Posts Tagged ‘travel’
A Week in Culture: Peter Terzian, Part II
September 30, 2010 | by Peter Terzian
This is the second installment of Terzian’s culture diary. Click here to read Part I.
DAY FOUR
8:00 A.M. Help the convalescent Caleb into a car-service limo to JFK, where he’ll board a flight to Rochester. This afternoon he gives his Melville lecture. We’ll rendezvous in Albany, where I grew up and where my father still lives, tomorrow: Caleb will fly in from Rochester in the afternoon, I’ll drive up from Brooklyn with Toby in the evening. On Saturday morning the three of us will drive to a rented cottage in Deer Isle, Maine, for a belated summer vacation. “Pack sweaters,” we are told by just about everyone.
8:57 A.M. Shave with Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” playing in my head. Sometimes I try to trace a seemingly random song in my head to its origin—a stray thought, a phrase in a book, something overheard—but I fail with this one. I haven’t been lying in any burned out basements lately.
9:27 A.M. On the subway, read Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy1—I’m toggling back and forth between this and Poser on my commute. There are a lot of animals in Bedford’s autobiographical novel, which is set in fin de siècle Berlin, and sometimes she holds back the fact that they’re animals. In one section, we’re told that a new character, Robert, is in the kitchen breaking plates, and two pages later he climbs into a young girl’s lap—Robert, we discover, is actually a monkey. In the passage I read today, the narrator describes the irritable donkey she had as a child who is “fond of music full of brass, and it was for her benefit that the gramophone was set a-trigger at tea-time under the lime tree.”
12:58 P.M. Take the subway on my lunch break to Chelsea, to see an exhibit of new work by David Shrigley at Anton Kern Gallery. This is the second time I’ve seen this show. I went to the opening two weeks ago with a couple of friends, but split off to talk to David, whom I interviewed last year for a travel article about the Glasgow arts scene, then had to rush through the gallery to catch up. David is tall and gentlemanly. The Glasgow trip was my last travel story, and I’ve been feeling misty-eyed about it lately. I told David that Glasgow was my favorite city, and he said, “Well, that’s ridiculous2.” Today I want to spend more time with the show, when it’s less crowded. The centerpiece is a row of ten pairs of empty black ceramic boots3. A row of his funny drawings lines the walls, and hanging outside the building is a desperate-looking placard that says, “IT’S ALL GOING VERY WELL NO PROBLEM AT ALL.” There’s also a wall with small, protuberant digits beneath a model of the word God. My favorite thing here, though, might be a sculpture of a rib cage set on the floor in a circle of light from the skylight above, which I find inexplicably moving.
1:34 P.M. Think about how I don’t think about Pavement when I’m not reading encomiums to Pavement shows.
7:05 P.M. Get my hair cut at Whistle, a salon in the East Village. “Um … so do you know this actor Andrew Garfield?” Will, my haircutter, does! I come out with a modified, less actorly updo.
9:04 P.M. Caleb calls. The lecture was a success, the people at Geneseo lovely.
10:05 P.M. What to read over a week in Maine? First, the books I’m halfway through: A Legacy, Poser. Then some magazines: the new Paris Review, the new London Review of Books with a piece about creative-writing programs by Elif Batuman I’ve been hearing about, last week’s London Review with the Alan Bennett story I never finished. And now comes the joy of selecting un-begun books from the shelf. I settle upon three short ones, as I had intended: two New York Review Books Classics—James Schuyler’s Alfred and Guinevere, one of Caleb’s favorites, and Maria Dermoût’s The Ten Thousand Things, which my friend Jeff Rotter has praised in a Facebook post; and Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing, in a tiny hardcover Bloomsbury Classic edition with a hand-painted cover. I’ll bring The Oxford Book of English Verse, of course, for romantic reading over breakfasts studded with wild Maine blueberries. And then the big question: to bring Ulysses or leave it behind? For vacation, shouldn’t I pack “pleasure” reading? But Ulysses gives me great pleasure—the kind of pleasure found in difficulty4. But shouldn’t I bring books that don’t require entire other books of annotation? I end up voting in favor—a quiet Maine cottage seems like the right place for a distraction-free geek-out. Read More »
Annotations
- Shockingly out of print.
