Author Archive
A Week in Culture: Reagan Arthur, Part II
June 24, 2010 | by Reagan Arthur
This is the second installment of Arthur's culture diary. Click here to read Part I.
DAY FOUR
6:10 A.M. The New York Times. More about Israel and the Gaza attacks. A surprising waste of space devoted to a co-op spat on the Upper East Side. I love reading about real estate and rich people behaving badly, but this feels small: boring fight and boring story. Bob Herbert on the oil spill. Henin and Ginepri are out of the French Open.
7:00 A.M. Managed to miss the train. On the bus instead, where my usual carsickness subsides enough to let me continue Operation Franzen.
8:15 A.M. E-mail includes news of a rave review by Julie Orringer in the Washington Post of Frederick Reiken’s Day For Night. I already loved Julie Orringer, but now I think she can do no wrong.
8:20 A.M. Great interview on the Huffington Post with Cal Morgan, editor at Harper Perennial and one of my earliest publishing pals when we were both at St. Martin’s Press. Cal is publishing some terrific fiction, in a really interesting way.
8:36 A.M. My morning spin around the blogs. Maud Newton, Betsy Lerner, Elegant Variation, Galley Cat, Sarah Weinman. With BEA last week I’m a little behind on these, and I see that Maud has been, as always, sharp and smart—this time about Garrison Keillor’s recent prediction that publishing is on its deathbed. Betsy Lerner writes about writing, publishing, and being an agent, and it’s beyond me how she manages to post a smart and witty new entry every day, but her blog has become a welcome daily habit.
12:23 P.M. Publishers Weekly, with round-up of last week’s BEA at Javits. Photo of Jon Stewart, who hosted the sold-out author breakfast, and provided the quote of the fair when he followed Condoleeza Rice’s apparently great speech with: “Don’t MAKE me like you.” I perform the editorial review scan: race through the review section for my own books, as well as books I saw, bid on, or passed on. These can bring pain or pleasure but today I’m spared both. Nice review for Don Winslow’s upcoming Savages. He’s the first writer I ever signed up, and a great guy to boot.
1:00 P.M. Glamorous publishing lunch: falafel at my desk. Twitter brings news that the Gores are divorcing: wow. And Twitter sends me to a deeply satisfying, hilarious review of Sex and the City 21 by Lindy West in The Stranger, which I promptly bookmark so I can read her more often.
1:10 P.M. Newsweek Tumblr in response to David Carr’s piece about their sale.
3:10 P.M. Break from work to check the Times online and dammit, Federer’s been knocked out of the French Open by the unpleasant Swede. I must Tweet my dismay.
4:45 P.M. Bookforum. Lovely Michael Greenberg essay about his near-death and his dying mother. Mary Gaitskill’s rigorous and convincing review of Marlene van Neikerk’s Agaat. Mark Stevens on the new Leo Castelli biography. Paul La Farge and Keith Gessen on utopia and dystopia. Reader, I skimmed. James Gibbons on Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death, which my colleague Pat Strachan edited—a “comic tour de force”! Hooray.
6:00 P.M. Franzen on the bus. The manuscript pile is growing. Must. Finish. Galley.
8:30 P.M. Manuscripts.
10:30 P.M. New Yorker. I love the Jeffrey Eugenides story set at Brown, which makes me nostalgic for my early New York City days when I was surrounded by Brown graduates who quickly cured me2 of saying “girl” instead of “woman” and other late-eighties infractions. Joan Acocella on “Cirque du Soleil,” which I just dragged my family3 to last week out on Randall’s Island. I could happily read Joan Acocella all day. The only thing that could make this New Yorker issue any better would be a Nancy Franklin review. Read More »
Annotations
- I know I should not hate this movie without seeing it, but the two hours I lost to the first one still make me angry, and everything I’ve seen or read about SATC2, including the movie’s own ads and promotional interviews, convinces me I’m on solid ground.
- Either UCLA was not as steeped in semiotics and political correctness, or I was not paying close enough attention. (Both, I think.)
- We gasped, we laughed, and my son asked me what time it was about every nine minutes.
