October 2009
62 posts
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Laundry Day
The grandfather sets the washing machine to fill with cold water. That was one of the things his wife had whispered from the hospice bed: “You can do almost everything in cold water.” He’d stained a beige shirt pink before realizing: there were other warnings she’d forgotten.
This load is all browns and reds. It’s November. Can’t go wrong with buffalo-checks. He bought a shirt for his...
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JJ, “From Africa to Málaga”
via...
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Watchgillianmae: theblueprint:
Jay-Z feat Alicia Keys: “Empire State of Mind”
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“Nancy Pelosi’s socialist health care bill is almost as long as Infinite...”
– Pareene
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Marathon Weekend
Mary HK Choi points out that Halloween seems unusually hyped up this year. But who has time for ghouls and goblins when Sunday is the New York City Marathon? Liz Robbins has marathon tips; Tara Parker-Pope looks at our amazing adaptation for running:
Most mammals can sprint faster than humans — having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun...
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The More You Know...
I JUST THIS WEEK realized there’s a keyboard shortcut for em-dashes—you don’t have to let Word make them from a pair of normal dashes.
See? Wasn’t that easy?
Shift+Option+Dash.
Live it. Love it. Use an em-dash today.
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Brooklyn Dreaming
Reading Andrea Rosen’s post about a ‘Drano bomb’ in Williamsburg was the first time in years I’d thought much about ‘South Williamsburg,’ as Gothamist called it in a 2008 article on machete attacks. I’d passed it on the BQE and on the bridge approaches, dipped into it on the way to Diner, but all my friends in the ’burg lived further north and have since moved to Greenpoint or Queens, and I never...
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Our Robot Overlords Bring Economic Stimulus
My only question is: why can’t 1-Obama produce a serial number and date of manufacture?
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“When I finish a book, I think, ‘What will I do? Where will I get an...”
– Philip Roth talks with Tina Brown
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Too Hip?
Recommending Endgame, I also have to post the trailer for Stander—movie trailer as music video par excellence. It’s so cool and efficient about conveying essential information, and the match-up of music, shots, cut points is just perfect. I always meant to see if the movie resembled its trailer, and to find the soundtrack without also finding a malware site…
Still, does the...
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Endgame
Don’t let any stuffy associations with PBS’s Masterpiece keep you from Endgame (available for online viewing through 11.06). It’s tense drama, shot Paul Greengrass-style (hand-held and fast—riots! German shepherds! Dick Cheney William Hurt! Derek Jacobi in pinstripes!) The blown-out palette is reminiscent of Pitch Black, Man On Fire, and The Constant Gardener. If that’s...
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Can 15,000 Brooklynites Be Wrong?
Alana Joblin Ain’s account of falling out with the Park Slope Food Co-op maps amazingly—and no doubt intentionally—onto accounts by those who’ve extricated themselves from sketchy sects.
The Co-op’s math, if nothing else, could use some re-examination; membership has almost doubled from 8,000 in 2002, yet the Co-op still requires “2.75 hours [of work] every four weeks for each adult member of a...
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We're In Luck
I was re-reading Lucy Corin’s fantastic story “My Favorite Dentist” and wanted to share it with you, and lo and behold, it’s the Red Room excerpt for her 2007 collection The Entire Predicament:
You are my favorite dentist. You don’t look on my chart and ask me how my job is. You never duped me into listing my hobbies, not six months ago, and not six months before that....
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Canoeing? "Try Not To Tip"
Sad, funny, as strange as PoMo Brooklyn fiction strives to be, and maybe with a rainbow-shiny, oil-slick gleam of hope at its stagnant end: the continuing saga of the Gowanus Canal:
High above us loomed a long-abandoned powerhouse for the old streetcar lines, now tagged with anticorporate slogans. A couple of years ago, it was taken over by squatting punks, who were rousted by foreign investors,...
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doree:
The NYTBR has published a counterpoint, by Book Review editor Gregory Cowles, to Michiko Kakutani’s evisceration of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City. Cowles writes approvingly, of a passage in the book, that it contains:
a wonderfully slippery list of references, at once dense and daft, as if Susan Sontag had written alternate lyrics to the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World...
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Hope For TV Writers, Viewers →
the head of NBC Television admitted what analysts have known for a while: that trying to set a schedule with an eye on the bottom line doesn’t really work.
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(Inter)National Book Award Finalists
The announcement ten days ago of the finalists for the National Book Award prompts a thoughtful riposte from Liesl Schillinger to the comment made last fall by Horace Engdahl, then spokesman for the Swedish Academy, which decides the Nobel literature prize, that American fiction is “too isolated, too insular”:
…Three of the five candidates in the fiction category [for this year’s...
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The Fascination Of What's Difficult
Laura started a good discussion at Apt. 11D about Friedman’s take on the need for education reform. The moustache of understanding Friedman thinks that education needs to focus on… well, on what Tom Friedman focuses on:
So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
(You might note the missing...
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“While it’s tempting to call them ‘baristi’ because of the Italian roots, the...”
– Fake AP Stylebook (via andrearosen: ryanbrown)
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She Chose A Quiet Street
The morning lovers lived downstairs, and if she overslept they gently tapped her headboard against the wall. The afternoon lovers crossed her kitchen ceiling to their bed, and she played them space jazz she thought they’d think was sexy, and wouldn’t know. Saturdays she was left no hint, upstairs or down. She woke to sidewalk cafés already full, women in sweatpants at the fruit market. ...
