Rachael Maddux

"BLVR: Are we just swamped by fear? I mean, is that what is really going on? Not that we actually..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:12:00 -0400

“

BLVR: Are we just swamped by fear? I mean, is that what is really going on? Not that we actually think that what happened in our lives is less meaningful—just that we’re overwhelmed by fear and that’s how we translate it to ourselves?

TM: That could be. It could be. It could also be that things feel meaningless to us not because the alternative to their ending is their going on forever, but because the alternative is their going on a little bit more. You know what I mean? But then, we come back to the same question—why should it go on a little bit more?

My mentor once told me a story about a plant that is in the garden of some of his relatives in Singapore. The plant blooms for an hour every, I don’t know, four or five years, and it’s a beautiful bloom. And he describes what happens when people gather around the plant. They know when it’s going to happen; I guess it’s kind of like clockwork. And he says they all come and they have cameras, and it’s so urgent for them to capture this thing. And he said that it’s as though they don’t see it, because they’re so busy capturing it, instead of just sitting there and allowing this thing to happen. … But I suspect that that idea of the momentary beauty somehow just isn’t enough and perhaps is connected to that fear that you talked about. There is that sense that for it to be more meaningful, it has to last at least a little longer.

”

- The Believer | Interview with TODD MAY

A smart, kind conversation about dying and not-dying.

Things that happen at work, sometimes: My deeply crappy magazine...

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:14:00 -0400

Things that happen at work, sometimes: My deeply crappy magazine cover mock-ups (complete with ludicrous fake math equations, please do not look too closely), become really super beautiful for real-real magazine covers. Also: I write about coffee, corn fungus research, balancing judgeship and parenting, and how to be wrong. Hey!

"Uncle Tom was to walk at the head of the procession blowing his squealing horn, while Tuck came just..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 11:38:00 -0400

“Uncle Tom was to walk at the head of the procession blowing his squealing horn, while Tuck came just back of the trumpet blower dragging the remains with a borrowed plow line. Next in line was Dan, crying like a woman on her 30th birthday, but keeping an ear cocked for the fine things we were all saying about what a great dog that Drum had been. Prof. Sam Jared, being better educated than the rest of us, walked at his side and gave both moral and physical support while the less talented of our members straggled along behind with handfuls of wild honey suckle that Joe Rollins had gathered as he came over Pilot Knob that morning. We were disputing among ourselves as to the advisability of letting Bro. Jeff Wall sing, but finally agreed that Drum had suffered sufficiently already and might not be dead enough to stand the strain, so we dropped him into a sink hole on Capshaw’s branch without further ado.”

- In the 1940s, my great-great-uncle Bob Lee Maddux wrote a series of letters to The Hunter’s Horn magazine about fox hunting and hunting dogs in and around Cookeville, Tenn., where he lived and where my dad’s whole family is from; in 1951 the magazine printed a collection of his columns and now I am reading them for the first time and they are beyond fantastic. This is a description of a “fancy funeral” held for one man’s dog who was shot by another hunter for running a sheep on his farm. It took me too long to read these things in the first place and now I might not ever get through the rest because I am just re-reading this perfect paragraph over and over and over.

OLD AS BALLS (Previously)

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:05:00 -0400

OLD AS BALLS

(Previously)

“We will be moving momentarily.”

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:35:00 -0400

“We will be moving momentarily.”

"I’ve had really smart agents and unnervingly good editors, but I don’t need THEM to lead..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:44:00 -0400

“

I’ve had really smart agents and unnervingly good editors, but I don’t need THEM to lead me astray; I will happily do that to myself. I write about culture, and sometimes I’m soaking in that shit so much that I don’t notice how flaccid and limp my prose has become, how bland and dumb I’m getting, how little faith I suddenly have in my voice. I start thinking I should write shit that I hate, in a tone that I cannot fucking get behind, because maybe that will make my financial picture a little less stressful.

That’s when I call my friends and talk their sad ears off, and mewl and moan and piss myself until they have to pretend their cell phone connections cut out just to get off the fucking phone with me.

