Month

February 2011

52 posts

First Lines from New Books Out Today: 2/28/11.

“I did not look into the mirror, not yet, not in the morning.”
Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III

“Visitors don’t arrive in Odessa so much as stumble upon it.”
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams by Charles King

“The girl had received all her immunizations.”
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel by Sarah Braunstein

“Metz is alive for now, standing in line
at the airport Starbucks in his camo gear
and buzz cut, his beautiful new
camel-colored suede boots.”
The Book of Men: Poems by Dorianne Laux

Feb 28, 201110 notes
#first lines
“Language was a net with holes too big to catch what he could say to her.” —

Sarah Braunstein, The Sweet Relief of Missing Children

(I promise I’m saving some quotes for my review. She’s that good.)

Feb 28, 20119 notes
#sarah braunstein
Feb 28, 201152 notes
#andre dubus III
Play
Feb 26, 20113 notes
#Lit #Pete Townshend #Townie #White City Fighting
“If I have a theology it’s a line from a Tom Waits song: ‘There is no devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk.’” —Andre Dubus III, author of Townie, as quoted in Nina MacLaughlin’s profile in the The Boston Phoenix
Feb 25, 201113 notes
#andre dubus III
If Walt Whitman wrote for Groupon

Buy One Round of Mini Golf and GET 2 ROUNDS FREE!

Roll on the turf! Let the spheres in their brilliant colors
explore the textures alive under foot. The angles and contours

are the very pleasures of existence! To see our world miniature,
without taking flight; the great challenge of humankind.

We’ll play until star fall is upon us and the smallest fracture
of wind moves the lighting bugs and serves as excuse.

Feb 24, 2011120 notes
#Walt Whitman #Groupon
Feb 24, 201152 notes
#lit #andre dubus III
Townie

“I’d heard the word before. They used it for the men they’d see at Ronnie D’s bar down in Bradford Square, the place where my father drank with students and his friends. It’s where some men from town drank, too—plumbers and electricians and millworkers, Sheetrock hangers and housepainters and off-duty copy: townies.”

—Andre Dubus III, from Townie

Feb 24, 20114 notes
#lit #andre dubus III
Feb 24, 20116 notes
#lit #mary roach
The Jemaa: A Good Place to Buy a Camel

In an interview with NJ.com, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya explains what inspired his new novel The Storyteller of Marrakesh:

The catalyst for the novel was going to the Jemaa, the square in Marrakesh, which is the main character in the novel. During the daytime, it is a farmer’s market and a good place to by a camel. At night, the square slides back to the Middle Ages. When I went the first time, one of the largest crowds was around this traditional storyteller, who acts like an emcee, telling stories and allowing audience members to add their own voices. I was enthralled and listened to him for two days.

Full interview here.

Feb 22, 2011
#roy-bhattacharya

Laura Miller:

For Dubus, salvation lay in getting at the stories imprisoned within a reality that at first seemed merely brutal and mindless. “Townie,” in addition to probing the wounds of class and family, explains how the son became, like his father, a writer. If that narrative is the least remarkable aspect of this book, it’s nevertheless intimately entangled with Dubus’ quest to understand his father and to escape the lure of violence. Long before the end of “Townie” it becomes evident that Dubus reached a maturity his father never quite attained. His growing up may have been hard, but he grew up all the way.

Feb 21, 20116 notes
#Andre Dubus III #Townie
Facts About the Moon Dorianne Laux

Facts About the Moon
Dorianne Laux

These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters, and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

Feb 20, 20115 notes
#Dorianne Laux #Moon #Poetry

milk-eyedmender:

” The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this laguage that flowed from the people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and the wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.”

- Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

Feb 19, 2011180 notes
If The Great Gatsby were written today

East and West Egg would be dotted with thousands of T. J. Eckleburg billboards, each ablaze with the energy of nonstop online self-disclosure.

Feb 19, 201111 notes
#panopticon #TJ Eckleburg
Play
Feb 18, 2011
#disco #Debra Winger

The purview and significance of the best memoirs extend well beyond the writer — a relief, since most people’s lives aren’t nearly as interesting as they think. The focus of Johanna Adorjan’s An Exclusive Love is not herself but her paternal grandparents. Despite its schmaltzy title, her memoir is a haunting, beautifully composed book that aims to understand why this elegant couple — Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors who fled Communist Budapest in 1956 and settled successfully in Denmark — committed double-suicide on Oct. 13, 1991, when the author was 20.

Feb 18, 20111 note
#Johanna Adorjan #memoir
The Traffic Bubble

What ailing AOL bought is vapor. About 35% of the HuffPo’s users come form Google. They land on cleverly optimized content: stories borrowed from other (and consenting) medias that mostly generate blogging and comments. This is the machine that drove 28m unique visitors in January, which makes the HuffPo close to the New York Times/Herald Tribune audience of 30m UV.  With one key difference: each viewer of the NYT websites yields an ARPU of $11, ten times more than the Arianna thing. Based on the HuffPo’s valuation, the NYT Digital would be worth billions. That’s a consolation.

