A Literary Map of Manhattan (NYT)
[video]
The Girlfriend Experience
(the tagline!)(via adyeu)
“John Grisham wrote A Time to Kill for 20 minutes every morning on his subway ride in to work… He ran his own law firm. What can you do in 20 minutes?” — dchly
“Good writing consists of using ordinary words to achieve extraordinary results.” — James Michener, author of numerous novels including Tales of the South Pacific and Hawaii
Bb 2.0 - YouTube collaborative music / spoken word project
… Walking toward or away from her across a restaurant floor, for example, he remembered always to do it in the old “terrifically sexy” way, and when they walked together he fell into another old habit of holding his head unnaturally erect and carrying his inside shoulder an inch or two higher than the other, to give himself more loftiness from where she clung at his arm. When he lit a cigarette in the dark he was careful to arrange his features in a viril frown before striking and cupping the flame (he knew, from having practiced this at the mirror of a blacked-out bathroom years ago, that it made a swift, intensely dramatic portrait), and he paid scrupulous attention to endless details: keeping his voice low and resonant, keeping his hair brushed and his bitten fingernails out of sight; being always the first one athletically up and out of bed in the morning, so that she might never see his face lying swollen and helpless in sleep.The main characters are essentially paralyzed by their own dreams — of who they should be, could be, ought to be. I found this to be incredibly interesting. Here’s another example of April in the act of hugging her husband:
… There was a certain stiffness in the way she was holding him, a suggestion of the effort to achieve the effect of spontaneity, as though she knew that a nestling of the shoulder blade was in order and was doing her best to meet the specifications.Beyond the self consciousness of Yates’ characters is their role-playing (and their arguing, two points that make Revolutionary Road and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf an excellent double-feature). Not only are vague daydreams getting them through the day, so too are the roles they play within them.
This reminds me of one of my favorite maxims — “When walking into a room, act as if you’re walking into a room” — by Barney’s window dresser Simon Doonan.
In other words, when you’re about to enter the room of, say, a party, you should be acutely aware that you are, in fact, entering the room of a party - and you should act accordingly. Hold your head up. Arc the fingers and flash your cigarette. Blink at the right people as you pass. Smile wide enough for your white teeth to glint beneath the lights. Pretend not to notice how fabulous you are.
Doonan’s is a finely wrought truism that describes a very specific way of viewing yourself from a third person point-of-view. It’s also a maddening way to exist, as though you’re being pressed in from all sides.
“To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.” — Alain de Bottom, as snobby as ever
I like what Rands has to say about brevity and the question-behind-the-question on Twitter (not “what,” but “why”).
I don’t want just the content; I want to know what you think about it. Retweeting an article? Great, what’s the one line you love? Think that lolcat is funny? Me too, but why? BEFORE: NYTimes Graphic: Home Prices in Selected Cities: http://bit.ly/4CjL (@khoi) AFTER: Ouch. Phoenix: http://bit.ly/4CjL (@khoi) … In Twitter, you follow people, not content.Reminds me of a WSJ article that stressed the following point about “Tweets as literature” — Good writing, no matter where it occurs, raises questions; it doesn’t answer them. You’re left wanting more. As for myself, I’ve started a variety of Twitter accounts (@greaterthan, @lunging), only to veer from intense dislike to intense respect for the format. I’m never comfortable, though. — and one more point, for all of those who defend “Twitter as art” and point to the multitude of writers, who, were they not dead, would be writing on Twitter (Hemingway, Dorothy Parker), it’s important to similarly point out the many writers who most certainly would not be writing on Twitter (DFW, Doystoevsky).
Cops: Woman Cut Baby From Pregnant Friend's Womb -
What’s even crazier about this entire mess is that it’s a fairly common occurrence:
The story is not the first of its kind. About this time last year, a Pennsylvania woman was charged with murder after she cut a baby from another’s woman’s body and tried to pass it off as her own. The mother died. In 2004, a Missouri woman strangled another woman with a rope and then used a kitchen knife to cut a baby girl from her womb. She was arrested one day later after showing the child off as her own.
“I’ll consider my life a success when I can wake up on a Monday and have no idea what day it is.” — sacca
The score is brilliant too.
Buffalo 66, 1998 (dir. Vincent Gallo)
By Tom Gabor
“Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful. One without the other leaves you short of elegant. And sometimes the “unusual simplicity” isn’t about what’s there, it’s about what isn’t. At first glance, elegant things seem to be missing something.” — Matthew E. May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance, in an interview
someecards made the headlines today for closing a Series A round of funding.
this gives me hope that non-suck e-cards might actually make it.