Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land Coming Soon
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Nobody knew much. We all stood around the breezy, hot parade ground in short-sleeve pastel shirts and chinos, talking committedly, chins tucked into our necks, the pale, wispy grass smelling of shrimp, ammonia, and diesel, trying to unearth good concrete memories—the deaf-school team we played in football that hilariously beat the shit out of us—anything that we could feel positive about and that could make adolescence seem to have been worthwhile, though agreeing darkly that we were all of us pretty hard cases when we arrived. (Actually, I was not a hard case at all.)
Maybe the most exciting book news I’ve ever heard. Read more of the excerpt here.
Ricky Jay is Fascinating
Saturday, August 26, 2006
At that point, I had known Jay for two years, during which we had discussed his theories of magic, his relationships with and opinions of other practitioners of the art, his rigid opposition to public revelations of the techniques of magic, and his relentless passion for collecting rare books and manuscripts, art, and other artifacts connected to the history of magic, gambling, unusual entertainments, and frauds and confidence games. Studying videotapes of him and observing at first hand some of his serendipitous microbursts of legerdemain have taught me how inappropriate it is to say that “Ricky Jay does card tricks”-a characterization as inadequate as “Sonny Rollins plays tenor saxophone” or “Darci Kistler dances.” None of my scrutinizing has yielded a shred of insight into how he does what he does. Every routine appears seamless, unparsable, simply magical.
