September 2010
48 posts
Tumblr was down, and then I walked from 56th and Madison to 87th and Madison before one of the four busses that run that route came. The evening seems like a metaphor for something; for what, I’m not entirely sure.
After months of asking questions about the Twitter, my mother finally made an account. Her five followers are: Me, two of my college friends, the corporate profile of her employer, and CNN anchor/reporter Brooke Baldwin.
“It’s fine, ma’am. It’s a story we’re used to. A person moves to New York City and chafes against the injustice of things they have made up and don’t understand! I mean, we hear it from the 23-year-old Ivy grads every day already.”
—Choire Sicha.
“Maureen Michaels, chairwoman of the Long Island Rail Road Commuter Council, offered a different explanation for her constituency’s seeming preference for harder liquor: a tougher commute. On Metro-North, she said, “the trip is shorter, the on-time performance is better.” And the bottled water? “Maybe,” she said with a laugh, “all the water on Metro-North is people sobering up.”
—I guess when numbers confirm the Metro-North sophisticates prefer drinking wine on the train while the LIRR mouth-breathers settle for Budweiser and vodka, a trend story can’t be far behind.
Dispatch from an evesdropper: Lady Gaga was recently in a bike shop near Union Square checking out “$4,000 bicycles and sunglasses,” but “got the fuck outta dodge” when someone asked for an autograph, just said the dude next to me in line at a Starbucks on Park Avenue South.
Economist Robert Reich, who has a Tumblr, is reading from his new book tonight at Strand at 7pm. Anyone else planning to be there?
On Recaps
… I try to not differentiate between what a writer is and isn’t. I leave that to others since we’ve all written crap that wouldn’t be deemed writing by any standard. Writing is too hard to put a tag on, and for anyone that’s labored over a blank page, or CMS or whatever, you gotta give them credit for putting something down and even more credit for showing it to others.
I can get on board with that.
I pay the bills working as ghostwriter, sometimes for executives but most often for companies. And when I’m nudged from the comfort of my apartment and show up at parties I introduce myself as a writer because it’s easier than saying “I write things for companies — yes, I realize companies are not self-aware things and you’d think this would mean they couldn’t speak in the conventional sense of the term, but the Supreme Court disagrees and they can so there.”
Sometimes it sucks not having a byline anymore, but that’s because I am an asshole enjoy seeing my name in print, not because I have a problem with the nature of that particular brand of writing copy.
(About all the TV-writing stuff that originated this thread: Is there a demand for snark about bad police-procedural dramas? If not then I have nothing to offer to that discussion.)
Elegy
I am writing now in preconceptions
Those of sex and ropes
Many frantic cruelties occur to the flesh of the
imagination
And the imagination does have flesh to destroy
And the flesh has imagination to sever
The mouth is just a body filled with imagination
Can you imagine its contents
The dripping into a bucket
And its acts
The ellipses and chaining apart
The feather
The observer
The imagination, bare, has nothing to confirm it
There's just the singing of the birds
The sounds of the natural scream
A strange example
The imagination wishes to be embraced by freedom
It is laid bare in order to be desired
But the imagination must keep track of the flesh
responding—its increments of awareness—a
slow progression
It must be beautiful and it can't be free
-for John Zorn, after his “Elegy”
-- Lyn HejinianIn My Life, Hejinian produced a line of prose I can’t erase from memory because it’s so, so true: “You cannot determine the nature of progress until you assemble all of the relatives.”
I demand journalists work harder to include cats in their reportage whenever possible, regardless of whether or not such references seem newsworthy. (Because, really, yes, they are. All of them.)
This is why I’m disappointed to assert that this story about how the historic Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street in Manhattan is becoming a Marriott didn’t mention Matilda, the cat that lives there.
Also: Yes, a Marriott. Boo!
“The language a writer uses to create a world is that world, and [Jonathan] Franzen’s strenuously contemporary and therefore juvenile language is a world in which nothing important can happen. Madame Bovary’s marriage *sucked*, Heathcliff was *into* Catherine: these words fail the context not just because they are of our own time. There is no import in things that “suck,” no drama in someone’s being “into” someone else. As for the F word, Anthony Burgess once criticized the notion that to use it in matter-of-fact prose is to hark back to “a golden age of Anglo-Saxon candour”; the word was taboo from the start, because it stands for brutal or at best impersonal sex. … A writer like Franzen, who describes two lovers as “fucking,” trivializes their relationship accordingly. The result is boredom.”
—The Atlantic methodically tears Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom to shreds.
