Sarah Wrote That

millionsmillions: #LitBeat: The Common in the City by Tiffany...

Fri, 25 May 2012 16:14:00 -0400

The Dog House Band

The Spread

Stephen O'Connor reading

#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.
Read on →

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...

Wed, 23 May 2012 12:25:00 -0400

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.

Queensboro BridgeManufacturing plants, Manhattan in the...

Wed, 23 May 2012 01:25:48 -0400

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...

Wed, 23 May 2012 01:10:00 -0400

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

Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby trailer is out—what do you think?...

Tue, 22 May 2012 23:31:00 -0400

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...

Sat, 19 May 2012 14:27:00 -0400

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.

Using Tumblr as a Lit Journal CMS

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:27:00 -0400

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.

Splash!
I wanted a homepage carousel so we could rotate pieces from the current issue, or from past issues when on hiatus. While in most Tumblr themes, every index page, whether the homepage, first page of a search, ‘/tagged/poetry,’ or ‘/page/10,’ has the same layout, blog-style, Tumblr’s custom theme variables elegantly embed database calls in HTML markup, making it straightforward to vary layout based on what’s getting displayed.

For our carousel, placing splash elements within a <div> with display set to none, and setting the hiding div to load only where there are previous pages, and on tag and search pages, results in the splash elements displaying only where the hiding div doesn’t—on the homepage.

Slideshows, sliders, and carousels can be added with one of many free jQuery plugins. Setting their images, text, and links as Tumblr custom text makes them accessible from the Customize theme screen so they can be updated as easily as setting a Disqus ID or changing theme colors—no subsequent coding needed beyond copying and pasting URLs.

HTML for Writers
To get around Microsoft Word’s famously un-web-friendly formatting, we paste from TextEdit—particularly important for poems, where pasting from Word makes each line its own paragraph instead of ending lines with a

<br/>

and stanzas with a

</p>

For photo captions, we use

<small></small>

to make text small. (I’d love to see Tumblr include that as a menu-bar option along with bold, italics, and ~~strikethrough~~, but it’s easy enough to add by hand).

Bios, set as

<h4></h4>

get their own formatting (set in CSS) on posts viewed on the site, but on the Tumblr dashboard h4 simply shows up as standard text.

Simple = Safe
Designing Tumblrs, you’re always designing for both your own theme and the dashboard. The dashboard steers you toward a relatively simple palette, restraining the intricacies that are the bane of many a CMS locked into what made sense under deadlines long forgotten to designers who’ve long since moved on. However beautiful a design may be, however robust an architectures, people need to use—and want to use—it. Tumblr is extraordinary in that regard—and not just for Tumblrs.

[h/t @MiraPtacin]

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:17:00 -0400

[h/t @MiraPtacin]

West End AvenueLooking north from 70th StreetWoman at left in...

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:52:00 -0400

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 YorkSomething like ten millionIn...

Sun, 06 May 2012 20:03:00 -0400

A book spine poem:

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

1. New York, East River, moonlight (c. 1888) 2. New York City...

Sun, 06 May 2012 14:07:00 -0400

New York, East River, moonlight

New York City street scene, from above

Panoramic View from W.U. Telegraph Bldg

Looking Down on New York's Skyscrapers

1. New York, East River, moonlight (c. 1888)
2. New York City street scene, from above (c. 1870-90)
3. Panoramic View, South from W.U. Telegraph Building (c. 1875)
4. Looking Down on New York’s Skyscrapers—From Woolworth Tower (c. 1913)

Quite pleased with these, which took a bit of tweaking to get aligned properly (I know there’s a plug-in but the tweaking is fun). In the last three the sense of distance to the back of the picture feels to me like time translated into space; while in the first, with the sun on the water, everything but the coal smoke tug could have been snapped today.

Woo hoo, I’m feeling all proud and silly—two stories I...