- He had a point—we were at a big, fancy art gallery in New York, after all.
- $28,500 a pair.
- Caleb has no such ambivalence—he’s packed The Faerie Queene.
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.
A Week in Culture: Rita Konig, Part II
June 17, 2010 | by Rita Konig
This is the second installment of Rita Konig's culture diary. Click here to read Part I.
DAY FOUR
7:00 A.M. NPR. Turns out it is pledge week. That explains the intolerable service! I can’t retain any information other than the stuff they are giving away.
8:00 A.M. New York Times story on children’s menus. Nicola Marzovilla hates them1.
7:30 P.M. Times dinner at Bill Keller’s house. Walk into a room of faces I don’t know. See one I recognize across the room. Phew. Can’t think why I know him. Am seated next to him at dinner. Penny drops. I have been watching him (quite a lot) making stew on the screen in the back of my Jet Blue seat. He is Mark Bittman, food writer from the Times. So I tell him. “Sigh, Yes, I get that a lot.” Pretty much end of conversation. Ben Brantley, theater critic, on other side. Heaven. Realize this is my moment to ask about the shark fin in the Obama picture. So I ask: did they choose it on purpose? Was this a big joke at the Times? No one had noticed! Bill goes off to find a copy of the paper. Apparently, it is more likely to be a dolphin. Think I hide my disappointment reasonably well. By the end of dinner conversation has turned to Real Housewives.
DAY FIVE
9:00 A.M. Flight to Savannah for art classes at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Last April, sitting on a panel during their Style Week, I told founder and president Paula Wallace that I really wanted to learn perspective drawing. Presto! Am on my way for three days of private tuition.
10:00 A.M. Plane is TINY. Actually, I find that small planes are less scary than the big ones. We are jammed in like sardines. Read The Far Cry and eat mini pretzels. I am now loving the book2. Read it all the way to the end. It is such a Persephone3 book.
1:00 P.M. Get picked up at airport. Keith Johnson was on my plane and is also going to SCAD to shoot for his show “Man Shops Globe.” Arrive at Magnolia Hall and start lessons, almost immediately, in the Carriage House with Peili Wang. He has two HUGE plastic bags filled with art materials. The most exciting is a box with a grid of every color of marker pen! I feel about eight years old.
9:30 P.M. Back from dinner and get into bed with new iPad. Watch "Real Housewives Reunion.” Kelly Bensimon is so stupid, she is like Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda. Move on to Glee pilot. It is so cheery after all those bitching women. Want to break into song—“Don’t stop believing”—and I hate musicals! I do LOVE Jane Lynch, though. And she just got married. It was in the Times Style section4.
Annotations
- J’AGREE. Well, in principle. I always want to eat everything on them: grilled cheese, pasta, chicken nuggets and French fries. This article has a bajilion comments from annoying parents showing off about all the sophisticated food their children have been eating since the age of two.
- The weather has turned. Theresa is turning out to be such an interested child. She comes across all these characters on the boat, and where her frightful father either dismisses them (usually the women) out of hand or takes to them (usually the men) immediately, she is more questioning and of an independent mind. I am feeling very fond of her.
- Persephone reissues novels that have fallen out of print. Mostly 1930s and 1940s. I would think they’re quite feminine. I can’t imagine men being very interested by them. But they are brilliant, usually about human character and frailty.
- Was amazed she was in it. I can’t bear that section.
A Week in Culture: Rita Konig, Designer
June 16, 2010 | by Rita Konig
DAY ONE
10:00 A.M. Ojai, California. Visiting my friend Honor Fraser and her family. Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is playing when I get up, and seems to continue on a loop most of the weekend. Dennis Hopper has died. More oil spilling. Picture in Times of Obama giving a press conference in Louisiana. There is a dorsal fin swimming about in the bay behind them. Has anyone else noticed?
