The little boy in this photo might be my brother, or it might just be some random kid. (I found it in a pile my parents were throwing out, in an attempt to get rid of some extraneous stuff.) Which is more interesting?
September 2010
You are browsing the archive for September 2010.
In this piece, Jessa really gets at the impossibility of reading the “right” books all the time:
The idea that as a literary person there are a certain set of books you must read because they are important parts of the literary conversation is constantly implied, yet quite ridiculous. Once you get done with the Musts — the Franzens, Mitchells, Vollmanns, Roths, Shteyngarts — and then get through the Booker long list, and the same half-dozen memoirs everyone else is reading this year (crack addiction and face blindness seem incredibly important this year), you have time for maybe two quirky choices, if you are a hardcore reader. Or a critic. And then congratulations, you have had the same conversations as everyone else in the literary world.
Yes! There are just too many things I’ve missed or glossed over or never gotten around to reading, and at a certain point you have to make your choices and live with them, and realize that you are never going to have read everything you’re supposed to. But I’m not sure I’m quite at that point yet. Which is why I am speed-reading Philip Roth.
(Just for reference, it is 12:28 a.m. and I am in a hotel room all alone in Hunt Valley, Maryland, and have had a little more wine than I meant to.)
- My favorite recent thing: The Believer’s amazing interview with Robin Nagle, who holds the enviable position of anthropologist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation. “My entry point is through things we decide are no longer worth keeping,” she explains.
Every single thing you see is future trash. Everything. So we are surrounded by ephemera, but we can’t acknowledge that, because it’s kind of scary, because I think ultimately it points to our own temporariness, to thoughts that we’re all going to die.
- The Yale Daily News interviews the oldest typewriter repairman in New Haven (at 94, perhaps he’s the oldest outside that city, too?). “Typewriters you can own,” he says. “I think a computer owns you.”
- Reviewing the painfully-titled musical Power Balladz, Charles Isherwood asks, “Is there room enough in Manhattan for two loving tributes to the heyday of the hair band?” Basically? No.
- The Web series First Day is about a girl who gets 1,001 chances to do her first day of school over and get it “right.” Unfortunately, this just means getting the cute boy to notice her.
- Rebecca Traister wrote a lovely essay about her attachment to a 12-year-old jar of pickled dilly beans she made with her grandmother, still parked in the back of her fridge:
I cannot bring myself to throw the beans out, though I will never dare to eat them. I look at them crowding one corner in the back of an overstuffed fridge and think not that I made them, but that my grandmother did. They’re her beans grown from seeds she put in the ground. They’re in her once-sterile Mason jar along with her dill, grown on the hill that I haven’t climbed for far, far too long now….[P]erhaps, [if] I threw out the dilly beans, my grandmother’s empty body might mercifully follow.
- Also at Salon, Cary Tennis has some advice for a woman devastated by the sale of her childhood home:
I think you have to go to this home and walk around and spend some time there and say goodbye to it. You have to sit there on the lawn or in the backyard and sketch or take photos or write something, and put some pieces of this house in a container to keep. Maybe you can take some soil and some paint and some things, a favorite thing or two from this house. You need a ritual.
- And a not exactly groundbreaking piece by 26-year-old Emma Silvers about why, despite her generation, she’s just not that into e-readers.
- There’s also Alex Pareene’s razor-sharp takedown of a recent, particularly annoying Maureen Dowd column, in which her “trademark stupidly obvious, terribly out-of-date pop culture references” (like Al Gore’s mythical “earth tones”) go beyond insufferable and become irresponsible.
- Jezebel asks, “Are We Really Ready for Preppy Nostalgia?“
- I’m loving Lorin Stein’s guest blogging stint for The Atlantic: He’s arguing against so-called “beach reading,” pointing out that Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom may be a masterpiece but is hardly a throwback to some bygone days of great literature, and shedding some light on the painstaking method behind the Paris Review’s amazing interviews with writers.
- And at Good Reads, Franzen tells Emily Gould, “People don’t have book-lined studies anymore; they have video game-lined great rooms.”
The last of the tomatoes are coming in now, wide and cracked, heavy with the captured humidity of passing summer, each one a Neruda poem shedding its own light, benign majesty. It is time to eat them, these sunsets of the season, then put away our flip-flops and face the fall.
Dear Sam Sifton: You are a wonderful writer, and yes, tomatoes are magical and delicious. But your editor should probably have reigned you in a bit on this one.
And now for today’s accounting of things that are dead or otherwise over: Paste magazine. Heeb magazine. Felicity Merriman, the Revolutionary War-era American Girl doll (once owned and beloved by my childhood friend Joanna, whose mother wouldn’t buy her a doll tied to a more recent historical period because it wouldn’t have been educational enough). Novelty shops. Books–again, or still (according to Ms. Harper Lee). And thankfully, the month of August.
Alive and well: Five of the dresses Vivien Leigh wore as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, after fans responded to a museum appeal by donating $30,000 to restore and preserve them.