You know what I need to do though? Put the phone down and ask myself who in the whole wide world is supposed to take responsibility for what I write if I won’t do it myself.

”

- The Awl | Ask Polly: Jesus, My Struggling Writer Friends Never Shut Up!

The above, by Heather Havrilesky, contains some of the best writing advice (or, maybe more specifically, living/working advice for people who write) that I’ve read in a very long time. Lately I’ve found that the more questions I’m asking, the more I’m throwing my messes at other people in hopes that they will be able to name and untangle them for me, the more it’s time for me to shut up and just do the work my own damn self. See also: Renata Adler, “Writers rant. Writers phone…” I tend not to phone—it’s more frantic, long-winded emails—but the work-averse impulse is the same. Having good, solid friends and mentors and various other types of ears you can put bugs into at all hours of the day and night is hugely valuable, of course. But undersold, I think—to young writers at least—is the importance of being able to call your own self on your own self’s probably very real and abundant bullshit.

Here is the great video for Pistol Annies’ “Hush...

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:31:00 -0400

Here is the great video for Pistol Annies’ “Hush Hush,” which has been lodged in my brain for more than week now. And here is something I have written for Slate about the seemingly unlikely but increasingly cozy relationship between weed and country music. And now I would like some green bean casserole please.

"You don’t really think about it, but our brains are really just above our noses all of the..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:38:00 -0400

““You don’t really think about it, but our brains are really just above our noses all of the time,” says Barrow Neurological Institute neurosurgeon Peter Nakaji. “This is one of the more common conditions to be missed for a long time… because so many people have runny noses.””

- MyFoxPhoenix.com | Man’s chronic runny nose was actually brain fluid leaking (via @sarahspy)

Last week I spent a few days bumming around small towns in...

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:49:29 -0400

Last week I spent a few days bumming around small towns in middle Georgia on a meandering reporting trip where one of the only must-do’s was visiting both of the Yesterday Cafes that claim to have the best buttermilk pie in the state. This one was superior. But the other one looked just like it.

This is gorgeous: 205 illustrators each contribute one panel to...

Mon, 06 May 2013 16:38:00 -0400

This is gorgeous: 205 illustrators each contribute one panel to Infinite Corpse, an “exquisite corpse”-style comic about… well, a really exquisite corpse. It took me a minute to orient myself because I thought I needed to find the first strip, but apparently “it has no beginning and it has no end,” so you can just jump in anywhere. Super beautiful (and creepy and sad and funny…. AND INFINITE; I think I lost a not-insignificant part of the past hour to it). (via @colinmeloy)

"A couple of chips and salsa at the beginning of my shift for quality control purposes. Work exploded..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 12:48:00 -0400

“A couple of chips and salsa at the beginning of my shift for quality control purposes. Work exploded into rollicking margarita-fueled bedlam and I was running around like a crazy person. I had to pee for five hours. At one point my hands started quivering weirdly and I wondered if the pee had gone back up inside my body and was poisoning my blood. I had a couple tacos before the kitchen closed, at 9:30, ribeye with cilantro and onion and salsa verde. Some pals of mine had come to eat at my restaurant for a birthday celebration, one of them was Sam, one of them was Teri, I gave them a free dessert, a cajeta crème brulee thing. I had a couple of bites of it once the rest of the customers were gone. I accidentally opened up a bottle of Dos Equis Amber for no reason so once the restaurant was closed I drank it. I deserved it. I got home at 1:25 AM and ate a Golden Delicious apple.”

- Strawberry Fields Whatever: The Strawberry Fields Whatever Diet: Everything We Ate For An Entire Week (Spring Edition!)

My new favorite thing on the internet/in the world, thank you Lindsey.

Audio

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:17:11 -0400

"This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: May 2, 2013 An..."

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:56:00 -0400

“

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the products sold at By Brooklyn. The store does not sell dandelion and burdock soda, lovage soda syrup, and Early Bird granola “gathered in Brooklyn.”

An earlier version also referred incorrectly to the thoroughfare that contains the thrift shop Vice Versa. It is Bedfoprd Avenue, not Bedford Street.

