February 2012
22 posts
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Notes: The Stranger's Child, Alan Hollinghurst
I’m behind in my book-reviewing obligations, so this will be brief.
Here’s what Alan Hollinghurst does well:
After leaving the dining-room Daphne went upstairs and came back down in her mother’s crimson shawl with black tassels, and with a feeling of doing things that were only just allowed. She saw the housemaid glance at her in what she sensed was a critical way. Coffee and...
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“I was happy to be a Brylcreem boy, a jiving Jew of the Green, from my gleaming...”
– Simon Schama, “Matzo ball memories” in the Financial Times.
Yowsers! And here I was thinking Schama was just an historian. These are some of the most vibrant and exciting 2,000 words of childhood memories I’ve ever read.
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“Do we even have to say that physical beauty is beside the point when discussing...”
– I’m not sure what planet Victoria Patterson lives on, but pretty much everything in this paragraph (and her piece) is disingenuous, or maybe delusional. Of course our species’ preference and patriarchy’s bias for female beauty is unfair. Of course. But if you’re going to...
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“As anyone who’s cocked half an ear to club music over the past three decades...”
– How disco changed music for ever in The Guardian (via fuckyeahwordsonmusic)
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“We worship products like holy artifacts. So if most cannot or are unwilling to...”
– I don’t follow metal (let alone grindcore), so I don’t even know who this guy is, but Matthew Widener sure gives thoughtful answers to Brandon Stosuy’s great questions.
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Watchpowells:
Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and State of Wonder and champion of independent bookstores, rocks on the Colbert Report.
I just happen to be reading State of Wonder right now, and wow, Ann Patchett’s got to be one of the most charismatic and personable novelists ever to grace television. Hooray!
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“Charlie and Ira came up hard, on a tiny Depression-era cotton farm in southern...”
– Alex Abramovich on Satan is real: The ballad of the Louvin Brothers
Book would be interesting regardless, but Alex A’s review kind of seals the deal.
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“If LCD Soundsystem were only responsible for three albums that are half-filler...”
– God bless you, Ian Cohen. (via screwrocknroll)
Hmm. I love a bad-band* smackdown as much as the next music geek, but a lot of these blurbs sorta miss the point. Who cares about their dopey frat boy fans or fashion victimhood? If you look closely enough, there’s usually plenty to hate about...
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Financial Literacy: 'Pretty Dismal' - NYTimes.com →
This is one of the findings of financial illiteracy in a working paper by Annamaria Lusardi, an economist at Dartmouth College. The paper examines just how well Americans and citizens of other countries understand the basic financial concepts that underpin decisions about mortgages, saving for retirement, credit card borrowing and other economic needs.
Reviewing several surveys, Ms. Lusardi...
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“They are, in James Wood’s words, the adult “show shelves,” in Jonathan Lethem’s,...”
– Francesca Mari, Shelf-Conscious
Good short Paris Review post on bookshelves and their social and emotional significance. I’ve never been one to organize my books by subject, author, publisher or any other rational schema. For one thing, it’s not in my lazy, laid-backish nature. But...
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“Do you know the philosopher Slavoj Žižek? He has this thing about love, the evil...”
– John Jeremiah Sullivan talking with Michael Goetzman, L.A. Review of Books
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“Lady: a child’s categorical noun for non-mother adults.”
– Molly Fischer, So many feelings
Fischer gets at some of the things that irk me about that “endemic verbal tic” lady — that it’s coy and childlike and signals a kind of mainstream-disguised-as-alt conformity, not to mention that it seems to want to deny the commonalities...
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Notes: Hark! A vagrant, Kate Beaton
Dear Kate Beaton, you and your book have shamed me into making an embarrassing public admission: I know nothing about Canadian history.
Right now my Canadian followers are smirking and eye-rolling and muttering something about !$&#!$ Americans. (My other non-U.S. followers are dusting off their geography jokes.) Dudes, I know! Which is why I’ll welcome any suggestion you might make...
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New York Times Magazine Hires Thought Catalog... →
Forgive a question from a non-New Yorker, but is the Observer sort of a NY-specific Onion?
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“In 2004, Wasserstein & Company bought the thriving mail-order fruit retailer...”
– James Surowiecki, Private inequity
I deal with some of these issues in my job, but I had no idea private equity had gotten this predatory. A must read, but be prepared to be pissed.