The Boy from Jurassic Park’s College Application Essay →

Julia Drake:

However, my experience on the park was more than a simple voyage of academic discovery. It was also a complicated and profound transition into adulthood. I overcame copious obstacles such as surviving a Tyrannosaurus rex attack, escaping from a treed car, and being electrocuted by a high-voltage fence. Overcoming these obstacles required great courage and also newfound maturity. Indeed, the adult traits I acquired surviving dinosaurs will make me an enthusiastic and passionate member of a college community, whether I brave a Friday night dance or experiment in a new discipline, such as figure drawing.

Pretty, pretty—pretty—pretty good.

David Foster Wallace’s Syllabus For English 183D: Creative Non-Fiction Workshop →

David Foster Wallace:

Description of Class

English 183D is a workshop course in creative nonfiction, which term denotes a broad category of prose works such as personal essays and memoirs, profiles, nature and travel writing, narrative essays, observational or descriptive essays, general-interest technical writing, argumentative or idea-based essays, general-interest criticism, literary journalism, and so on. The term’s constituent words suggest a conceptual axis on which these sorts of prose works lie. As nonfiction, the works are connected to actual states of affairs in the world, are “true” to some reliable extent. If, for example, a certain event is alleged to have occurred, it must really have occurred; if a proposition is asserted, the reader expects some proof of (or argument for) its accuracy. At the same time, the adjective creative signifies that some goal(s) other than sheer truthfulness motivates the writer and informs her work. This creative goal, broadly stated, may be to interest readers, or to instruct them, or to entertain them, to move or persuade, to edify, to redeem, to amuse, to get readers to look more closely at or think more deeply about something that’s worth their attention. . . or some combination(s) of these. Creative also suggests that this kind of nonfiction tends to bear traces of its own artificing; the essay’s author usually wants us to see and understand her as the text’s maker. This does not, however, mean that an essayist’s main goal is simply to “share” or “express herself” or whatever feel-good term you might have got taught in high school. In the grown-up world, creative nonfiction is not expressive writing but rather communicative writing. And an axiom of communicative writing is that the reader does not automatically care about you (the writer), nor does she find you fascinating as a person, nor does she feel a deep natural interest in the same things that interest you. The reader, in fact, will feel about you, your subject, and your essay only what your written words themselves induce her to feel. An advantage of the workshop format is that it will allow you to hear what twelve reasonably intelligent adults have been induced to think and feel about each essay you write for the course.

I’m starting to wonder if the real written treasure that D.F.W. left behind is his syllabi.

/via The Howling Fantods

Why We Like Our Own Farts

One of the most common retorts in my household—“That’s because you like sitting in your own filth!”—seems so much more plausible now.

/via Devour

Hue and Cry Notice →

Ellen Barry:

On average, the police in [New Delhi] register the discovery of more than 3,000 unidentifiable bodies a year — unidentifiable not because they are unrecognizable, but because they carry no documents and there is no one who knows them.

There’s an entire world of pain out there, in which people operate in a totally different sphere of existence. We, here in the United States, know almost nothing about it.

‘100’ →

EDW Lynch:

The Leica commercial “Leica 100” looks back at 100 years of Leica photography through cleverly staged recreations of famous photographs. The commercial includes recreations of photos by Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, and Neil Armstrong, among many others. “Leica 100” was created by ad agency F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi for Leica Gallery Sao Paolo.

Sea of Crises →

Brian Phillips:

In January I flew to Tokyo to spend two weeks watching sumo wrestling. Tokyo, the city where my parents were married — I remember gazing up at their Japanese wedding certificate on the wall and wondering what it meant. Tokyo, the biggest city in the world, the biggest city in the history of the world, a galaxy reflected in its own glass. It was a fishing village barely 400 years ago, and now: 35 million people, a human concourse so vast it can’t be said to end, only to fade indeterminately around the edges. Thirty-five million, almost the population of California. Smells mauling you from doorways: stale beer, steaming broth, charbroiled eel. Intersections where a thousand people cross each time the light changes, under J-pop videos 10 stories tall. Flocks of schoolgirls in blue blazers and plaid skirts. Boys with frosted tips and oversize headphones, camouflage jackets and cashmere scarves. Herds of black-suited businessmen. A city so dense the 24-hour manga cafés will rent you a pod to sleep in for the night, so post-human there are brothels where the prostitutes are dolls. An unnavigable labyrinth with 1,200 miles of railway, 1,000 train stations, homes with no addresses, restaurants with no names. Endless warrens of Blade Runner alleys where paper lanterns float among crisscrossing power lines. And yet: clean, safe, quiet, somehow weightless, a place whose order seems sustained by the logic of a dream.

It’s a dream city, Tokyo. I mean that literally, in that I often felt like I was experiencing it while asleep. You’ll ride an escalator underground into what your map says is a tunnel between subway stops, only to find yourself in a thumping subterranean mall packed with beautiful teenagers dancing to Katy Perry remixes. You will take a turn off a busy street and into a deserted Buddhist graveyard, soundless but for the wind and the clacking of sotoba sticks, wooden markers crowded with the names of the dead. You will stand in a high tower and look out on the reason-defying extent of the city, windows and David Beckham billboards and aerial expressways falling lightly downward, toward the Ferris wheel on the edge of the sea.

The subheading for this piece, Grantland’s initial, I think, foray into design-conscious, long-form, "Snow Fall"-style narrative journalism, is:

A sumo wrestling tournament.
A failed coup ending in seppuku.
A search for a forgotten man.
How one writer’s trip to Japan became a journey through oblivion.

The collision—pun intended, in a piece about sumo wrestling—here between the content and the style, and the author’s voice, is magical. “Sea of Crises” is so, so worth your time; you will be transported. Read it as soon as you can.

New Use For a Microsoft Surface: iPad Stand →

Ben Lovejoy:

Microsoft must have thought it had pulled off a nice piece of product placement when it gave CNN election commentators a bunch of Surface Pro tablets to help with their coverage. CNN dutifully covered its desks with the devices, resulting in a series of proud tweets from Microsoft fans.

There was just one small problem, noted by GeekWire: a closer look revealed that hidden behind the Surface tablets were the iPads that commentators were actually using. In one case, the commentator was actually using her Surface tablet as a stand for her iPad.

The silver lining on an otherwise dark, dark political night.

David Foster Wallace’s Syllabus For 'English 170R: Selected Obscure/Eclectic Fictions' →

David Foster Wallace:

COURSE DESCRIPTION
It’s a 170-grade Advanced Seminar, meaning it’s “speaking-intensive” and presupposes the basic set of lit-crit tools taught in English 67. Structurally, the course is meant to be more a colloquium than a prof.-led seminar. We are going to read and converse about nine novels (some of which are kind of long) dating from the 1930s–1970s. They’re books that are arguably good and/or important but are not, in the main, read or talked about that much as of 2003. At the least, then, English 170R affords a chance to read some stuff you’re not apt to get in other Lit classes. It would also be good to talk this term about the dynamics of the Lit canon and about why some important books get taught a lot in English classes and others do not — which will, of course, entail our considering what modifiers like “important,” “good,” and “influential” mean w/r/t modern fiction. We can approach the books from a variety of different critical, theoretical, and ideological perspectives, too, depending on students’ backgrounds and interests. In essence, we can talk about whatever you wish to — provided that we do it cogently and well.

Another “Dave W.” syllabus, another masterpiece. Sidetone: can you imagine trying to bullshit your way through one of his classes? To his face? I get the shivers just thinking about it.

/via The Howling Fantods

Finally →

Casey Liss:

Life seems to happen in stages. As someone who has had a Facebook account since 2004, I’ve seen it. All of my friends got married (we were one of the first). All of my friends got pregnant. All of my friends had kids. We started on the marriage bandwagon before nearly anyone. Erin was a couple months shy of 24 and I was 25. Yet here it is we’re on a treadmill, and can’t progress forward. At this point we’ve been married 6 years.

I stop looking at Facebook daily, like I used to. I rarely look at it anymore. I just can’t stand it; every other post is about someone’s baby. I’m happy for them… I really am. But I can’t see the constant reminder of how we’re falling short. Of how we can’t seem to conceive.

I don’t listen regularly to the podcast Casey Liss is a part of, ATP, often, but when I saw that his son was born a week ago, I downloaded the episode. After hearing about and reading the linked-to piece above, I’m glad I did.

The Blair Witch Project, 15 Years Later

I’m linking here to two essays from The Dissolve about what I still think is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen, The Blair Witch Project. First up, Mike D’Angelo:

Found-footage horror, which had previously barely existed as a genre, became so popular that it’s still going strong 15 years later; there are movies in multiplexes right now that only exist because of The Blair Witch Project. Shot for an initial budget that’s been reported as less than $50,000, it grossed just shy of $250 million (closer to $350 million, adjusted for inflation), making it one of the most profitable films of all time. Its two directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, were even on the cover of Time. Apart from Paranormal Activity—a direct descendant—there’s been no little-indie-that-could sensation like it since.

Oh, one more thing: America fucking hated it.

And then we’ve got a conversation between Nathan Rabin and Scott Tobias:

The one thing I like about found-footage horror films—and Blair Witch is certainly the gold standard of the form—is that they have to rely on the fundamentals. The film is scary as hell, but in the harsh light of day, we realize we’ve been freaked out by piles of rocks, stick configurations, and the flapping of a tent. Though I think the film actually includes some striking, even stylized, images—the angle on Heather’s face during that snot-filled confession, the discovery of the wooded area full of hanging stick figures, that utterly chilling final shot—the interplay between darkness and light, and onscreen and offscreen information. It doesn’t take a dime to achieve effects like that, either. Horror is the one genre that isn’t really helped by money being thrown at it, and Blair Witch affirms that as well as any movie I know.

The fact that some people were angered by the lie associated with The Blair Witch Project is ludicrous and has always been. All movies are based on a lie, especially in the horror genre. Once again, Happy Halloween.