A Week in Culture: Reagan Arthur, Book Editor
June 23, 2010 | by Reagan Arthur
DAY ONE
6:30 A.M. Packing for a trip to Toronto to meet George Pelecanos for the Hammett Awards. Embarking not just on a short trip, but on a Culture Diary, haunted already by George’s quote yesterday in The Wall Street Journal when they asked people what they’re reading this summer: “I'm not going to play that game1. Everyone says something that sounds smart and ends up taking Michael Connelly to the beach.”
6:45 A.M. In and out of the bedroom while packing, so I hear bits of an NPR story about New Orleans music2—second line, bump.
7:10 A.M. Bag ready, kids still asleep, I turn to my two ongoing Wordscraper games on Facebook. There are ample reasons to like and loathe Facebook, and I can’t justify its existence or my participation in it, but what I can do is blame Nora Ephron. Her essay about her online Scrabble addiction led me into a world I (happily) never knew existed: the world of Scrabulous. Soon, I was the closest I’ve ever come to an illicit online activity, playing rapid-fire games with total strangers who slaughtered me mercilessly. And then a friend told me we could play via Facebook, which I’d assumed was off-limits to any self-respecting adult over twenty-five. (Many would argue this is still the case.) It was the beginning of the end3.
7:21 A.M. Slate. Dana Stevens, like every other critic I’ve read so far, confirms my sense that Sex and the City 2 is an abomination upon womankind. William Saletan is in a dust-up with The National Review.
8:07 A.M. WNYC in the car to Newark Airport. Bob Henley, did you have to use the word “confab”? I’ll answer that: no, you did not. Long, depressing, infuriating story about the oil spill. Scott Simon riffs on airport security4.
8:40 A.M. Turns out leaving Newark on Saturday during Memorial Day weekend is a breeze. I’m in and out of security faster than you can say “Scott Simon.” Which only leaves me more time to suffer the plague of modern travel: the CNN airport onslaught.
9:00 A.M. Joy! My iPod John Prine Pandora station is working. So long, CNN.
9:05 A.M. Rats. Pandora no longer working. Time to plug into Syd Straw’s “Pink Velour.”
9:30 A.M. iPod battery dead. CNN rage returns. Half-hour report that began with the dubious claim that “Some people don’t know how expensive college can be” has been deemed “incredible” by the anchor. That’s one word for it.
9:35 A.M. Twitter. A blogger loves James Hynes’s Next. And this is one reason why I love Twitter5.
10:15 A.M. Plane prepares for takeoff and I’ve left my New Yorker in the overhead bin and I can’t turn on my e-reader or iPod. Media withdrawal begins.
10:30 A.M. Manuscript on e-reader for the short duration of the flight.
2:15 P.M. Waiting to meet Pelecanos in hotel lobby. French Open! I haven’t seen any of it yet. Nadal v. Hewitt for five minutes, then George and I head for Toronto’s Greektown, and a great Greek feast.
4:30 P.M. Manuscripts; nap.
6:30 P.M. Hammett Awards, where I say hello to Walter Mosley and meet Jedediah Barry6, whose novel The Manual of Detection is one of the prize finalists.
10:00 P.M. After the ceremony, drinks with George, Canadian writers Linwood Barclay and Giles Blunt, and wonderful Deon Meyer, the South African writer who is here as an international guest of honor. They all seem to know an awful lot about films, soundtracks, motorcycles, and cars. I guess now’s not the time to bring up The Real Housewives.
Annotations
- Culture Diary readers, it is so tempting to play that game.
- Apparently everything this morning will remind me of Pelecanos, who has been writing for Treme.
- Eventually Hasbro killed Scrabulous and replaced it with their vastly inferior official version, and my fellow addicts and I have migrated instead to the brothers Agarwalla’s not-quite-but-close-enough alternative, Wordscraper. I tend to have at least two games going at all times. And yes, I may have come to Facebook for the Scrabble, but I stayed for the Friends; it’s a daily habit I both enjoy and vaguely want to kick.
- It’s like he KNOWS I’m going to the airport!
- Do I need to defend my Twitter habits, too?
- I loved his novel and tried to buy it but lost to the estimable Eamon Dolan at Penguin Press; it’s nice to meet him and his charming companion Emily. George and I are thrilled when Jedediah goes on to win the award.
