December 2009
73 posts
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I Remember My 00s
I remember riding on the back of A.’s neighbor’s low-rider through Williamsburg at three A.M. I don’t remember who sat beside me. I remember waving to a car one block over, and the two cars pausing at a half dozen intersections before one of us turned off. I remember gripping the seat back, up onto the Williamsburg bridge, and looking ahead, at taillights, pylons, anything but down.
I remember...
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“We too have lived through an era of stability, certainty, and the illusion of...”
– Tony Judt
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Friend: Are you into sports?
Me: Well, theoretically—
Friend: You're not into sports.
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The Rich Are Different...
…they can write things like Anthony Lane’s delightful piece on Grace Kelly:
A home movie exists of the children at play, on a beach—perhaps at the family vacation home in Ocean City, New Jersey. The children, in bathing costumes, are still small, and each is summoned forth to face the camera and salute, as if being a Kelly were a form of active service. When in Rome, you can see the...
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DFW And The DWM
I love David Foster Wallace’s literary criticism, his attention to the symbiosis of diction and ideas, how each determines the other. In English departments ‘craft’ analysis—”how a poem [or story] means,” as pithily put by I wish I remembered who—is the domain of creative writing types, and distinct from critical studies. Conversely, creative writing classes are...
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RückseiteÜberraschung
Everything I chanced upon on the Internet today was funny (well, not this or this. Three guesses as to why we don’t hear more about tainted food). Instead! BBC reports on condom size problems in India and South Africa. And WTF, Comcast? More substantively, Pareene has the last word on Whole PaycheckFood’s John Mackey in possibly my favorite Gawker post this year.
Then...
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Will Leitch:
We came to New York City not because we wanted to get rich, at least not most of us: We came here because this was where you could do whatever you want and be paid for it. It was more altruistic—thus, dumber—than capitalistic.
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WatchDirector: Yohann Gloaguen
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Just Like Fashion It's A Passion For The With It...
The Times gins up some page views compares Michelle Obama’s and Sarah Palin’s style. In making the two women a focal point for the year, the piece veers from lists of peripherally related issues to what their choices seem to typify so that initially it’s hard to find a main idea other than: look! (Poor Cindy McCain. No style piece for you).
For some reason, both the Times and...
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Sad: I.D. Magazine 1954-2009 →
(via designage via noahkalina via Jesse Ashlock)
we can blog and tumbl and tweet ourselves silly, [but] I think we all know what’s being lost.”
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"The Decade We Had"
Ten writers. Eight Men. Two Women. Really, Times?
Colum McCann, however, rocks 2008:
Fiction deals elegantly with issues that politics eventually wrestles with, corrupts, destroys, but nothing specific had been written to prepare me for President Obama. I wasn’t able to align him with any fiction, and yet it seemed that so much of literature has worked toward the moment. From Vladimir Nabokov...
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Spiers's Fav Book-length Fiction; My Fav Short...
Elizabeth Spiers recommends her ten favorite fiction books of the 00s, including J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help, and George Saunders’ Civilwarland in Bad Decline. Four of the ten are short story collections
which are hard to sell and tend to have less longevity than full-length novels, so I have a bit of bias in promoting them. And their lack of...
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Thoughts On "The Gawker Decade"
Doree Shafrir’s New York magazine article on netiquette prompted a good discussion that in light of Gawker’s winning Adweek’s award for ‘Blog of the Decade’ and Mediaite christening the 00s ‘The Gawker Decade’ is doubly interesting. Particularly this from peterfeld:
Gawker is Gen X (maybe not some of the newer ones writing it now, but it’s a Gen X...
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“She was remembering other Advents, and hedges snowy as sheep from her window,...”
– Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow pp. 127-136
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Greenland Melting
nybooks:
In 1999, the German photographer Olaf Otto Becker took a picture of a glacier in Iceland for his first book, Under the Nordic Light. When he returned to photograph the same glacier three years later, it was gone. Becker’s photographs from [his latest] expeditions appear in his latest book, Above Zero, and are now on view in exhibitions in New York City and Copenhagen.
As Eve Bowen...
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In Soviet Russia, Hair Cut You
My shallow but sincere reaction to this still from 1972’s Solaris (in New York’s Avatar-bandwagon, but still geeky fun, piece): what were Communist haircuts like? When did the U.S.S.R. get blow dryers? Did they have hairspray? Mousse? Really. In the 80s did they suffer from perms and shortages?
For all the billions of dollars and rubles we spent arming ourselves, how little we...
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If On A Winter's Blog A Traveler
In the U.S. we sand and salt the roads. The British grit theirs (apparently, insufficiently).
I do love Briticisms. We drive on the northbound lanes; they drive on northbound carriageways.
Now, what would they call unobtonium?
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Mountain Watching
Kevin Grange:
When poet Gary Snyder applied for a lookout position in 1952, the North Cascades was still being managed by the Forest Service. Snyder had high hopes of reading the collected works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Blake during his stint as a seasonal ranger, and when he asked for the “highest, most remote and most difficult-of-access lookout,” he was granted lookout duties atop...
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Paul Krugman Needs A Tumblr →
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Run This Town
Of course Princeton, New Jersey is attractive. Its long-standing wealth is immediately apparent in the design and upkeep of buildings private and public. When I was photographing this post I considered titling it ‘The Comforting Proximity of Millionaires’ (from Gatsby, but without Nick Carraway’s sarcasm). But the baronial interests me less, and is usually more derivative, than clever solutions...
