links for 2009-11-13

November 13, 2009 in Links

• Klosterman on the Transcendent Interview – Short Stack
  I feel incredibly fortunate that I'm able to sustain a career writing about things that interest me personally. I can't have the expectation that, if something is interesting to me, it isn't universally compelling. Any time I have ever tried to write something and anticipate what people might be interested in, it always fails. You can't fabricate intellectual enthusiasm for a subject. I write about things that are interesting to me and hope that they are interesting to other people, but I don't expect them to be.
  (tags: interview journalism writing)
• Dear Ms. Goswami
  Here is our perception of you: You are a lazy writer. And a lazy columnist. You do not respect your readers enough to try making sense; resorting to cliches of the worst kind, all the time. You compensate for your poor standards by talking down to your readers—you do this most often by talking about US trends in general and Hollywood in particular, and positing yourself as some kind of insider and perceptive “spectator”. But you see nothing except what your own media feeds the masses. You augur a terrible age, in which people who are raised on meaningless mediated values, grow up to spout those same values, louder and lower, in that very media.
  In short, you are a writer of no substance. Most of your readers know a great deal more than you.
  This is not a new discovery for us, or a new anger at the sudden realization that trees are cut to distribute your column. This is the summation of a strong opinion formed over the course of years.
  (tags: writing journalism criticism snarky)
• What Do 15 Best-Selling Authors Teach Us? – Sources of Insight
  ome books and authors change how we think.
  I was catching up with an old friend and I was distilling some of my favorite books into one-liners to show the contributions of various authors. He suggested I share them as a post, so here it is
  (tags: books thinking review)