Over dinner after drinks, my friend and I eavesdrop and happen to hear two women talking about books. One of them summarizes The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. as “all set in Brooklyn.” My friend and I make faces at each other and keep listening. Other books are brought up, but none of their selling points seem to us as crushing as the first. “All set in Brooklyn.” “I have to read that” was the response, in case you didn’t […]
The interiors of the apartment building where Rosemary Woodhouse would become Satan’s unknowing paramour were filmed elsewhere, but anyone knows that the exterior shots were of the Dakota, on Central Park West and 72nd Street, a corner most famous for being where John Lennon was shot. (Mia Farrow’s sister was the Prudence to inspire John to write “Dear Prudence,” but that is a campfire tale digression.) I lived a few blocks from the Dakota for a couple of years. I […]
A friend of mine was in town over the weekend. He and I both talk too much, forgetting often why we are going into so much detail. At one point, we were walking in the East Village. I had a headache, and he was reminiscing about his college days, which were not the same as mine. In his day, everyone awaited Friday’s edition of the college paper in a frenzy. He assured me this probably does not happen anymore. “And […]
There’s something off about reading Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill for the first time when you are in your early 20s, vaguely weird and living in a dramatically shitty apartment on the Lower East Side. I imagine that experience is like being a middlebrow rock star’s girlfriend and listening to “Just Like a Woman.” You think: that’s what I look like? You’re repulsed, you can’t even. Who does this person think he or she is anyway? Even if you’re not […]
My parents would argue that I always had this level of love for popular music, even as a toddler in the backseat of our car singing the Kate Bush part of “Don’t Give Up” with an incredible amount of emotion. (Pause for a second, and think of how it would be to hear your three-year-old belt out behind your neck: YOU WORRY TOO MUCH.) Maybe it’s true. As Marilynne Robinson says of hearing the psalms when she was a child, […]
I have noticed that George Saunders has a favorite quote. Well, maybe it’s not his favorite favorite, as if anyone really has one of those, but he has cited it often, in interviews where it had absolutely no place at all. The quote is attributed to Gerald Stern, but Saunders dominates the first page of results if you type the whole thing in your search bar. “If you set out to write a poem about two dogs fucking,” the quote […]
I did not go to Ireland, Stephen Daedalus-style, to forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of anyone at all, much less my race. But at 20, with a round face and dyed red hair, I did choose exile. I wanted to slough off the social anxieties of late adolescence, to return to a primal state: wild and free. More pressingly, I left because my roommates were all going abroad. They hated college. I was more ambivalent, […]
There’s a blurb in the front of Airships that calls the author “afraid of nothing in experience.” Before you get to any of his work in the book, there’s an “appreciation,” not an introduction, by Richard Ford that makes the same wild claims. When Barry Hannah died, the Oxford American compiled stories from people who knew and loved him; the magazine was an Irish bar and Hannah a dead cop. He’s celebrated, for sure. A total rock star, the sort […]