I’ve posted a chapter of my memoir every week since January. This will be the first week I skip in five months. I think I’ll take a breather next week too, and then I’ll return with Chapter 24 the week after.

Some have asked me how I manage to keep up this pace, and wonder if I’d begun some of this writing before. I have not; it’s all new. If you’re reading a chapter of my memoir on a Wednesday night, that probably …

1. After interviewing Philip Roth, James Marcus turned a culturally significant Roth utterance into an audio dance track (via Moby Lives).

2. Sarah Weinman unearths another writer in the Singer family, Hinde Esther Singer.

3. Kenyon Review: “What happens when a poet’s own name is invoked in a poem of her own making?”

4. Adira Amram of the wonderful musical Amram family has released her first record. Looking forward to hearing this!

5. McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan now

A dustup is always fun. Caleb Crain basically murdalizes a non-fiction book called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton in today’s New York Times Book Review. It’s an exciting article, but after examining the plays in detail I’m not quite sure who wins.

A critic who sets out to write a strongly negative review ought to open with a powerful point, but Caleb Crain actually punches himself with the opening paragraph, which posits many doubtful assertions as fact:

Work is …

(This is chapter 23 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

In July 1998 a three-year-old Internet streaming audio startup called Broadcast.com began selling shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The shares opened at $18 and shot up to $74 on the first day — a stunning success, and one of the biggest first-day stock jumps in modern financial history.

Internet stocks had been exciting high-risk buys on Wall Street since Netscape’s historic initial public offering in August 1995, but it was …

1. How delightful to learn that James Joyce may have invented the word ‘blog’ during a typical conversational ramble in Finnegans Wake! Here it is in context:

Now from Gunner Shotland to Guinness Scenography. Come to the ballay at the Tailors’ Hall. We mean to be mellay on the Mailers’ Mall. And leap, rink and make follay till the Gaelers’ Gall. Awake ! Come, a wake ! Every old skin in the leather world, infect the whole stock company of the old …

Like Harriet M. Welsch, I love sneaking into places. For instance, when they started building a new baseball stadium for the New York Mets in 2007 I just knew I’d have to find a hole in the fence (this is my philosophy of life: every fence has a hole in it somewhere) and explore. I took my daughter Abby early one Sunday morning, and we scored big-time. We even got to stand on the rudimentary pitchers mound and take …

(Today’s special guest reviewer is Scott Esposito, founder of The Quarterly Conversation, a literary review, and Conversational Reading, an associated blog.)

The June 21 issue of the New York Times Book Review gets off to an bad start with Katie Roiphe’s front-page review of A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century by Cristina Nehring (the review also briefly discusses Against Love by Laura Kipnis).

The problem with Roiphe’s review is twofold: lack of specificity and excessive credulity. She continually hints at …

(This is chapter 22 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

My satisfaction with the response to Notes From Underground didn’t last very long. It’s a strange thing to suddenly get public attention, especially if you are a shy or quasi-Asperger’s person as I generally am. Being noticed is both addictive and repellent.

As slight as my brushes with “web celebrity” were during the middle and late years of the 90s, they always left me feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed. It’s …

When I was young, I used to go to the public library and head straight for the “P” aisle in the fiction section. Then I would wander through the stacks until I came to Proust. I would gaze with awe at the seven volumes of the work that was called, at that time, Remembrance of Things Past. I would take a volume off the shelf, leaf through it, and put it back. The strange sounding titles, Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove, The …

1. For your Bloomsday enjoyment: comic strip artist Robert Berry is visualizing James Joyce’s Ulysses. This project appears to be off to a great start.

2. More Bloomsday action: Dovegreyreader on a new book called Ulysses and Us by Declan Kibberd.

3. Farewell to poet Harold Norse.

4. It must be a good sign that somewhere inside the giant paradox that is the nation of Iran, they are loving the inventive and hilarious early writings of Woody Allen.

5. …