6/30 Reading in Bryant Park!

From Underwater New York:

Wednesday, June 30

12:30 – 1:45 pm

Bryant Park

An afternoon with Underwater New York

Featuring

Music for Underwater Things by Michael Hearst;

Readings of original underwater-y stories by

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Ed Park, Personal Days: A Novel

Nelly Reifler, See Through: Stories

Said Sayrafiezadeh, When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir

Deb Olin Unferth, Vacation;

And an underwater letter-writing activity from

Ben Greenman, What He’s Poised to Do: Stories

The world and the word

A short plug here for Ed Park’s novel, Personal Days. The book is replete with inventive wordplay (unwanted backrub given by a character named Jack = jackrub; character called Graham with whiny British accent is renamed Grime). Plus, there’s a nice un-Eating Sideways moment. It’s when the narrator suggests that there should be a French expression, along the lines of l’esprit d’escalier, for the sensation of being initially amused but later unnerved by something that’s said to you. —PRI's The World (podcast on language)

"Work Friend Accidentally Becomes Real Friend"

Phipps, 31, told reporters that the interactions with his coworker, which for two years had been confined to job-related matters and breezy small talk, first took an unplanned turn toward authentic friendship this past March. According to Phipps, he and Jenkins happened to leave the office at the same time one day and decided to kill half an hour at a nearby bar before heading off to separate evening engagements. —The Onion

Let's do "lunch"

Coworkers, in phone calls, always sound like they're plotting bank robberies.
—TWSL

Keep holding

Your call is important to us.

That is why, although we are not now answering,

we will, as soon as possible, answer,

provided you keep holding.

If you do not keep holding,

we assue you

we will not answer

—from Philip Dacey's "Recorded Message" (in The Deathbed Playboy)

How bad do you want it?

Dandy Warhols, "All the Money, or the Simple Life"

The Brown Corpus

Speech recognizers make educated guesses at what is being said. They play the odds. For example, the phrase “serve as the inspiration,” is ten times more likely than “serve as the installation,” which sounds similar. Such statistical models become more precise given more data. Helpfully, the digital word supply leapt from essentially zero to about a million words in the 1980s when a body of literary text called the Brown Corpus became available. Millions turned to billions as the Internet grew in the 1990s. Inevitably, Google published a trillion-word corpus in 2006. Speech recognition accuracy, borne aloft by exponential trends in text and transistors, rose skyward. But it couldn’t reach human heights. —Robert Fortner, "Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition"

(Via Jenny D)