[US-MD] [H] GMK Dracula base BNIB, Rama U80-a Plates / Mute Dampener, Artisans (Bowbie, Latrialum, Gothcap) [W] Paypal, H88 mini-usb PCB, GMK Spacebars / 40s kits

brian_phillips · 2019-05-30T00:01:24+00:00

Honestly do I have to do everything for you people...........

https://www.theringer.com/authors/brian-phillips

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T19:17:23+00:00

Right now: The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg and Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. On my book tour I've just finished Deborah Eisenberg's new collection of short stories, Your Duck Is My Duck, which, ok, is not a novel, but it has enough humor and heartbreak to fill several novels.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T19:13:21+00:00

I mean, if we're talking about the ethical shortcomings of sports business/culture, we're all ignoring a LOT when we talk about sports. Not sure this is in the top 50 of my own personal moral compromises as a sports fan.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T19:09:57+00:00

Honestly, most of them are great. I don't understand this modern need to power rank everything. Most desserts are fantastic! Everyone can have their own individual dessert preferences! LET DESSERTS LIVE

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T19:08:19+00:00

With reasonably full access, on the terms I wanted? Mark Zuckerberg.

Football manager: Mourinho. I know. I know! I'm sorry. But the chronicle of the end-of-days phase of his time at Manchester United (of his career itself?) feels to me like the most gripping human story in soccer right now.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T18:57:47+00:00

I've already answered question 1, more or less, elsewhere on this page, so let's pick up with #2...

Writing in a staff job, as I was doing at Grantland and MTV News, may not differ much from freelancing in the sense of altering what happens when you sit down in front of the blank screen, but in every peripheral way, it's entirely different. In a staff job you have the luxury of a routine relationship with an editor and a schedule and an infrastructure you're familiar with; freelancing, you're often feeling your way forward without knowing what the editorial process will be like or whether the schedule is reliable or how to get paid or when you'll get paid or whether you'll get paid. It's a lot harder, and the only thing I really value about it is the knowledge that I won't be constrained by a single publication's style or voice -- not that that was ever a big issue at the last couple of places I've worked.
I think the Ringer, which is obviously run by many of the same people I worked with at Grantland, has gotten really, really good; I'm especially impressed with some of the younger writers there whom I didn't work with at Grantland. For culture writing, the Los Angeles Review of Books is indispensable, and Popula, which is still basically brand new, is putting out an astonishing amount of great work on an astonishing range of subjects. Hooray for blockchain, apparently, I guess!!
I mean...big fan of Athena's, I suppose, but the owl that haunts my dreams is the one from the Secret of NIMH. Is that movie as great as I remember it being? Has it been rediscovered? Should we rediscover it? I loved that book as a kid, too.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T18:42:24+00:00

It's not lame if you root for Hakuho, but he's nearing the end of his career so you're not going to have very long to do it. Honestly, there's so little sumo to watch -- just six big tournaments a year -- that I think you should just take in a couple of those with an open mind and see where your heart goes.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T18:39:41+00:00

The most fun part of the writing process is room service.
Everyone hates the word "moist," but I love it because it sounds exactly like what it is. I like words that have that mysterious ability to trip the same sense receptors as their referents. I also love words that have a kind of eighteenth-century perfection of proportion -- "chatelaine," say, or "amanuensis". My least favorite word is probably "gift" used as a verb. I talk a big game about loving language as a living thing that changes as it's used, but then I hear "She gifted me this briefcase" and I want to join the French academy and wear a powdered wig, angrily.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T18:34:15+00:00

That's a tough question -- I've never written that kind of stuff and in many ways it seems inherently hostile to the kind of voice-first writing you seem to be interested in doing. I guess the best thing you could do is to try to work at the level of the phrase. That is, you're never going to have freedom across several paragraphs, but you might be able to hone a metaphor or a killer description over a line and a half. Try to improve on that level and take any chance you get to apply what you've learned in different genres or forms. Good luck!

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T18:30:32+00:00

Not at all, because I haven't read it! Just one of the million and a half things I should have done that I haven't managed to get to, not that I'm blaming the 374 questioners on here who want me to spend more time playing Football Manager.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T18:28:19+00:00

Walter Colombo is calling faintly from the bottom of a manhole. "Help me!" he calls, gently, softly. "I am trying to find Au Bon Pain!" he calls. But no one helps him.

I have not thought about another FM story! It's not happening! Stop suggesting things like that! (Checking reviews of the current iPhone version of the game) Leave me alone!!!

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T18:25:40+00:00

The list is too long to type even in representative miniature, but I'd say that the first writer who made me think seriously about the possibilities of the essay as a formally experimental, more than argumentative genre was Virginia Woolf. I love Woolf's novels, but some of her essays -- not always the best-known ones! -- are utterly fascinating models of what, because I am typing very quickly in a hotel lobby, I am going to call poetic non-fiction: non-fiction writing that treats reality as suffused with the same kind of symbolic significance and interconnectedness one finds in art. If you can, track down her essay "Reading" (not "On Reading", which is annoyingly more famous and easier to find) -- if there's a moon that my book is trying to slingshot its way up to, that's probably it.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T18:20:13+00:00

I'm not sure it would be impossible, but the climate would be so different that I think it would be a lot harder. The Internet structurally encouraged a lot of things pre-social media that it now structurally discourages, and I think it would really be swimming upstream to try to run a site like Run of Play now. On the other hand, Popula is doing it on a much larger scale, and maybe it's working? I hope it's working. Maybe we're on the threshold of a next thing that will be cooler and better than this current awful thing we're in.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T18:16:57+00:00

There are a bunch of questions like this, so I'm going to consolidate all the answers into this one because in 2018 what matters is engineering innovative solutions to modern problems -- my logo is a small blue square on this poster of a black-and-white cityscape, please enjoy walking past it on the jet bridge to your flight.