”

- New York Times | How I Became a Hipster

OK!

Basia Bulat covers Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory...

Thu, 02 May 2013 11:14:00 -0400

Basia Bulat covers Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” for The AV Club, makes me cry a little at my desk, reminds me how much I loved Oh My Darling when it came out. In 2007! God! I think I put “The Pilgriming Vine” on every mix I made that year and it’s still great.

On MARTA this morning, in rapid succession

Thu, 02 May 2013 10:15:00 -0400

— A young man offered a young woman his seat (she declined).

— An older man thanked the young man for offering his seat to the young woman.

— Another young man complimented another young woman on her shoes.

— I braced myself for some shitty counterbalance, but nothing came.

So, so into it. Also: “Weed Instead of Roses”!

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:46:00 -0400

So, so into it. Also: “Weed Instead of Roses”!

"During the worst dark nights of the soul, my smaller failings rise up one by one in a chorus of..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:20:00 -0400

“

During the worst dark nights of the soul, my smaller failings rise up one by one in a chorus of metallic voices: that unwritten, obligatory important letter; my tipsy, laughing, unintentional, klutzy faux pas booming into a sudden silence; the failure to speak when speaking would have helped someone…

These things are much worse to recall than any of my gigantic, life-changing mistakes. Those are boulders too big to see all at once, hulking, unmoving, and strangely safe, whereas the little things generate a cascade that turns into an avalanche. They’re all connected to one another somehow, neurochemically, so that remembering just one of them sets off a chain reaction sparking all the way back through the decades with increasing urgency until I’ve looped through my entire life, all the way back to the first one, which now seems worse than ever in light of all the others.”

”

- Kate Christensen’s Blue Plate Special is out in July, and this is from the very first page, so you know you’ll want to devour it as soon as possible. (via maudnewton)

I understand that it is a healthy and worthwhile thing to read books that challenge your thinking, that “make you see the world” “in new ways” and “expand your horizons” and “broaden your thinking” and “take you out of yourself” and all that, but also there is nothing quite like reading a series of sentences that precisely capture a feeling or a thought or experience you have had but that you have not yet put into words, or that you tried and failed to put into words, or that you put into words but not quite the right words, or that you encountered in such an abstract way that you hadn’t quite got to the point of thinking about them in terms of language, but now you don’t have to, because they exist in the world in the form of someone else’s effort, pure comfort and reassurance that you are not crazy, or at least not alone. This is the same feeling I get when I go into a hardware store, sometimes. Thankful that someone else has done the work to invent all these bits and pieces to solve my problems and stop up my gaps. Which is to say, I’m really really excited about this book.

I love this album but I know I would have loved it more ten...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:33:09 -0400

I love this album but I know I would have loved it more ten years ago—exactly ten years ago, actually, the summer between high school and college, when I was 18 and when being 23 seemed like the most extraordinary, frightening, fantastic thing. This is it, exactly it, the 23 I thought about at 18. It was a tall tower I could see from miles away that I never stopped approaching until it was suddenly in my rearview, just as far away as it had always been. I was never going to be that 23, just like I’ll never be that 18 again, or the 23 I actually was again, but I thought about it then, and I think about it now sometimes, mostly when I’m listening to this record, this time traveler from my never-lived past.

Scene from a semi-illegal MARTA photo-shoot in process.

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 18:03:22 -0400

Scene from a semi-illegal MARTA photo-shoot in process.

Laura Stevenson’s The Wheel is out today and I can’t...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:47:00 -0400

Laura Stevenson’s The Wheel is out today and I can’t think of the last album that I felt this way about. Like it was possibly made in a lab for me? Which is a perhaps deludedly narcissistic way to feel about art, but I feel it. I reviewed the record for eMusic—here—but it feels insufficient. To even come close to explaining exactly how deeply I feel this record I would have to spend months trying to write through/about my very early-dawning (still lingering) awareness/fear of death… which happens to be something I’ve been doing anyway, so that’s convenient, but not exactly something to burden casual eMusic browsers with. Anyway, this record. You should hear it.