February 2011
26 posts
“He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer - a memory for names and...”
– Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
“I don’t think I would have worked with anybody but Paul Simon,”...”
– I’m Going to Graceland
“I have cleansed myself. I closed my eyes and in a nanosecond, I cured...”
– Charlie Sheen needs a blog
Lianablog: A poignant moment at Barnes and Noble →
dogsareadorable:
20-something Indian guy: Do you like horses? Me: Yes. Guy: When I was in 6th grade there was this girl, and she loved horses. She’d run around the playground making all these weird horsie noises. Me: Oh. Guy: And you look just like her. Me: Thank you. Guy: I just wanted…
I had this exact same conversation once with a guy at the Barnes and Noble at The Grove....
You can’t go home again. Especially when it was never your home in the first place. And even moreso when it’s your first time visiting.
Today I went to Mishmar David, a former kibbutz that is named for my great-great uncle. This Israel trip has been sort of “run headfirst into your heritage” kind of trip, and today it reached its zenith.
The head of the kibbutz greeted me...
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“When my second husband shouted, ‘Me or your writing!’ I replied, ‘My writing.’...”
– Nawal El Saadawi (via penamerican)
A hot guy in college who was trying to convert me to evangelical Christianity (you can imagine how that ended) told me that I had turned writing into my G-d and that that was blasphemy. I told him that at least my G-d wasn’t a fucking sexist.
He was really...
“I’ve done some pretty crazy things in my life. Dating a guy my friends called...”
– Saying Goodbye to The Gloss
I grew up in a place where one of the worst adjectives you could use to describe a woman was “ambitious.” But I was an always an ambitious little kid, and later an ambitious woman, with notebooks full of half-stories and snippets of conversations. A boy I liked told me I was uppity. My mother told me that if I married someone rich I could afford to stay home and scribble all day long...
spiers:
RT @MichaelWolffNYC: My old friend @espiers doesn’t fair too well in Adweek story posting soon…alas…
I can only hope that she fares well, though.
“Most of us wish that we could have it both ways, as Dickens did – to write...”
– John Barth (Dickens’ birthday today)
Actually, I don’t want to write like Dickens at all. The man was wordy as fuck and his characters all had stupid names.
Tammany Hall
chiaraatik:
Did you know that during the days of Tammany Hall, if someone in your family died the gov’t bosses would pay for the entire funeral (about $25, five dollar more than the average immigrant’s monthly wage), And! And! They would actually send a government representative TO the family wake?
All this in exchange for a few votes.
I know that the Tammany system is supposed to be corrupt...
finding my missing pieces: this is going to be... →
myadoption:
I woke up just before 5 a.m. today because I was hot. I peeled my sweatshirt off, rolled over to go back to sleep and made the mistake of not only checking my email on my Blackberry but reading a 600 word message from Lisa.
There was nothing bad in it. She wanted to let me know that she’s…
Probably 75 percent of the Tumblrs I follow are pictures of baby animals or Summer of...
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2 tags
“True story: I have lied about my level of kosher observance in order to claim a...”
– 5 Ways to Weasel Out of Being More Healthy
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I’m on a kick to read more Booker Prize winners. Here’s the list. Ones in bold I’ve read. Let me know if you have recommendations for which ones you think I should read next:
2010 - Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
2009 - Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
2008 - Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
2007 - Anne Enright, The Gathering
2006 - Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss 2005 -...