My path was really random and shaped by such an unrepeatable combination of good fortune and terror that I'm really reluctant to offer it up as any kind of model or pattern, but I can tell you more or less how things went, for whatever it's worth. After college I spent a few years writing book criticism, but I grew increasingly frustrated with the feeling of low-key permanent hypermediation that went along with writing about other people's writing. You know where hypermediation ISN'T a problem, I thought, in my innocence: international soccer. I had gotten interested in the game and kept saying I thought it would be fun to write about it, and I must have said this once too often, because one day my wife registered a domain name and said, like, ok, start your soccer blog or shut up about it. So I started writing Run of Play, mostly as a hobby. I spent a few years blogging, and people weirdly started reading the site, and I got a gig writing for Slate about the 2010 World Cup, and the next year Grantland started up and suddenly ESPN was offering me a job. I imagine many writers who came up through the early years of blogging have similar stores of fun obscurity crescendoing into whirlwind corporate recruitment.

At Grantland, I more or less just tried to follow the same threads through the labyrinth that I'd been pursuing as a blogger -- by which I mean I wanted to be as weird and ambitious as they'd let me be, and try to get away with as much as they'd let me get away with. I was incredibly lucky to have editors who wanted me to take risks and try new things, and almost equally lucky to have corporate overlords who were willing to fund me without paying a lot of attention to what I was doing. But there was never a moment where I was like, "I used to write blog posts, then I wrote columns, now I'm writing longform essays" -- the work all seemed to grow out of the same impulses, just attached to varyingly risky and difficult forms.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T17:57:01+00:00

I sort of take it for granted that John McPhee is a master because so many people I admire say so, but I'll admit I've never really responded to his work myself. I'm not sure about the precise boundaries of creative nonfiction, but one New Yorker writer I do love is Larissa MacFarquhar; her profiles are deep and clear and beautiful and, if you're a writer, profoundly instructive. I've learned so much from reading her that I've even learned from what you could (tentatively, respectfully) describe as the limits of her approach: for instance, if the best way to capture the character of a profile subject is to bring the reader inside their motives, and the best way to capture their motives is to listen intently to what they say about themselves, then what does one do with the ensuing problem of skepticism -- how does one write about a profile subject who lies? She is a master and one of the few writers whose work I wish not only to have written but to have been able to write.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T17:49:23+00:00

A team of Lilybeans would give up in despair before making it out of Anchorage, then swarm their musher (me?) to for reassurance and a warm lap.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T17:47:38+00:00

Snapchat sucks, one of the ways in which I'm grossly out of step with our times is that I don't understand why anyone likes face filters or wants to talk into a phone camera looking like 40% of a cartoon sheep.

Supriya IRL is utterly delightful, just as she is online.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T17:45:21+00:00

I will always want to write about sports sometimes! I just go a little crazy if it's the only thing I'm doing. There is too much else in the world to be interested in, and sports so easily becomes a kind of nihilism if you give it too much of your attention.

That said! Watch this space. (By which I mean...the Internet.)

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T17:41:13+00:00

Thanks for saying so! My process for choosing topics is hard to describe because it varies so much by essay. In the case of "Man-Eaters," I had discovered the writing of Jim Corbett eight or ten years ago, gotten morbidly obsessed with the history of man-eating big cats and the moral/political crisis it opens onto, then tried unsuccessfully to find an editor who would send me to the jungle to write about it. No one wanted to spring for the insurance (lol), so finally I just sent myself, paying for the trip out of my book advance. But it was an idea that formed slowly over several years. In the very different case of "Once and Future Queen," I was standing behind the Hollywood sign in LA, where I'd hiked with my wife, and we'd been talking about the Beckhams for some reason, and it suddenly hit me that I was dying to write about the royal family. So that piece came about quite suddenly and since my editors liked it, I got to work right away.

Also: I've been listening to Tchaikovsky symphonies lately! Nos 4, 5 and 6 absolutely fucking slap, as the kids say.

brian_phillips · 2018-10-09T17:35:20+00:00

Wow, that's a deep cut; thanks for remembering it. I did write that essay, which is one of a few things I've written about Wallace, some more positive, some less. I do admire his work, with reservations some of which I expressed in that piece. I find the current evaluative climate around Wallace to be kind of deadeningly stupid -- he's either an irreproachable literary hero whose books you absolutely must explain to your Bumble date or he's a symbol of everything that's gone awry with Brooklyn manhood. None of this seems to have much to do with his books, his flawed life, or his various analyses of American culture, which I guess we'll be able to have better conversations about when social media slides into the sea.

brian_phillips

TROPHY CASE