Thu, 03 May 2012 22:35:00 -0400

Woo hoo, I’m feeling all proud and silly—two stories I published last year in Route 9 made it into Wigleaf’s 2012 “(Very) Short Fictions”: in the Top 50, “The Chemical Mist” by Rachel B. Glaser, and in the Long List, “Echo and His Brother” by Brian Mihok.

Congrats also to Danny Goodman and fwriction: review for Jen Knox’s “Types of Circus” in the Top 50 and Anthony Leubbert’s “The Education of the President’s Dog Quincy” in the Long List.

I love the Wigleaf Top 50 for its expansiveness as well as its reliably good eye. It casts a wide, good net, and it’s done a lot to build recognition of shorter fiction, and online fiction, as artistically serious mediums. I believe this is the first year Tumblr-based journals have been included, and I’m so tickled that one of them is Route 9.

The First Rule of Cool

Thu, 03 May 2012 21:37:00 -0400

Gawker [h/t Why not, she said]:

Political journalists are deeply uncool people, and not in the way where they’re, like, so uncool that they’re actually cool. They are constitutively uncool. They are not to be trusted on matters of coolness.

The first rule of cool
is not to say what’s cool

on sweat and need
agreed—uncool

except when cool
neither cool or uncool

choose rules
rules are for the ruled

the rules of cool for the uncool
are no different than the cool rules

cool slides in cool
hot comes in hot

and then is not
cool stays cool

Obama on “The Waste Land” and T.S. Eliot got me to...

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:00:00 -0400

Obama on “The Waste Land” and T.S. Eliot got me to click over:

I haven’t read ‘The Waste Land’ for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements — Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality.

And then that picture. That look.

[Buzzfeed: 16 Revelations About Young Barack Obama From His Ex-Girlfriends]

nycgov: The Tallest Building in New York City (1 WTC) As of...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:50:00 -0400

nycgov:

The Tallest Building in New York City (1 WTC)

As of 2 pm today, according to the Daily News.

I’d be sorry to see this locked in its Instagram filter, except that pseudo-1913 strikes me as a gracious nod to the Woolworth Building, once again in its original glory after thirty years overshadowed and a decade marking that terrible gap.

oliveryeh: “Ok aspiring fiction writers, if you’ve ever...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:13:00 -0400

oliveryeh:

“Ok aspiring fiction writers, if you’ve ever wondered how to write a successful novel, the secret is here: kill off your characters. Of the handful of books that won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2011, all 13 novels had the common theme of putting to death main characters…” Read more…

Novel-writing as Jungian subway map—you think you’re boarding the Escaped Tiger Local, maybe transferring a hundred pages in to Totalitarian Bucharest where it runs parallel to the Nanny Issues line, with a transfer to Horniness one level downstairs. But no; all tracks shunt onto the one-way main line express…

[full-size: 1920 x 1182px]

shotgunsnack: bobcat sayin hey in AZ Bobcat: Don’t...

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 22:31:00 -0400

shotgunsnack:

bobcat sayin hey in AZ

Bobcat: Don’t grieve…. It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh…
Cat: …the needs of the few…
Bobcat: …Or the one. I never took the Kobayashi Maru test until now. What do you think of my solution? ….I have been and always shall be your friend.

Sunday Lessons

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:14:00 -0400

a fragment after Sebald

The autumn before I had moved just off the park, and I recall the late rosiness of a midwinter Sunday, when the branches that interleave down every street in that section of the city were bare and visible to such a distance in the slantwise light that they lent the grey cracklature of Flemish masters to intersections a half-mile off through which the few cars slid with the appearance of silence, their acceleration impossible to distinguish from the ambient roar, even in those years when the city was not so prosperous and many shopfronts remained broken-glassed or boarded, parked cars secured with locks across their steering wheels, and a buttoned-up hurry perceptible in the strides of passersby, less from quickness of their steps than from their hands in pockets or held close to their sides, gazes averted or cast far ahead, tensed and ready muscles palpable in their staccato steps, spines rigid, heads locked into safe angles as if tight against the cold.

