January 2012
2 posts
Watch the NYC Subway Unfold
mashable:
The map is laid out according to the order the subway lines were built. Beautiful.
Via.
Wait forever for the G train to appear, as always.
December 2011
3 posts
“I can’t remember what it is I’m supposed to be doing.
I can’t think of anything...”
– from “Untitled” by Anna Moschovakis in I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone
November 2011
3 posts
“I have to shut my eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m...”
– Amelia Gray, “There Will Be Sense”
October 2011
2 posts
“The emotions are engaged
Entering the city
As entering any city.
We are not...”
– George Oppen, Section 3 of “Of Being Numerous”
September 2011
3 posts
All The Right Friends: On R.E.M.'s Carnegie Hall... →
Covering this for Paste marked not the first time I ever saw R.E.M., but it was the most recent and, now that they’re done forever, the last (until the Central Park reunion concert?) I guess. I suppose it’s fitting that the popular wisdom around the band’s close-out is that they began feeling like they could no longer adhere — as they always had — to that line of...
5 tags
Steamed: Notes from a Barista →
My thoughts on a life I used to know.
January 2011
2 posts
And in a way I don’t mind watching it get...
December 2010
1 post
October 2010
3 posts
Why did we come to New York? We came because we were born elsewhere. We came for the scarcity and smoke. We came for its future. We came for a girl, or a boy, the idea of coming for girls or boys. We came for school, or a band, or a scene, or a poster of a band from a scene in a room at a school. We came for a borough. We came because New York means “next” in the language of hometown....
September 2010
3 posts
When you wake up, don’t listen to the blues. Don’t eat hardboiled eggs. Don’t take the G train. When you’re walking down an Avenue, don’t read the fine print on the billboard, don’t take a free paper, don’t take off your jacket. You’ll want it back on. Don’t turn left there, and don’t take that elevator. Don’t answer your phone....
“There are things about himself that he doesn’t want to know, things he does that...”
– Ben Loory, “The TV”
yes like that yes more please yes.
August 2010
3 posts
The world according to chart →
July 2010
1 post
“The difference between a critic and a reviewer is, I forget … I’ve always...”
– Wilfrid Sheed in Max Jamison
June 2010
1 post
“The General Tso’s Sub was comprised of deep-fried slabs of tofu, julienned...”
– The Village Voice: “The Early Word: No. 7 Sub Shop”
I happened across this shop last Friday and this review is dead on.
May 2010
2 posts
“Three Delays is so stunningly composed, so wildly, implausibly, excessively...”
– Rick Moody, seething, one hopes not hyperbolically, into his Believer review, on Charlie Smith’s Three Delays, Smith’s first novel in over a decade, his sixth, after poetry volumes, soon into my hands, I must, thusly, as he says, rapacious.
“Good. You know why I like my waitress friends so much? And what I learned from...”
– Andre Dubus, Voices from the Moon
April 2010
3 posts
To Various Persons Talked To All At Once
by Kenneth Koch
You have helped hold me together. I’d like you to be still. Stop talking or doing anything else for a minute. No. Please. For three minutes, maybe five minutes. Tell me which walk to take over the hill. Is there a bridge there? Will I want company? Tell me about the old people who built the bridge. What is “the Japanese economy”? Where did you hide the...
“Over Irish whiskey a few days later at the soon to be demolished Brooklyn bar...”
– “A Nice Jewish Boy’s Naughty Big Novel” by Christian Lorentzen, on Joshua Cohen’s forthcoming Witz
March 2010
4 posts
Austin field trip, someday
David Foster Wallace Archive acquired by Harry Ransom Center
These english majors wanna be some super genius...
February 2010
4 posts
“I stopped believing that ‘theory’ had the power to ruin literature for anyone,...”
– Elif Batuman (via thehurrythrough)
December 2009
1 post
Vinyl Records and Turntables Are Gaining Sales
First thought: that scene in Shakespeare In Love when Dame Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth comes up to a puddle and pauses, waits for a courtly male to cover the mud, sees none, and so stomps across saying “Too late, too late.” That’s the New York Times on trend pieces: the Lord Wessex of arts sections.
Second thought: I don’t...
November 2009
2 posts
Apparent categorical impulsives
Understated Dramas Featuring a Strong Female Lead
Quirky Movies
Visually-striking Dark Movies
Witty Dysfunctional-Family Comedies
Action & Adventure to watch instantly
October 2009
1 post
September 2009
1 post
Tracking central →
August 2009
5 posts
“Grossman calls an orange an apple, and then proceeds to imagine what would have...”
– Andrew Seal, at Coversational Reading, speaking on the argument of Lev Grossman’s “Good Books Don’t Have To Be Hard,” which argues for a “revolution from below, up from the supermarket racks” in literature, wherein plot defeats all other things, except neither...
“Which will please millions, even if Stewart Lee won’t be among their number....”
– “The Key to Dan Brown’s Success,” Andrew Collins in Times Online
“Road House, without the benefit of a director with the oeuvre of Verhoeven, is...”
– “Road House, Paul Verhoeven, Modern Action Films, and the Ironic Vision of the Viewer” at biblioklept