Sarah Wrote That

millionsmillions:

#LitBeat: The Common in the City

by Tiffany Gibert

Let’s be honest: if The Dog House Band, the most well-known literary musical ensemble, is headlining an event, many of the guests will attend just to watch critic James Wood rock out on the drums. Luckily, the band plays quite worthwhile events, such as last Wednesday night’s benefit for The Common, a non-profit print and online magazine, which aspires to publish writing and art that “embody particular times and places both real and imagined; from deserts to teeming ports; from Winnipeg to Beijing; from Earth to the Moon.”

With only three issues in its lifespan, The Common is still young, but the editorial board boasts names like Mary Jo Salter, Claire Messud, Richard Wilbur, Jim Shepard, and Wood himself. When it comes to literature, they’re a trustworthy bunch, and the small event space in Manhattan filled with guests happy to spend $50 to support the magazine—a small sum for the opportunity to snack on imported cheeses and roasted fiddlehead ferns and to share a signature cocktail with Dog House Band guitarist (and writer) Sven Birkerts.
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This was such a fun evening, dancing alongside @lizarnold, @andevers, and Sabina Murray, and managing, when Zadie Smith ended up next to the conversation I was in, not to skip a beat (partly because, typically, I wasn’t certain it was her until she was by the elevators).

Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker in the 1974 Gatsby. Its line readings seem to me too often exactly that, recited rather than said in response to other characters or on the spur of the moment, but her Jordan is exactly as I’d imagined.

05.23.12
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Queensboro Bridge
Manufacturing plants, Manhattan in the distance
January 30, 1931

cf. opening shot of Luhrmann’s Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s chapter 4:

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

thunderclapstorm replied to your photo: Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby trailer is out—what do you…

if you are a NYC architecture nerd what did Manhattan look like 1912? Curious. I’m writing novel and need that for a scene and can’t find anything compelling.

Only a few skyscrapers, lots of horse-drawn traffic, els, long-vanished brownstones—yet largely recognizable, street grid the same, all the pieces in place. Check out:

Library of Congress Bain Collection
Museum of the City of New York
NYC Department of Records photo collection

05.23.12
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Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby trailer is out—what do you think? First thing I notice is that he drops 1932’s financial district (Bank of Manhattan Building, Cities Services Building) into 1922. Which, yes, I’m a huge NYC architecture geek; but some CG artists or matte painters had to make those buildings, so I wonder whether it was an error or, more likely, a temperamental preference for culmination to origin; a decision that the actual early Jazz Age didn’t look jazzy enough compared to the skyline by decade’s end.

I’m provisionally sold on Weathered DiCaprio as ~~Howard Hughes~~ Gatsby and Carey Mulligan as Daisy, but Toby McCarraway still looks about 5 years too young for Nick, and though Bruce Dern wasn’t tall enough for Tom Buchanan, he had the meanness down cold.

Today and a week ago. On the tree-lined streets, shadows almost have their summer depth and Amherst feels—that is, sounds—largely deserted. As a bartender explained to me earlier this week with what seemed equal rue and satisfaction, when the university went from two to three summer sessions, thinking to gain an additional round of enrollments, it moved up the first day of the first session to the Monday after spring semester ends. So for the next few weeks, the town is left mostly to year-round residents.

Even more than the warmth and the quiet, it’s the newly complicated quality of light that slows me on some metabolic, respiratory level; after the blink-and-miss-it of this or that flower or tree in bloom for a week or less, I have a sense of having arrived at not at a season but a place that has been here all along.

05.19.12
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Using Tumblr as a Lit Journal CMS

This week, after two years and three issues, I handed off UMass’s Route 9 to to new editors. We started in 2009 on WordPress, but after two issues I decided we were best not just having a Tumblr but being a Tumblr. The potential for pieces to be reblogged or featured was appealing, of course, but my main reasons were practical: run entirely by MFA candidates, the journal, if it continues to thrive, will be handed off every several years. Tumblr frees future editors from also having to be server admins, while allowing customization that would otherwise require managing (and paying for hosting for) our own CMS.

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05.11.12
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[h/t @MiraPtacin]

West End Avenue
Looking north from 70th Street
Woman at left in fur coat fixing car engine
December 27, 1927

I love what stood out to the archivist in this shot of my old building (first of the tall blocks on the left), with West End looking like I’ve always imagined the arrival to Tom and Myrtle’s pad in Gatsby:

the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses

The block with hobbit-hole top floor windows in the foreground would go before the Crash to make way for another of the behemoths that in this photo were mostly less than five years old. No stoplights, no crosswalks; horses sharing unmarked lanes with cars—it all feels at once swank and like a frontier town:

the city rising up […] in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money.

[NYC Municipal Archives]

A book spine poem:

Here is New York
Something like ten million
In September, the light changes

05.06.12
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