No place like (staying) home for the holidays
Happy Holidays, everyone. I hope you’re keeping warm, and all is merry and bright.
Max and I are staying in the city for the season, and I’ve been posting photos of what we’ve been doing and seeing — tea at The Four Seasons, indoor fireworks at Grand Central [...]
Elissa Schappell on Dawn Powell
“If you don’t know Dawn Powell (well, frankly, I weep for you), let me catch you up.”
The asshole’s dating manual
A book proposal for our enlightened millennium: “Pussy is really the second most abundant commodity on earth.” (Via.)
Carver-Lish piece unsigned at New Yorker
Why is the New Yorker article about Gordon Lish’s shaping of Raymond Carver’s early fiction unsigned?
One of those Sonic Youth, comic-book-reading alternatinas
Junot Díaz has a very short story, Alma, in The New Yorker’s fiction issue.
Marie Mockett’s bamboo shoot extravaganza
Earlier this year, Agni published my friend Marie Mockett’s fascinating Letter From a Japanese Crematorium, one of the most elegant personal essays I read in 2007. (Photos at her own site supplement the story.)
Mockett is hard at work on a novel, but sometimes I lure her away from her desk to join [...]
James Wood on Coetzee’s Dostoyevskian confessions
I don’t measure fiction by the same aesthetic metrics as James Wood, but I read him, even when his judgments rankle. Any impassioned Wood critique is far superior to a hundred courteous hand-clappings.
It’s especially interesting to see Wood building, in the latest New Yorker, on the grudgingly admiring essay about J.M. Coetzee’s [...]
The Bible according to Google Earth
Art depicting four Biblical events as if captured on Google Earth highlights their awesomeness and improbability. (Via.)
Ames memoir as short film
What’s Not to Love?, based on Jonathan Ames’ memoir, will air on Showtime this week.
Eradicating the Pogues’ “gratuitous vulgarity”
BBC Radio 1 has cut “slut” and “faggot” from the Pogues’ Xmas tune, “Fairytale of New York.”
Katherine Lanpher’s when-in-doubt chicken
In 2004, Katherine Lanpher gave up her radio gig in Minneapolis and moved to Manhattan to serve as co-host of The Al Franken Show. A year and a half later she quit the show to write Leap Days, a memoir about leaving behind the life she knew and making a home in New York [...]
Kevin Kinsella’s granddad’s reservation cole slaw
My friend Kevin Kinsella tends to wind up at the center of strange events and unfortunate misunderstandings that he, to his knowledge, has done nothing to invite upon himself. (I can relate.) So his passion for Russian literature shouldn’t come as a surprise. A few months ago he interviewed novelist Anya Ulinich. [...]
The forthcoming Coetzee
I’ve yet to read Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year in full, but several excerpts are available online.
Grace Paley & the MFA
All hail Grace Paley’s candor: “Look, you’re really a writer. You’re really doing it. You don’t need this class.”
Vonnegut on painting badly
Watch a 2000-era Vonnegut urge people to “practice art, no matter how badly, because it’s known to make a soul grow.”
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