January 2012
10 posts
I'm in love with these (via New York Public...
See more at the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator
Obit on Parnassus/F. Scott Fitzgerald/The New...
Death before forty’s no bar. Lo!
These had accomplished their feats;
Chatterton, Burns, and Kit Marlowe,
Byron and Shelley and Keats.
Death, the eventual censor,
Lays for the forties, and so
Took off Jane Austen and Spenser,
Stephenson, Hood, and poor Poe.
You’ll leave a better-lined wallet
By reaching the end of your rope
After fifty, like Shakespeare and Smollett
Thackeray, Dickens,...
A Supposedly Run Thing I'll Probably Do Again →
I started a running blog. The impossible is here.
It’s about having no athletic prowess whatsoever and still trying anyway. I never got picked for the team growing up, but I get picked every time when I run. Because I’m the WHOLE TEAM. Works like magic.
Please read it and feel physically superior!
December 2011
4 posts
Surprisingly, I am less sure than this guy on...
towirr:
A gentleman named Farhad Manjoo just posted a proudly contrarian article on Slate explaining why independent bookstores are not only irrelevent but maybe even harmful. I work at an independent bookstore, so that’s an argument I’d be very very curious to see made well. Honestly, I know the failings of small booksellers as well as anyone, and it’d be good to see them articulated. But...
What we talk about when we talk about Joan...
A: happy diddy's birthday!
R: i am eating a whole cake for it!
A: it's not rosie o'donnell's birthday
A: you should order a cake from payard. eat a sliver
A: and then fret that you got the wrong one and that nobody will come to your party
A: and then throw it away
R: see I like to celebrate Joan by eating all the things she doesn't eat
R: its the kids in africa theory
R: joan is starving somewhere so i better eat an entire pizza
Jessica Coen: Names, Words, and Phrases Appearing... →
jessicacoen:
An abridged list, in no particular order.
Edmund Wilson
poststructuralism
the Situationists
“extrainstitutional intellectualism”
bourbon
“proletarian meta-narrative”
the Lost Generation
Cornell
Sacre Coeur
Jonathan Lethem
The Paris Review
paradigm
Jacques Derrida
French…
November 2011
2 posts
October 2011
6 posts
Your new favorite story about the intellectual...
[Some of Kael’s imbroglios help illuminate the boundaries of her taste. Her spat with Joan Didion is one example. Kael and Didion had parallel flight paths: both were Northern California kids who had close-read Henry James at Berkeley, gone East to get their bearings, and returned to California to forge their styles. Both were exceptionally sensitive to the cultural atomization of the sixties and...
“I sometimes laugh as I stir my witch’s brew, putting in the onions and the herbs...”
– Sheilah Graham, Hollywood. Via The New Yorker.
September 2011
5 posts
thepartydress:
“I’ve been identified with Zelda Fitzgerald. This I’ll go along with. I love her boldness. The living it up, the desperate kind of existence in which nothing matters. And yet, everything matters.” Faye Dunaway
I've been away.
From this site, and/or maintaining any kind of regular presence of late, and I have no real explanation other than I’ve been researching a book and living mostly in 140 characters whenever I can look up. That said, I’m on my way back.
And! I am working on a site for the book that should launch soon (which will for now be equally about the writing process as it will be about random...
August 2011
7 posts
“With the general confusion as to what men want—“Shall I be fast or shall I be...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Girls Believe in Girls,” from 1930. 1930! It appears in the recently published A Short Autobiography, a collection of Fitzgerald’s essays. —Thessaly
(Thanks Sam MacLaughlin from McNally Jackson!)
Joan Didion's Packing List →
girlcrushzine:
To Pack and Wear:
2 skirts 2 jerseys or leotards 1 pullover sweater 2 pair shoes stockings bra nightgown, robe slippers cigarettes bourbon bag with: shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil
To Carry:
mohair throw typewriter 2 legal pads and pens files house key
This is a list which was taped...
July 2011
2 posts
Word: Erin McKenna talks to Sloane Crosley
Sloane: For most of the young women I meet, laziness is really not the issue. The younger women who come to my readings are smart and so funny and put-together and frighteningly ambitious...But the flip side of that is that want everything to be perfect out of the gate. I believe they paralyze themselves with this fear. That’s what Jenny [Egan] was saying. Basically: get over yourself, have a little faith in your own talent, do something new that only you can and produce above all.
Erin: I love that. Fear, perfectionism and unwillingness to make mistakes only lead to avoidance or failure. You have to know that each time you screw up, you’re just that much closer to your victory. Man, when I started baking, everything was naaaasty and I was often on the floor crying! But instead of laying there in a tear fest, I’d visualize the bakery, breathe in that joy and pick myself up and start over.
“That was always my experience— a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a...”
– FSF to Anne Ober, 1938.
June 2011
14 posts
This song is making a much deserved comeback.
“DEALS: Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger’s FURIOUS LOVE, about the...”
– OMG PLEASE. [via]
Jack Cheng: Speaking of Libraries →
jackcheng:
In 1971, Marguerite Hart, the children’s librarian of my hometown of Troy, Michigan, wrote to dozens of politicians, writers, artists and otherwise notable individuals asking them to send in a few inspirational words for the children of Troy on the opening of its first public library. When I wrote…
Little Wing, by Kelle Groom
Reviewing a book of prose by Kelle Groom and so decided to dive into her poetry archive. I wasn’t disappointed.
[via]
LITTLE WING
Charles decorated Nagasaki with cut petals, thousands of pink and white stars to throw into Cio-Cio San’s hair like a night sky. On the fire ladder, I swayed
as if over sea, reached the fly loft. On a gangplank of sails, I looked up into a giant...
“It has always had special meaning for me because I read it when I was young – 18...”
– Woody Allen on J.D. Salinger (via mollylambert)
