January 2012
1 post
suggestions
You should watch Mary and Max on Netflix tonight.
an essay about rovinj & money & me →
I’ve been absent but promise to write more here in the new year (resolutions & such). In the meantime, another essay…
March 2011
1 post
February 2011
5 posts
“The mental traffic level is very high [in New York]. Here you have traffic...”
– Jonathan Lethem on the difference between L.A. and NYC. (If I were certain this were true, I would move to L.A. for sure.)
This Is Me Being Service-y: My Favorite (Roman)...
This was my second time in Italy and I can now say with certainty that my least favorite thing about the country is its lack of queues. At the coffee bar there is no definite line and this disturbs my sense of order. In America I would be yelling if a woman cut in front of me, but in Italy I can only shame myself for not being quick or wise enough to cut in front of her, and this makes me sad....
Letter to the Daily Show
RE: http://tinyurl.com/4bkcmn8
Dear Daily Show:
I unliked you on Facebook and I won’t watch you anymore and I am giving away my tickets to see you on March 23. You suck. Why was this a good idea, jerks? I will never understand why people think it’s okay to exploit a defenseless animal. And please, no PETA jokes; they’re a yawn.
January 2011
4 posts
I was watching the BBC miniseries of Brideshead Revisited and thinking about how I couldn’t possibly have picked up on everything in my first reading of the novel. There’s so much beauty in there; it begs to be read again. But that got me thinking of the other books I should reread too. So, a list of novels I would like to reread to squeeze out every last ounce of meaning: Brideshead Revisited...
Together at last: Moore, Plath, Dickinson, Parker,... →
December 2010
3 posts
“The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from...”
– Hemingway
November 2010
1 post
I recently had to take the GRE, and I did pretty shitty on the math portion. This was expected, and I’m not too bothered by it. However, it got me thinking. Why can’t we have specialized math sections for math-impaired individuals? I present my version: Copy Editor Math.
1. Susan’s daughter, Betty, eats seven pears on Monday and three on Tuesday. How many daughters does Susan...
September 2010
1 post
Looking for an old clip, I googled myself and found: “Recipes From New York Chefs—Gin, Marti Trgovich.” I’m not sure if this is charming (gin and I get along delightfully) or creepy (someone is going to roast me with gin).
August 2010
1 post
January 2009
3 posts
Today I went to the Met to see the exhibit Art and Love in Renaissance Italy. It exceeded my expectations, fusing art, history, and literature; visually, it was even more stimulating than I had expected. Plus, it had an unexpected sense of humor—who knew that fifteenth-century lovers found fruits and veggies so erotically humorous?
One of the most interesting items was a comb (part of a...
I love Carrie Fisher for two reasons. First, she was in Star Wars, one of the greatest films of all time, and—even better—she got to play Princess Leia. Lucky gal.
Second, as she ages, she’s taken on this crazy-fun-old-aunt persona, which I absolutely adore. She’s funny and wise, and that’s why I asked for (and received!) her new book, Wishful Drinking, for Christmas. The cover,...
December 2008
2 posts
“Fearful that he would spend all his money during a bender, he would “slide tens...”
– I am going to do that.
September 2008
3 posts
Sunday was the Brooklyn Book Festival, and I had Joan Didion on the brain. She was speaking on a political panel at 5 p.m., and since I’d never seen her speak before, I made sure to get in line early for the free tickets, which went quite fast. Then of course there was the line to get into the actual event, below, which turned out not to be so bad either.
Robert Silvers, editor of The New...
Jennifer Traig’s Well Enough Alone is not the kind of book I would have picked up on first sight. I am, quite frankly, kinda bored with memoirs. But as a lifelong hypochondriac, its lovely cover—a portrait in the form of a pill mosaic, if you will—piqued my interest. I turned to the back sections first, and was delighted to find a clever appendix consisting of: Diseases That Would Make Nice...
August 2008
27 posts
Over at Good, Anne Trubek does a poor job convincing people that Catcher in the Rye has no place on high-school assigned reading lists. Also, she would be OK replacing it with a TV show.
Me Cheeta, a chimp’s autobiography “in his own words,” is up for the Guardian’s first-book award. “Previous winners have included Zadie Smith and Jonathan Safran Foer,” according to the UK newspaper. I’m sure they’re pleased. Especially hard-to-please Zadie.
In other, um, animal-lit news, the Times Online has a piece on the animal as protagonist....
“They are the ones, the locals say, who are carousing, brawling and getting...”
– Who are these horribly behaved travelers in Greece? Thankfully, not Americans.
Both the NYTimes and Budget Travel have recent profiles of Asilah, Morocco. But personally, I’ve been jonesing for a one-way ticket to Essaouira (above) ever since I read this article eight years ago.
I’m all for ambiguous, murky endings that fail to wrap the story up nicely; I think they offer a nice dose of real life, a pinch of reality. These endings work in a variety of circumstances, but not when your novel is essentially a mystery that the reader has been trying to solve since page 1! As you probably have read everywhere, Rivka Galchen’s debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances,...
Since I don’t live in Chicago anymore and can’t bring myself to read Gawker anymore, I missed John Cusack’s journalistic debut for Huffington Post Chicago. Luckily, I got the scoop from The Beachwood Reporter. Cusack, it seems, spelled the names of some athletes wrong, including some guy named Michael Jordan. As TBR put it: “John Cusack’s debut post for Huffington...
WaPo’s Short Stack lists five great unfinished novels. I can’t wait to read Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. (Although, apparently, I can—it’s been sitting on my bookshelf for three long years. Inexplicably so.)
“She is Lady Macbeth. She is…Bertha Mason…. She is Snow White’s...”
– And she’s still pissed that Hillary’s not on the ticket.
“The device was not on a list of equipment that must be working for a plane to...”
– Wouldn’t you like to think that all devices on the plane are required to work before allowing for take-off?
“Like, how can we forecast when we can’t even now-cast?”
– Funny.
I just finished reading The Alcoholic, Jonathan Ames’s and Dean Haspiel’s new graphic novel, out on Sept. 9. I had never read Ames before, and I have to admit that I was worried it was going to be a cliched drinking story—but wow. Such a good book! Jonathan Ames, you are funny and smart and insightful. Dean Haspiel, hubba hubba.
Name the 50 largest countries in the world in five minutes.
Typically madness memoirs are told from the POV of the person going mad. And so it was with interest that I read Michael Greenberg’s Hurry Down Sunshine, in which he describes his daughter’s mental illness. It begins: “On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad.” And right there, right off the bat, a whiff of pretension. I can’t quite pinpoint what irked me about...
“This much-hyped book is eye-bulgingly atrocious, packed with medieval history to...”
– Worst debut ever?
“When you appall Jay McInerney, you know you’re in trouble.”
– So true!
The Czechs and Croats are having a bit of a row, so much so that at least 10 percent of Czech summer vacations to Croatia have been canceled. How come?
P.S. Don’t worry, Croatia, this American girl’s still visiting someday…
“In purely statistical terms, do the articles…amount to the greatest...”
– Slate
“The heads and feet of various fowl loll over the rims of soup tureens and serving dishes. Ten fishheads…their open mouths stuffed with fishballs made from their own cooked flesh. Eleven lizards have been partially skinned and deep-fried…”
I recently picked up Fuchsia Dunlop’s Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, and...
More proof that those 100-books-you-must-read lists are B.S. And completely subjective. No Fountainhead or End of the Affair? But The DaVinci Code makes it? Wha? Also, I’m always disappointed that I’ve read less than I’d hoped. Only 17 in this case.