-Monday Note

Feb 17, 2011
What if Anthony Burgess had to pay the bills working at Groupon?

Horrorshow drink specials at the Korova Milkbar! 

What’s it going to be then, eh? Feeling bolnoy? Why not stop by the Korova Milkbar, where you can get milk plus something else?  You won’t have to cheest out all your deng, my droogies — with this Groupon, you get FIVE pitchers of milk peeted with vellocet or synthemesc for the price of FOUR!  

Feb 16, 201113 notes
#a clockwork orange #korova milkbar #book droogs
Feb 16, 201146 notes
Play
Feb 15, 2011
#disco
“Love is another identity we assume, the heart’s emotions just as staged and manipulated as any title or idea…” —The Marriage of Figaro, from the J.D. McClatchy translation
Feb 14, 20114 notes
#Love
“They fought over sex, of course. Of course! Even so, it was horrible and humiliating all around. Each believed sex to be a great mediator, a mollifier, a rich black coal to stoke the fire of love. For they did love one another, in spite of their frequent and intense hatred. Their love and hatred were simply two sides of the same emotion, easily flipped.” —Brad Watson, “Terrible Argument” from Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives
Feb 14, 20115 notes
#Love #Sex

“Falling” is not a viable way of life, and so we tell ourselves that the transition from “falling in love” to “being in love” or a more sober “liking” represents a dispelling of fantasy, a landing on solid ground. We try to keep our footing sure by degrading idealization into mere intoxicating illusion; we are wiser and know better now. However, it is not at all clear that the solid ground we perpetually seek is any more real than the idealizations that inspire passion. It is, rather, selected for different purposes.

Stephen A. Mitchell, CAN LOVE LAST

Feb 14, 2011
#Love
“Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger. You may find yourself getting up for a snack long before you’re aware of a physical sensation. If you are a single woman midway through her cycle, you may find yourself on a barstool or a set of front steps you swore you’d never climb again.” —Mary Roach, BONK
Feb 14, 20115 notes
#Mary Roach #Sex
The Real Thing

“Love must have some grounding in reality. It isn’t some abstract idea to be gleaned from books. Love is touch, sound, taste, smell, sight—everything that makes the world what it is. Of course it may be based on an ideal, but it cannot survive solely on ideals. You can be inspired by the ocean, you can admire it, but you cannot swim in a photograph of it, however pretty it may be. For that, you must have the real thing.”

-Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, from The Storyteller of Marrakesh

Feb 14, 20112 notes
#roy-bhattacharya #storyteller of marrakesh #love
“This ‘in love’ business causes a great deal of trouble in the neighborhood.” —Gioia Timpanelli, What Makes a Child Lucky
Feb 13, 20111 note
#gioia timpanelli #what makes a child lucky
Modern Love

And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up
For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;
A thing of soft misnomers, so divine
That silly youth doth think to make itself
Divine by loving, and so goes on
Yawning and doting a whole summer long,
Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara,
And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots;
Then Cleopatra lives at number seven,
And Antony resides in Brunswick Square.
Fools! if some passions high have warm’d the world,
If Queens and Soldiers have play’d deep for hearts,
It is no reason why such agonies
Should be more common than the growth of weeds.
Fools! make me whole again that weighty pearl
The Queen of Egypt melted, and I’ll say
That ye may love in spite of beaver hats.

-John Keats

Feb 13, 201121 notes
#Keats #Love #Poetry
After The Movie

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believe a person can love someone
And still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.
Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come to a day

when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”
think “me” and kill him.

I say, Then it’s not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

—Marie Howe, from “After the Movie,” THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME

Feb 12, 20117 notes
#Love #Poetry
“An equality of sins, [Annabella] reasoned, as well as virtues, is what the harmony of a marriage depended on.” —Benjamin Markovits, A Quiet Adjustment
Feb 12, 20112 notes
#a quiet adjustment #benjamin markovits

In an intriguing series of studies in the 1950s, investigators were interested in what features would initiate sexual behavior in male turkeys. They first found that you could get arousal with a lifelike model of a female turkey—the males would gobble, strut, puff up, and eventually mount the model. To find the minimal stimulus for sexual response, the scientists removed parts from the model, such as its tail, feet, and wings, ultimately ending up with a head on a stick. The males were fully aroused by this head, and would prefer it even to a headless body.

-Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works

Feb 11, 201114 notes
#sex #turkeys
“Tension is the best aphrodisiac, short of anger - unless you are in love, when the world winnows down to a bed in a room without clocks, and the simple brush of arm against arm arouses you.” —Frederic Tuten, Self Portraits
Feb 11, 201125 notes
#Love #Sex #Frederic Tuten
When a Diacomma male encounters a calling female..

