Stanley Kubrick’s pictures of NYC life in the 1940s are the greatest.
No, thank YOU.
So I’m recapping Downton Abbey for TIME Magazine this season. It brings me almost as much happiness as watching Maggie Smith do battle with overgrown bouquets. Enjoy!
Ryan Gosling Works in Publishing may be my favorite version of the meme yet.
(Source: ryangoslingpublishing)
Surprisingly, I am less sure than this guy on Slate that independent bookstores are killing literacy.
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 that’s not what this essay was. Let’s look at it. All of it. In detail.
I’ll be interjecting my thoughts into the text of the essay itself. I know that’s a pretty ungenerous way to go about it, but as you’ll see, Mr. Manjoo is kind of an asshat, so I’m not feeling generous.
This is just the best thing.
What we talk about when we talk about Joan Didion's birthday
| 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 in a Single NYT Trend Piece
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…
YOU GUYS! I am hosting a new series at the lovely McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan on the nature/art/craft of biography. We have a lot of big names coming up in 2012, but my kickoff event is coming up on Wednesday, November 30. I will be discussing Kurt Vonnegut with his official biographer, Charles J. Shields, who met with a ton of resistance and drama from the Vonnegut estate over the course of writing And So It Goes. It will be a juicy talk!
You can see details/buy the book/add it to your calendar here.
Stay tuned - I am also launching a podcast about biographies in early 2012. It will be called PRIVATE LIVES and it is going to be awesome.
Free Cabin Porn (where this image came from) is like cryptonite to city living. Even on a day when I have pranced around in the falling leaves proclaiming to love New York, this site makes me immediately want to re-prioritize, or at least pretend to.
Octsnowber in Brooklyn.
