July 2010
27 posts
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Hopefully they won't see this
Without Housing Works to reblog/harass, the McNally Jackson tumblr goes quiet. Also we’ve been busy. MOSTLY BUSY, okay.
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“That night, a popular anti-Kremlin blogger, making his way along the river in...”
– The maybe-sad Keith Gessen on Moscow’s traffic in the new New Yorker.
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Short Books
Last night Maggie Nelson read from Bluets (Heather Christle & Dorothea Lasky also read, and also ruled). I read Bluets twice, and this morning I was trying to think of other short books that reward re-reading. So, bullets!:
Bluets
The Great Gatsby
The Mezzanine
On Being Blue
Goodbye, Columbus
Notes from Underground
Others? There must be others.
thingsiatethatilove:
…I went to McNally Jackson. “Is it too late to use my Tumblr discount?” I asked at the register. “No,” said the cashier. We paused. “I believe there’s a password?” she said a moment later. I said the password. It was fun to say a password. I learned that I was the first person to have used the discount which is nuts! 20% off is a great deal and there are still...
"Keaton"
objectivecorrelative:
“I want our poetry section to be made up of show-stoppers. I don’t want the poems merely to have integrity, or merely to be sophisticated — though I want those things,” he said. Mr. Stein made an example of an Elizabeth Bishop poem (“Keaton”) that he tore out of The New Yorker and pinned above his desk. “Every time I looked at it, my eyes would fill up with tears,” he...
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Bluets
71. I have been trying for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. 72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it? —No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its...
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“AUTHOR: Hey Mom, do you remember when you made us walk from home to school on...”
– This little piece by Joel Rice—on odd parental whims and skateboarding—is great.
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Extra Lives
It was summer in the suburbs, and I was staying up until 4 am most nights. Not insomnia, not getting high in the basement, not driving my mom’s car with my new license to Noon Hill to chug cans of Keystone—no, I was alone in my bedroom playing Final Fantasy X and I could not stop. The characters are all fairy tale simple, the plot preposterous, even the title is vaguely oxymoronic. (Though not...
“bookshelfporn.com has dissuaded me completely from buying a kindle. thank you.”
– via Twitter.
Our evil plan to persuade people to not buy eReaders by posting amazing photos of books is working. Mwahahaha.
(via bookshelfporn)
a grammar: Shteyngart's book trailer. →
One more video relating to something I liked this year: this is the part-funny, part-awkward-attempt-at-funny trailer for Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, featuring his student James Franco, Mary Gaitskill being wry and performing a gesture that means “lady business,” Eugenides,…
“I’m a 27-, almost 28-year-old man, I live with three other people in a place I...”
– Bookslut | An Interview with Justin Taylor (Speaking of Justin Taylor; via housingworksbookstore)
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“The fact that the majority of respondents here presume it is their...”
– There’s an e-kerfuffle (the worst kind of kerfuffle) happening at HTMLGIANT over Tin House requiring a receipt from an actual bookstore with submissions. Some of the reactions strike me as actually insane. This is Justin Taylor in the comments, the sanest and best voice among them. I was going...
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“America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp. Our...”
– The opening lines of Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask. Happy 4th of July!
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“Leonard Michaels (January 2, 1933 - May 10, 2003) was an American writer of...”
– From Leonard Michaels’ wikipedia entry. Which, I mean, it’s true.
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“He would get some award and we would think it was funny and make fun of him.”
– Jesse Michaels, of Operation Ivy fame, on his dad, Leonard Michaels, of Leonard Michaels fame. (Via Jewcy)
“There is no folly of the beasts of earth which is not infinitely outdone by the...”
– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick 