— Esquire offers a helpful guide to men who want to get more mileage out of their everyday speech. Start by talking about cloning the mammoth more often. And watch how you use the following words. Bro? Never. Douchebag? Retired. But dadgum? Yes. Sumunabitch? Always.
— Colson Whitehead, our true love, explains how to build a dartboard that will inspire a novel.
— Tao Lin nails this review of Werner Herzog in a very Tao Lin way.
— This album—kind of a mindblower—is based on the speech patterns of a group of neighbors in a multicultural part of downtown Toronto. You can listen to it free. Does anyone want to see this performed live in New York with me on November 28 or 29?
— On the spread of English across the globe, and the possible fate of endangered languages.
— Philip Roth says the novel is going to die. But he’s really old. He might be projecting.
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You know, it’s really hard to ignore the depressingly obstinate and out-to-lunch elements of that Roth interview when people keep insisting on bringing them up. Just kind of inconsiderate, that’s all I’m saying.
Word. I think the TDDL blog needs an update.
Philip Roth is so old, they didn’t even have douchebags in his day. They had sheep bladders, soaked overnight in lye, that squirted water through a hollow reed.
Philip Roth is a ‘douchebag’
“Modern English is more efficient, more economical, more effective, plainer — in a good way — than it used to be, all of which makes it better suited to its ultimate purpose: getting what’s inside us out. There’s less need for translation. Especially between men. Men understand other men more clearly than at any other time in our shared history, because we’ve become exceptionally good at smashing the bottles that once trapped our messages.”
Uber Barf. Two things:
1. “Especially between men”? So this implies women are somehow less direct or understandable? Believe me when I say directly and without hidden agenda: This is bull crap.
2. Modern English’s main purpose is all about, according to this Mr. Jones, “getting what’s inside us out.” If that’s not the most male-centric, thinly veiled illusion to speech (and by extension language and writing) being a sex-act, I don’t know what is. Go jizz all over someone else’s magazine, Mr. Jones.