Sarah Wrote That

Q: Do you have exceptional literary talent?

A: I thikn so

[from filmsourcing.com]

by Wired New York contributor @ddny2k

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bzdurnik:

“Tonight” is the first track from Saint Etienne’s forthcoming album. Download this track for free at www.saintetienne.com (limited time only)

This brightens up a dark, rainy Friday…

Reblogged from Bzdurnik

Close-reading a Downton Abbey B-Plot

Mary and Sybil’s interactions in this week’s Downton Abbey (season 3 episode 2) b-plot were a particularly well-done bit of writing, very complex and real and satisfying, partly because the place where it lands us is for now relatively without consequence in a show that often limits its gratuities to shit the Dowager Countess says.

Read on →

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton | Part 2, Chapter 11:

Lily, lingering for a moment on the corner, looked out on the afternoon spectacle of Fifth Avenue. It was a day in late April, and the sweetness of spring was in the air. It mitigated the ugliness of the long crowded thoroughfare, blurred the gaunt roof-lines, threw a mauve veil over the discouraging perspective of the side streets, and gave a touch of poetry to the delicate haze of green that marked the entrance to the Park.

As Lily stood there, she recognized several familiar faces in the passing carriages. The season was over, and its ruling forces had disbanded; but a few still lingered, delaying their departure for Europe, or passing through town on their return from the South.

Lily in her eventual destitution does a lot of walking around Midtown, which was evidently even more devoid of places to rest without buying something than it is today.

I’d forgotten that Wharton refers to “a little restaurant in Fifty-ninth Street,” not on. I wonder when that usage changed.

photo: Museum of the City of New York
Easter Sunday outside St Patrick’s Cathedral ca. 1902
Edwin Levick, Frederick Lewis

Edith Wharton in 1905
photo: Edith Wharton Restoration

Tuesday is Edith Wharton’s 150th birthday and the Times is on it with the Downton Abbey angle, which despite its if you like [x] you might also like [y] is not really a stretch (Americans with no titles and aristocracy with no money).

Wharton’s birthplace (14 W 23rd Street) is now a Starbucks.

Noodling through some of her stories,* I’m struck by how, though the language is dated, it’s no differently dated than other (nonfiction, non-‘literary’) pre-Modernist writing—I don’t have a sense of passing through some impermeable barrier into Art where every sentence is held in such tension that to remove one word brings down the whole affair. They read lightly and like gossip; they assume you know what happened in Milan or Modena and what any Vanderleyden would do in such a situation… or else why would you be reading?

Which is not to say say she’s unserious. She has such a gift for epigram, as in “The Descent of Man”:

Her marriage had been too concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically… […] Her husband’s personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the sky and cutting off the air, till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved hopes.

Much of Wharton would not fare so well in show-don’t-tell workshops. Too bad for us. I do think one can’t write these days with the same assurance about readers’ background and beliefs**, and reading Wharton I cringe occasionally at figures of speech (“every fiber of her being”) and gestures (“the blood rushed to her face”) that have now and maybe always had long passed their expiration date. But the stories—the plots—are so good.

Largely because they are very much of and at home in the world. I think that’s one of the reasons A Visit From the Goon Squad resonates so, and so differently than much contemporary (and arguably more crafted) fiction. There’s as much living and looking there as there is writing.

* let’s just shove copies of House of Mirth at people and deny Ethan Frome exists
** or maybe not, ahem Freedom

Impressions of the Maiden Voyage of the ‘Queen Mary’ to New York (1936)
Charles Chislett
Yorkshire Film Archive | Cunard Queens [blog]

You really do want to click through to this 30 min. black and white silent film (unfortunately not embeddable). Chislett brought his camera through Times Square at night, on the El, up to “The Yankee Stadium,” and to the top of the Woolworth and Empire State Buildings. He traveled across the Atlantic third class:

The cost of a trip to New York was, for cabin class, £53.15s (equivalent to £2,710 in today’s money, r.p.i.) – according to Merseyside Maritime Museum, this was enough to “keep a family with three children in food for over a year.” The cost for third class was £18.10 (equivalent to £942 in today’s money, r.p.i.) …[…] taking into account how average earnings have risen since 1936 makes it equivalent to £3,530. A considerable sum for a 31 year old bank employee (and this may well have been the cost for just for a one-way ticket!).

Two or three weeks ago, I wrote to my Congressman, John Olver, protesting SOPA and PIPA*. This morning his office replied:

Critics have raised several objections to these bills. Some worry that their definition of an infringing website is overly broad and could lead to the shutdown of US sites without due process. There are also concerns that the bills may affect the Internet’s reliability, security, and performance and give content owners the power to stifle Internet innovation and protect outdated business models. For these reasons I am opposed to the bills in their current form and hope that new legislation can strike a proper balance between protecting IP and preserving the freedom and dynamism of the internet.

When I checked Senator Brown’s website (I’d deleted his quicker but as I recall more equivocal reply) it and all of Senate.gov were loading erratically.

*forever fixed in my mind as that tapas restaurant attached to ABC Carpet

"[T]he meatiest bits feature the three wealthy Crawley daughters, reared like veal, though sharp as vipers"

- Emily Nussbaum on Downton Abbey, in The New Yorker

xgray:

(via Stanley Kubrick’s New York: Incredible Photos of Life in the 40s)

Great series.

Reblogged from DunnRaw