…he approaches her from behind, antennates her thorax and gaster and if she runs away, follows her closely.  Eventually he succeeds in mounting and copulating with her … the Diacomma female returns into the nest, dragging the motionless male in copula along. Nest workers then attack the male, and bite off its head and thorax, while leaving the gaster attached.  There the severed body part remains for one or two days, until it is finally removed by nest workers.


Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
-E.O Wilson and Bert Hölldobler

Feb 11, 20114 notes
#ants
“A breaking-away from the old, encased self into a new one forged through the link with another is what falling in love is all about. Risk is involved. So, too, is the adventure of finding oneself newly vulnerable, and despite this, hurtling towards the unknown.” —Lisa Appignanesi, All About Love
Forthcoming july 2011
Feb 11, 20114 notes
#Love #Lisa Appignanesi
Feb 11, 20113,545 notes
Feb 10, 2011
#Bonnie Jo Campbell
“Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship.” —Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names For Love
Forthcoming April 2011
Feb 10, 201112 notes
#love #diane ackerman
Will 'Moneyball' movie be worth it?

From ESPN:

There are several keys to the critical success of “Moneyball.” For baseball fans, it will be how well it toes the alienating line of its central thesis as well as how real the depiction of the game is. And for movie fans in general, it will be how well it transcends its subject matter and becomes a story that a wide swath of people can truly care about, the way “Social Network” did. There are indications from insiders that, despite the laborious, sometimes clumsy process of getting the film off the ground — perhaps best defined by the perplexing casting of Jonah Hill as the character formerly known as Paul DePodesta — the final shooting script will balance entertainment with an adherence to the book and the facts. But of course, we won’t know until we know.

Feb 10, 20111 note
#Moneyball #Michael Lewis #Baseball
“In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos—a cult of two with fallible gods.” —

Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names For Love

Forthcoming April 2011

Feb 9, 20117 notes
#love #Diane Ackerman
“Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They’re never total fits or misfits.” —

Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names For Love

Forthcoming April 2011

Feb 8, 201111 notes
#Love #Diane Ackerman
“Becky was the white woman who had two Negro sons. She’s dead; they’ve gone away. The pines whisper to Jesus. The Bible flaps its leaves with an aimless rustle on her mound.” —Jean Toomer, Cane
Feb 8, 20113 notes
#Jean Toomer
Feb 7, 201118 notes
“Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live. At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front, her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light.” —Jean Toomer, Cane
Feb 7, 20114 notes
#Jean Toomer
Play
Feb 6, 20112 notes
#don't call it a comeback #they've been here for years
Fall (excerpt)

Yes the body is lonely, especially at twilight.
Yes Baptists would rather you not have a body at all,
especially not breasts, suspended in their hooked bras
like loose prayers, like ticking bombs, like two
Hallelujahs, the choir frozen in their onyx gowns
like a row of flashy Cadillacs, their plush upholstery
hidden behind tinted windows, Jesus swinging
from the rearview mirror by a chain.

Dorianne Laux, The Book Of Men

Feb 4, 201114 notes
#Dorianne Laux #poetry
“To software developers looking to lay claim to the cultural authority of books: be careful what you wish for.” —Peter Kay
Feb 4, 2011
Feb 3, 201112 notes
#NYPL
Introspective Voyager

Our experience of a poem is always greater, more diverse
Than our imperfect ability to describe it,
He wrote in his book about Stevens.
After he collapsed in class and broke his neck
A titanium halo held his head in place.
When it was taken off, he drank.

- James Logenbach, excerpted from The Iron Key

Feb 2, 20112 notes
#James Logenbach #poetry
Play
Feb 2, 201130 notes
#Go-Betweens #librarians #b-sides
Play
Feb 2, 20112 notes
“Prediction: tomorrow the groundhog will see the shadow of its frozen carcass.” —
Feb 1, 20118 notes
#all is quiet on groundhog day
Next page →
2012 2013
  • January 61
  • February 74
  • March 47
  • April 47
  • May 47
  • June 29
  • July
  • August
  • September
  • October
  • November
  • December
2011 2012 2013
  • January 73
  • February 84
  • March 120
  • April 76
  • May 88
  • June 87
  • July 75
  • August 73
  • September 58
  • October 72
  • November 61
  • December 44
2010 2011 2012
  • January 36
  • February 52
  • March 48
  • April 45
  • May 40
  • June 56
  • July 63
  • August 55
  • September 74
  • October 91
  • November 96
  • December 83
2010 2011
  • January
  • February
  • March
  • April
  • May
  • June
  • July
  • August 4
  • September 43
  • October 42
  • November 38
  • December 38