John Leland, The New York Times, Apr. 11, 2014
"During a phone call last Sunday, he talked generally about changing his legal strategy, about writing a book, about finding a gallery to sell the paintings he has been making in his apartment. As in previous conversations, he said he wanted the public to know the real man behind the crime reports. Why, he asked, couldn’t an article about him concentrate on his music, without the tawdry drug stuff?"
-- Nothing Is Alien: An Interview with Leslie Jamison - Merve Emre, The Paris Review, Apr. 7, 2014
"I think about that article published in the New York Times recently-that reading literary fiction makes you more empathetic-because it felt to me that there were meaningful results in those studies, but I wasn’t sure what they were. You read something for three minutes and then perform better on a test? It’s measuring something, but I don’t know what that something is."
-- Letting Go - David Sedaris, The New Yorker, May 5, 2008
"It is here that I’ll identify myself as a Kool Mild smoker. This, to some, is like reading the confessions of a wine enthusiast and discovering midway through that his drink of choice is Lancers, but so be it. It was my sister Gretchen who introduced me to menthol cigarettes. She’d worked in a cafeteria throughout high school, and had come to Kools by way of a line cook named Dewberry. I never met the guy, but, in those first few years, whenever I found myself short of breath, I’d think of him and wonder what my life would be like had he smoked Tareytons. People were saying that Kools had fibreglass in them, but surely that was just a rumor, started, most likely, by the Salem or Newport people. I’d heard, too, that menthols were worse for you than regular cigarettes, but that also seemed suspect. Just after my mom started chemotherapy, she sent me three cartons of Kool Milds. “They were on sale,” she croaked. Dying or not, she should have known that I smoked full-strength Filter Kings, but then I looked at them and thought, Well, they are free."