But that afternoon was not cold, as I recall, for I remember walking in a knee-length tweed skirt up a long block toward the grey cracklature that receded further the further I progressed into it; and fresh from London and before that Madrid as I was, I would have worn long pants on any day forecast to be truly cold to the continental degree that New York was still able to chill then, with the wind racing up from the river and a blue above similar to expanses over Manitoba and Saskatchewan or other wide-blowing provinces that were before me then. I only knew weather from the radio, for even when the dials on my rusted steam radiators reluctantly ground to different positions, from which they budged again as grudgingly as they had settled, they gave little control over the climate of the room I was renting, in an apartment with two other women, the taller and English of the two a graduate student studying to be a painter, the other a designer for Internet sites, and, I was told, the practical one, the holder of the lease; at least it was she to whom I wrote out my monthly seven hundred dollars, though I had signed no papers, only received keys from an acquaintance who cordially explained them to me over coffee and I then never heard from nor wrote to again. It was so much easier then to find with sometimes regret but little blame that one had fallen into such lapses, and to allow them to persist until their not unpleasant consequences became simply the way of things. One might do work that took one from London to New York and quite reasonably have no mobile phone, and email only through employers, in my case a university whose obscure endowments allowed for translators to be selected with regard only for the purest equivalence between source and resulting English. Scant sales were only expected, my new supervisor told me, patting my leg, a gesture I was still too precocious or not yet American enough to suspect.

So I felt sure enough, both of money and that my days would continue for some time in much in the way they were, to resume the piano lessons I had feared I had left in London. I found Alastair in the back of a newspaper now defunct. Within minutes, in my first lesson, he said he could tell from my fingers that I would be able lightly to accomplish Mozart concertos, Liszt, Schubert, the work of all my great countrymen whom I had been brought up to admire, but, Alastair said, whom I would soon tire of if I devoted myself to nourishing from their written measures, where only math was preserved, the life or sense of life of inevitable variations and irregularities; and, Alastair said, if I could become fluent in alternate scales, Lydian and Dorian modes, seamless jumps in time, I could accomplish things few, he said, had done or written down. How accomplished do you want to be, he asked, and I admitted this was not a question I had thought to apply to things I did for pleasure, and said that I thought yes—yes, definitely, yes, if he thought so, and he said he did, definitely.

I rarely think of him without also seeing Jonathan at a writing desk under the windows of the room they called the music room, though it was but a standard living room whose walls, floor, and ceiling they had lined with cork when they remodeled their six rooms, standard in those 1920s buildings, built on speculation, with details of English manors. I see Jonathan standing with a double bass that was always in the corner, and he begins playing along with me, and though he is improvising and I have practiced, his playing is assured and light-footed, fleet and sweet in the right measures, dipping into codas, allowing my fingers to range freely, then complementing them. He is no musician by trade, but an executive in one of the very Wall Street firms whose stumbles seventy years before had precipitated the plummet of his and Alastair’s neighborhood from prosperity, from which even by the time I met them, I gathered, it had not entirely recovered.

On this particular day, I was the last of Alastair’s students for the afternoon…

@anjalimullany: The view on my first day in the office From...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:35:33 -0400

@anjalimullany:

The view on my first day in the office

From Fast Company in 7 World Trade.

I love this this static stereographic viewer for Google Street...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 14:58:00 -0400

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Schnectady, NY

Sunset Boulevard, LA

Waterloo, Belgium

Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Bayhead, NJ

Amherst, MA

Princeton Junction, NJ

I love this this static stereographic viewer for Google Street Views. I dropped in some locations where I’ve set stories (I frequently use Street Views in writing); they all came out so shiny.

[h/t Archetizer: Experiments in Motion: The Where Blog] [Stories: 1. All the Summers Ahead 2. Apples Horses Brides (forthcoming) 3. If You Have Only One Week in L.A. 4. (this one’s cheating—I’m still writing it—but I liked the pic too much to leave it out) 5. Social Utility 6. Barnegat Bay 7. Somebody’s Wife 8. Where We Chose]