Welcome to Flushing Meadows!
Gonna be a hot one.
The US Open is one of my very favorite things about New York.
Looking forward to seeing Davydenko, Blake and Cilic play today on the smaller courts. This is Day 1 of 5 I’ll be spending out here.
Enjoy! The Roddick match last night was awesome. I went one night last night and had a blast.
8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live
notthatkindagay:(via onefootinthegrave)
“You see this?” added McQuade, pointing at a real estate listing for a duplex in Hagerstown, MD. “Two bedrooms, two baths, a den—a fucking den—and a patio. Twelve hundred a month. That’s total, not per person.”
HAhaha.
This photo of Victoria Azarenka collapsing at the US Open is oddly painterly.
This is very strange and seconds, I hope, before someone got her some water.
The Rumpus Book Club - The Rumpus.net
Buy Franzen’s Freedom from The Rumpus directly, or show proof of purchase from an independent bookstore (yay Bookcourt!), and join this book club for free.
I started reading and it’s as good as they say it is.
Family’s the one thing you can’t change, right? You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are. So even in an intensely mediated world, in a world that offers at least the illusion of radical self-invention and radical freedom of choice, I as a novelist am drawn to the things you can’t get away from. Because much of the promise of radical self-invention, of defining yourself through this marvelous freedom of choice, it’s just a lie. It’s a lie that we all buy into, because it helps the economy run. Family is one of the clubs I reach for to beat up on that particular lie.
…when I connect with a good book, often by somebody dead, and they are telling me a story that seems true, and they are telling me things about myself that I know to be true, but I hadn’t been able to put together before—I feel so much less alone than I ever can sending e-mails or receiving texts. I think there’s a kind of—I don’t want to say shallow, because then I start sounding like an elitist. It’s kind of like a person who keeps smoking more and more cigarettes. You keep giving yourself more and more jolts of stimulus, because deep inside, you’re incredibly lonely and isolated. The engine of technological consumerism is very good at exploiting the short-term need for that little jolt, and is very, very bad at addressing the real solitude and isolation, which I think is increasing. That’s how I perceive my mission as a writer—and particularly as a novelist—is to try to provide a bridge from the inside of me to the inside of somebody else.
It’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to. I think novelists nowadays have a responsibility—whether or not my contemporaries are actually living up to it—to make books really, really compelling. To make you want to turn off your phone and walk away from your Internet connection and go spend some time in another place. That’s why it takes me so long to write these books. I’m trying to fashion something that will actually pull you away, so I’m certainly conscious of the tension between the solitary world of reading and writing, and the noisy crowded world of electronic communications.
I kind of made a personal vow going into the publication of this book that I would not talk about the concept of freedom. It’s all over the book, and I don’t want to do the work of interpretation for the reader. Partly because I’m not sure my interpretation necessarily has any special validity, beyond the fact that I know the book very well. I don’t actually think the author should be the last word on what the book means, or what some aspect of the book means. I’m not omniscient. But certainly, we live in a commercial culture that celebrates freedom of choice, that fetishizes freedom of the markets, and these are all… [Pauses, sighs.] These are developments that are not without their emotional and psychic consequences for the individuals in the society living in that system. That was all in my mind as I was working on the book.
Where does this stuff come from? It comes from sensory deprivation. It comes from turning down all the volume knobs to the one setting—or somewhere between zero and one—on everything, so I can actually hear myself think and I can actually poke around inside myself. We’re all so used to cultural noise being played at full volume. It can come as a surprise, even to myself, how much you can know about what’s going on by listening to almost nothing. It’s important, because if you have it up at full volume, you can’t hear yourself think, and all you want to do is chase after the stuff that’s going on.
Here’s the rule. Pay attention. If a very famous someone produces something good-not-masterpiece, you can’t praise it because they are too famous and your job as a talented-yet-unfamous person, when reading their stuff, is not to go, ‘Is this good? Am I enjoying this?’ but instead to say, ‘Is this as incredible as that one guy said? Is their fame deserved? Can I think of people who deserve their fame more?’”
“Really?”
“Yeah, absolutely,” the internet said.
The Time I Tried to Defend Jonathan Franzen to the Internet « Gather Round Children
This entire piece is lovely and amazing.
(via housingworksbookstore)
Your copy of Coming & Crying will be hardcover, 168 pages, containing 24 stories by 24 people, sent directly from a box in Melissa’s apartment and carried in a series of bins by Meaghan and Melissa to the general post office in Manhattan, where a woman named Estelle Lee will release it — that’s the word — to you. It will come in a white envelope.
$28 ($24 + $4 shipping/handling/Estelle, which will ship in 2-3 weeks)I’m in this! In case you have 28 bones/ers for a book that you will read over and over again and share with your friends and/or will make you very uncomfortable around me for a while, I heartily recommend you get this book!
Seconded.
The Believer - Interview with Robin Nagle
Since 2006, Robin Nagle has been the anthropologist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY). “Every single thing you see is future trash. EVERYTHING.”
I only bring this up because I’m fascinated by the degree to which brains have evolved to become more powerful than guns. Society’s founding geniuses engineered a social system that encourages the young people who have guns to shoot at each other instead of robbing old people. Forgive me for calling that awesome. Arguably, the most important function of human language is to protect the smart from the strong. Humans use words to create sentences, and sentences to create concepts, such as our notions of duty and honor. Powerful concepts control behavior. Without our language and concepts, the strong would kill the smart, and humans wouldn’t evolve to be any smarter. I think you could say that human evolution is being guided at least partly by the power of ideas.
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