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A Message From Your Local English Major
(latke photo via)
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Annalee Newitz compares Avatar and District 9:
Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s...
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WatchSnoop Dogg and Martha make brownies. I know what you’re thinking. So does Martha.
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“Students thinking of going to graduate school in English should understand that...”
– Rosemary Feal, executive director of the M.L.A. Link via Gawker.
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The Dream Of The Blue Cougars
I’m actually looking forward to Avatar, and hopeful that Manohla Dargis is correct and it’s finally The Next Big SciFi Thing that displaces The Matrix aesthetic.
But what I want to talk about is Coltan.
Dargis, and David Denby in The New Yorker, among others, liken the Avatar story to that of John Smith and Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s The New World, or to Dances With...
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Highwaywoman
Driving up the Garden State Parkway this afternoon I was tailgated through Metropark and Iselin by a minivan with a line drawing of a white wheelchair on a blue placard swinging from its rearview mirror. One of the old stone bridges we passed under was festooned with American flags blown like scarves against chain link fencing, and a black poster that read:
Support the troops Win the War!
I...
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There's A Metaphor In Here Somewhere
Remember the episode of the 1980s Twilight Zone in which everyone around our hero gradually begins speaking a kind of nonsense English, with apparently standard syntax and intonation, but words transposed with no discernible logic? And everyone else understands one another… Our hero’s first indication of a problem should come when his wife refers to lunch as ‘dinosaur,’...
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That's Me In The Corner
My story “Where We Chose” is out today in Open City #28. It’s about New Jersey:
In the evening while Jacob did homework and Shawn checked each channel’s news I went out to get the mail. The sky was white and distant behind the cicadas and the scraping silhouettes of leaves.
If you’re in New York, the issue release/holiday party is tonight: 7-9pm The Hi-Fi Bar, 169 Avenue...
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“As long as they don’t starve to death, committed jazz musicians will be...”
– Seth Colter Walls, in Newsweek All too many professions that I value could be substituted for “jazz musician” without changing the sense of that sentence: fiction writer, poet, primary care physician, organic farmer, local bookstore owner, composer, writing instructor… Oddly...
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London Calling
Much recent goodness from the London Review Of Books.
Colm Tóibín’s review of Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life begins with “The Swimmer” and Cheever writing in his diary, after seeing a male figure by a swimming-pool, about the urge
to plunge into life, to race after our instincts, to upset the petty canons of decency and cleanliness, and yet if I made it in the shower I...
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“I like a president willing to talk about ‘is-ness’ and...”
– E.J. Dionne However satisfying it was to hear Dionne and Brooks one-up each other’s approval of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize response, Gary Sick’s analysis sounds a lot closer to my reaction (except that mine sounded more like “huh?”)
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Four Years Of Foliage
In October 2007 in New York it seemed one couldn’t have a conversation without someone mentioning the warm weather. Not in a smalltalk way—more like the Ancient Mariner, or someone who fears she or he has seen a ghost. The year before I’d been in Central Park shooting video at peak color, and I decided to revisit the same spots. In places, trees that had been leafless by that time...
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Jezebel declares ‘douchebag’ “totally over”:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a word that shows up in a Times trend piece must be in want of a replacement
Can we also universally declare the opening line of Pride and Prejudice worn out and off-limits, and give it back to Jane?
I’ve never liked the ‘douche[bag]’-as-insult trend. Too many...
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“Every night the summer drowned carelessly in the middle of the village.”
– Herta Mueller
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Renminbi vs. Yuan
Sometime in the past year the Times’ writers seemed to switch from ‘yuan’ to ‘renminbi’ when referring to China’s currency. I apparently haven’t been the only one confused. Paul Krugman explains:
I sometimes think that the whole renminbi/yuan issue is a sinister plot by the Chinese designed specifically to deter people from discussing Chinese currency...
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Local Heroes
Northampton gets a shout-out in Brian Kitely’s new novel The River-Gods, which NPR’s Alan Cheuse digs.
Over on Salon, Kelly Link’s Magic For Beginners makes Laura Miller’s (odd) list of the decade’s best books.
The Pioneer Valley—“arguably the most author-saturated, book-cherishing, literature-celebrating place in the nation.”
It hadn’t quite...
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“Cultural critique always relies on some idea of the way people ought to want to...”
– Stefan Collini
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My Print Debut
I have a story in Open City #28 (Winter 2010), available December 15 (or place an advance order here). I really can’t overstate how happy this makes me.
The issue contains fiction by Jonathan Dee, Sam Lipsyte, Leslie Maslow, Michael McGrath, Gary Lippman, and Christopher Sorrentino; poetry by Sophie Cabot Black, Ben Nachumi, Kevin Oberlin, Adam Peterson, James Schuyler, and Dan Sofaer; and...
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Those '90s Clothes →
Meaghano has a nice piece on You’ve Got Mail over on A Bright Wall in a Dark Room.
meaghano: janambm:
This is obviously super, super important.
For me, “You’ve Got Mail” was the first movie I’d ever seen in a theater that made me go “YES.” That was it. That was what I wanted.
…There was nothing about that movie that didn’t make me want to dress in 90s clothes and skip down a city...
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All The Gordons That I Know
Gordon Lightfoot
Gordon Lish
Gordon Liu
Gordon Liddy (G.)
Just because it’s a pattern doesn’t mean it makes sense.