2:00 P.M. Go up to Beatrice Wood1’s studio. Wood died when she was one hundred and five years old and worked as a potter right up until her death. Honor and I watch 1980s interviews2 with her. I buy her biography, I Shock Myself. I love reading about the unsuspecting feminists, the ones who lived their lives according to their own tune, rather than getting in a bate about women’s rights. I suspect that not all of her life was happy, as it so often is not when you take the road less traveled. I imagine it can be quite lonely between the glamorous and exciting stops. Still, she made a very spirited ninety year old.
7:30 P.M. Read "Little Red Riding Hood" to my godson three times, The Cat in the Hat once and “The Ruby Prince” twice. Roscoe is showing no signs of falling asleep. I can barely keep my eyes open. What is it about children that they like the same story over and over again? Am not into LRRH. I don’t remember this ending3 at all. The wolf eats the granny AND LRRH in one gulp each and the hunter comes along and rescues them by cutting open the wolf and there they are, good as new? Love The Cat in the Hat4. But find it exhausting to read. Are there ANY full stops? Think I will faint if I read it again.
Annotations
- Not wild about her pottery, even if it is worth a bundle, but the place is amazing, in the hills looking out over the Ojai valley. Spectacular, and so peaceful. At the front of the house is this old truck which runs on vegetable oil and a travelling band live inside it, the current artists-in-residence. It looks like a mobile trash can and must smell like a Krispy Kreme shop.
- Very Golden Girls: sitting-room sets with over made up middle aged women all using each other’s names a lot. Wood is dressed in sherbet-coloured saris and lots of large Indian jewelry. She attributes her longevity to a balanced diet of young men and chocolate.
- “The Ruby Prince” and LLRH are both from a book of what, I thought, were frightful fairy tales. Maybe too close to their original German. “The Ruby Prince” is about a Ruby that turns into a Prince. The Shah, who owns the ruby, sends the prince off to slay a dragon in exchange for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Of course!
- For those who, like me, are unfamiliar with it, it’s about two bored children sitting at home in the rain. Their mother goes out and suddenly in comes this crazy cat. The best part of the book, I think, is the bad-tempered goldfish who is always saying, “Don’t do that – you’ll break it!”
Meeting the Goose
June 14, 2010 | by Justine van der Leun
I’d always thought it a shame that Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Kappus never met. Now, I’m sure that it was a small mercy.
I discovered My Literary Hero when I was fifteen years old, handed his first book by an English teacher who thought I’d like him. Like MLH? I loved MLH: immediately, completely, and obsessively. It wasn’t a romantic crush; it was a writer crush, and it endured. Over the next thirteen years, I read and reread everything he had written, toting all of his books—essays, novels, short stories, what couldn’t the man do?—from my childhood home to my college dorm to my first apartment to my second, third, and fourth apartments. I read him on road trips, on airplanes, in foreign countries. I scrawled his best lines (poetry!) in my journals. I insisted that friends, family, acquaintances, and random passersby read MLH’s work. I insisted they recognize its excellence. I was a one-girl, and then a one-woman, fan club. MLH was my idol.
I eventually started to write a book myself. One day, as I was struggling with a passage, I thought, “I bet MLH would know what to do. If only I could ask him.” And then I thought “But could I ask him?” Sure enough, his e-mail address was there for the taking—one just needed to be willing to pick through the Internet obsessively for three hours and voila! Access!
I wrote (and revised and rewrote) an e-mail to MLH. Shockingly, MLH wrote back the next day. He’d be glad to help. Our correspondence commenced. It was my condensed, digital version of Letters to a Young Poet. Only he wasn't advising me on how to write lyrical German poetry; he was advising me on how to appropriately market a non-fiction book about a dog. It seemed similar enough.
If MLH and I got along famously over e-mail, I figured, we could potentially be best friends in real life. So when I took a cross-country trip several months after my first e-meeting with MLH, I wrote to tell him I'd be passing through his outpost and asked if I could buy him a drink. By “passing through” I meant “driving thirteen straight hours out of my way.”