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The Like, “What I Say And What I Mean”
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A Rabble Of Worrying Freebutters
Yesterday I caught myself employing usage I recall first hearing on cable news. A lot of expressions from mainstream or social media are fun, like shared jokes. The trick is knowing when to drop the joke. “WTF,” “fail,” “not so much”—aren’t they all getting to be like Top 40 hits you’ve heard one too many times?
But some usage sounds wrong from the start, and for me this was one of those...
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Rise Of The Machines
Ever wonder how James Cameron dreamed up Skynet and the terminators? Dana Goodyear profiles him in this week’s New Yorker:
One night, he [Cameron] said, he dreamed of “a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire.” Then he sketched the figure cut in half and crawling after a woman. He said, “I thought, That was cool. I’ve never seen that in a movie before.”
…Cameron… recruited...
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Oil vs. Soap
He preferred oil to soap.
“People were using soap for thousands of years before they discovered germs,” he said, “and now you’re telling me it just turns out to be useful?”
This wasn’t the main reason we broke up. But it’s always the first I mention.
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Better Pricing Through Monopoly →
This American Life finds that insurance companies can be both victims and the good guys, that more competition doesn’t necessarily mean lower prices, and that hedgehogs are CUTE.
If this is the result of a ceaseless quest for quirk, more quirk, please!
Go listen. Right now.
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Meanwhile, At The New Yorker Festival
Lots of coolness from the usual suspects and then some. Full run-down here; some of my particular favorites:
Talking about New York with Mad Men creator Matt Weiner
Adopting novels for the screen, with Sapphire and Kalefah Sanneh
Neko Case talking with Sasha Frere-Jones: “If I was a musician who only made music from my publishing, I’d be so fucking poor.”
Donald Antrim, A. M....
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Junot Diaz, On Becoming Junot Diaz →
My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn’t budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn’t been pretty damn cool. But they were cool, showed a lot of promise. Would also have been fine if I could have just jumped to something...
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The Way We Write Now: Casually
Gawker alerts us that the Times has embraced “epic fail”:
Cake Wrecks, Jen Yates’s popular blog and new book of the same name (Andrews McMeel, $12.99), [celebrates] the folly of professional confections gone horribly, horribly wrong. Think of them as epic fails, with frosting…
…By last fall, around 100,000 visitors a day were gawking at Cake Wrecks. More than a million people subscribe to Ms....
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Among The Reasons To Love The 90s
The late ’90s were a heyday for ads that took their time creating a mood for products they were ostensibly selling, which made it easy, working in advertising, to feel one was actually producing a kind of video poetry that caught what it was like to be twenty-three or thirty better than anything on the big screen—even if it’s difficult to come up with what the ads were saying,...
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West 69th Street
The wonderful thing about an old-fashioned street grid are the possibilities for varying your journey depending on whim and traffic.
NYC Grid looks at one of the blocks I used to take to Central Park.
(N.B. this photo is by me, from 2008, not one of NYC Grid’s—terrific—set)
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“Who Do You Love,” Museum of Bellas...
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Live Lit
I’m reading tomorrow at 8 at Amherst Books.
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D.J. Food
Family dinner was hugely important for all three of us… We would sit there, talking for hours long after the food was gone and… it’s when we all really sort of entered one each other’s lives in a really profound way
Terry Gross talks with Ruth Reichl about the end of Gourmet, Ruth’s latest (!) memoir, Not Becoming My Mother, and the new recipe book Gourmet...
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Bar Night
The first night Veronica sat with what she hoped was a sad little turn to her mouth. How dare Reyna, yes, how dare she? They—the four women, though these days it was more often three, and even two some Fridays—had never said women only, but Fridays had been women only for as long as they’d been meeting, years now, since they’d all worked in the same office. And he was so young, twenty-five,...
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Watchwoodlandcreature:
If you didn’t watch 60 Minutes last night (and you probably didn’t…), you need to watch this segment. It’s about dudes who jump off huge mountains wearing weird plastic suits and zoom around at speeds up to 140 miles an hour. Craziness.
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Something Out There
In the New Yorker Money Issue, Nick Paumgarten writes about people who search for cycles and patterns underlying finance. (A subscription is required to view the entire article but the abstract is still fascinating stuff, especially if you’re, say, thinking of writing a conspiracy-minded thriller!!).
Paumgarten, as feature writers often do, uses a prominent example (here, financier Martin...
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Meet The First Year Students
How nice—the New York Daily News profiles one of NYU’s first-year MFA students. She recounts her acceptance:
“[The] head of NYU’s program said they were excited about my writing… I don’t know if she says that to everybody, but it felt pretty good.”
She good-naturedly plays along in the article’s accompanying video, no doubt delighted simply to be able to say, “I’m at...
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All The Hits Fit To Predict
NPR Morning Edition looks at David Meredith’s Hit Song Science:
“[It’s] a series of algorithms that we use to look at what’s the potential of a song to be sticky with a listener,” Meredith says. “To have those patterns in the music that would correspond with what human brain waves would find pleasing.”
Meredith says his software found that hits have certain...
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So Imagine You’re On The Nobel Peace Prize...
…and you feel it’s important to recognize Lady Gaga. Artists only get one first album, and you haven’t danced the way you dance to “Poker Face” since the Clinton Administration. She writes her own material… maybe she’s not as revolutionary as she or her fans claim, but you don’t think she’s famous just for being famous (even if she did name her album The Fame).
But—you tell yourself in quiet...
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Blogger Agonistes
Emily finds that book-editing has adversely affected her blogging:
I do think that blog-writing is a different kind of writing than edited printed-matter writing [but now] I keep doubling back and second-guessing and tweaking my word choices and my grammar in even the most basic (i.e., m-dash-free) of sentences…
At some point during this process… I lost the heedless confidence that is...