Sarah Wrote That

Night Scene, West from 500 Fifth Ave, showing Times, Paramount, Astor & Edison Hotels.
Byron Company, 1937 (photographer unnamed)

Chance and Attention →

I have a guest post over on HTMLGiant about teaching creative writing:

Ideally what happens in creative writing classes is less different from the way we write on our own than academic trappings and the rituals of workshop™ might make it seem. We’re hopefully reading widely and intently regardless, developing a personal canon and an ear for line-level nuance, an eye for overall shape. We identify techniques, try them out, learn to recognize our failures, and move on. We do most of this on our own, and presumably want to.

Read on →

Last week’s Hairpin piece reminded me I hadn’t had a Grüner Veltliner in a while. I’ve yet to find a bad one.

yellow-glasses:

A ‘Hygge’ Guide to Copenhagen

Copenhagen is known for many things, such as the little mermaid or Tivoli Gardens, but one of the most interesting things about this place is actually indoors, and called ‘Hygge’.

Well, I’m ready. [h/t Autumn Watts]

Reblogged from Where the heck is Mr. Jones-Güngör?

"Language, in these instances, is regarded as a kind of afterthought or additive: first come the feelings to be embodied in words and only then does word choice kick in, designed to make the resulting discourse appear ‘poetic’."

- Marjorie Perloff via Elizabeth Cantwell. I love this essay.

Reblogged from Line Breaks & Other Violent Crimes

"Really, almost everything that’s been done since was done in Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy. So I find that very heartening, too. Just remember this was invented as a flexible, strong and swaggering form that could do all kinds of things that other forms couldn’t do."

- Jennifer Egan is hopeful about the novel’s ability to assimilate and adapt. In Capital New York [by Dan Rosenblum via @tmcgev]

granta:

Granta 118: Exit Strategies out February 2! Includes new stories by Alice Munro and Anne Tyler, memoir from Claire Messud, John Barth and Alexandar Hemon and poetry by Adrienne Rich.

Hello, Granta!

Reblogged from GRANTA

“…and thus the whole suit lapses, and melts away. Jarndyce and Jarndyce… is no more!”

Recommended: watching the entire 2005 Bleak House at one go.

photo: Allison Devers

I’m re-reading Howards End for the first time in a decade or more, and @andevers’s cozy shot of snowy London crossed my desk shortly after I’d gotten to Margaret and Mrs. Wilcox’s Christmas shopping expedition:

They drove from shop to shop. The air was white, and when they alighted it tasted like cold pennies. At times they passed through a clot of grey.

Last winter was exhausting but the snow drought we’re having here in New England is creeping me out.

From Chiltney [a fragment]

She’d been baptized Elizabeth Darby but at Chiltney Farm she was Lizzie, second youngest of ten, with lips that felt less outsized when she was moving them, and a broad face that to her oldest sisters’ secret astonishment boys couldn’t steal enough glances at. She took the longest time at the mirror, getting her reflection right. A blessing, the oldest sister said; a curse, said the next, the undisputed pretty one until Lizzie came along, not that anyone called Lizzie exactly ‘pretty’; not that you’ll do well to think pretty lasts or will do you much good, said their mother.

What did do Lizzie good—and if anyone wanted to argue they kept it to themselves—was that in June when she finished Third Form, her mother said a girl her age, with her face, would do better bringing home a few pence extra minding Galston’s High Street Shop than doing her sisters’ chores.

Tha knows best, Lizzie’s father said.

I guess I do, her mother said.

Read on →