Instead, MLH invited me over for dinner. He was significantly older than I and decidedly non-sleazy, but he lived in the bar-free boonies. That’s how I ended up at his kitchen table.
That’s also how I made MLH wish we’d never met.
Read More »A Week in Culture: Maud Newton, Part II
June 10, 2010 | by Maud Newton
This is the second installment of Maud Newton's culture diary. Click here to read Part I.
DAY FOUR
8:07 A.M. I don't work on Wednesdays, but I'm up early anyway, mildly hungover and with tea in hand, to write. The dinner scene looks clunkier now; commence line-edits.
9:30 A.M. Online grazing: Garrison Keillor publishes an infuriating death-of-publishing op-ed. Kingsley Amis argues that Keats isn't a great poet. Graydon Carter says that Kingsley Amis was “an accomplished womanizer, drinker, and conversationalist” who was “funny and raffishly rude, and had the thinnest, whitest skin I've ever seen on a man—like a condom filled with skim milk.” The NYPL and the Brooklyn and Queens library systems are beginning major layoffs; protest by joining the postcard campaign.
10:30 A.M. More writing, further consultation1 of Memento Mori.
12:30 P.M. For lunch: bagel with tomato, onion, lox, and cream cheese. I've set aside a little time here because I'm excited to take a look at the galley for my friend Amitava Kumar's A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb2, about the U.S. terrorism-detection machine/industry.
2:00 P.M. Back to work on my novel draft.
8:12 P.M. After six hours' work, I'm feeling more optimistic about the way all the hullabaloo with the dogs leads into the dinner scene.
8:45 P.M. Sushi and drinks with Max. Lately when I drink gin, I've been doing it Kingsley Amis' preferred way, with a little ice, lemon, and water. It's growing on me. I don't know why3 I'm drinking the things he and Muriel Spark did.
11:00 P.M. Time for another episode4 of Damages (second of Season Two).
1:23 A.M. Amis on owing to/due to: Never say5 “Due to lack of interest, the carol service has been cancelled"—only “Owing to...”
Read More »Annotations
- After reading Brad Gooch's biography of Flannery O'Connor last year, I internalized her (and Elizabeth Hardwick's) prohibition against allowing the same word to appear twice on a page, and my prose strains in places as a result. I wonder: did O'Connor read Muriel Spark? If so, confronted with such hilarious and inarguably brillliant repetitions—see, e.g., the sticks—how could she have continued to adhere to her rule? Also, how did Spark reuse words so imaginatively? She built humor through the sameness but somehow made the descriptions fresh every time. I wish she could revise this scene I'm getting ready to work on now, the one with the dogs in the car.
- I'm especially fascinated by the section about the Bangladeshi-born, New York City-raised Muslim artist who was detained in June 2002 after returning from a residency program in Senegal, on suspicion that he'd fled the country on September 12, 2001, and left a bomb behind in a locker. After being detained for questioning and then subjected to a six-month investigation that included nine polygraph tests administered in one day, the suspect launched The Orwell Project, which includes photos of and details about all the meals he eats, the urinals he uses, and the products he buys. "His aim,” Kumar writes, “is to overwhelm those who have him under surveillance... With the information they need.”
- I have no (conscious) belief that doing this will have any talismanic effect.
- Maybe I'll be happy about all the plot points later, but right now the story is starting to feel cluttered—not to mention seeded with coincidences. Obviously Patty had some sort of relationship with the scientist whose wife was just murdered, and I have the feeling we're supposed to wonder if he is the father of her son. Did he really have to be carrying on an affair with General Counsel for the Evil Energy Company, too? And then there's all the drama with Rose and the “fellow support group member” who obviously has something to do with Frobisher and who's going to get her into bed. The FBI plot is fine, but it's getting buried amid all this other stuff.
- I would like to think I would avoid using either in this formulation, but a quick run through old entries using Google might prove otherwise. Rather than worrying about this, I prefer to focus on the ancillary question of the double “l"; when did we stop writing “cancelled” or “travelled"? When did the single “l” become the default?
