November 3, 2010 Arts & Culture New York Photographs 1968–1978 By Paul McDonough What turned me away from painting was a realization that the streets and parks of Boston provided me with subject matter that I could not conjure up in my studio. At that point, a blank canvas drew nothing but a blank stare. So, with a newly purchased 35mm Leica loaded with tri-x film, I began my forays into downtown Boston to photograph. The kind of photographs I took then related to my art school days, when I would amble around the city making quick pencil sketches of people on park benches and subways. After roaming around Vermont in the summer of 1964, I decided to move to Cambridge, MA where I took a full-time job in a commercial art studio. I was by this time married to my first wife and our plan was to save up enough to live for a year in Europe. Instead we wound up in New York, arriving by U-Haul in the summer of 1967. Rents were cheap, and we could now get by on my part-time work in advertising studios. I had abundant free time, and I took full advantage of it. Read More
November 3, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Sarah Burnes, Literary Agent By Sarah Burnes Author’s Note: So as to not turn this into a kind of Caucasian Chalk Circle—that is, play favorites, pit one client against another—I am not going to mention any of my own this week unless they win an award or Lorin tells me to. DAY ONE 6:56 A.M. Alarm goes off, blaring NPR. Sebastian gets up to wake the kids. I turn off the radio and go back to sleep. 7:34 A.M. The Middlest comes up to make sure I am awake. I turn on the radio and listen to the Morning Edition story about the NFL enforcing their own rules. 8:35 A.M. For reasons both Byzantine and boring, I am driving to work today, dropping off the Littlest at kindergarten on the way. We pass by a Wonder Bread truck as we walk to the car. “Candy!” he shouts. “No,” I reply. “That’s a bread truck.” “A candy bread truck?” 9:45 A.M. At the office, I close my door to finish my weekend reading. I’m reading on a Kindle, which is convenient, but I haven’t yet figured out how to transfer my notes and highlights onto a document, so it’s not nearly as useful as it might be. Or as a paper manuscript is. But of course this makes me like this guy. 11:07 A.M. An offer comes in via e-mail! It’s going to be a good week. 1:00 P.M. Lunch with my friend Diane, Executive Director of the New Press. I tell her I think she should publish a book on the legal roots of the foreclosure crisis, and she looks at me quizzically. I realize I’m not explaining myself well and tell her I’ll give it more thought. We gossip about the kids in the sunshine at La Esquina. 2:35 P.M. Early for an appointment, I duck into B&N (there was no nearby independent!) and browse. I buy Gail Collins’s When Everything Changed, having just gobbled up Rebecca Traister’s Big Girls Don’t Cry. I also buy the current issue of Vogue, which really I should just subscribe to. 4:48 P.M. I dive back into a proposal I am editing—on paper. 5:57 P.M. Pack up bag. Since it’s Monday, I have all my favorite magazines, including the NYRB. 6:20 P.M. Driving home, I listen to the end of All Things Considered and to Marketplace and shout at this guy who says that there should not be a moratorium on foreclosures. What if it were your paperwork that got lost, pal? 7:14 P.M. My beloved mother-in-law and the Eldest’s BFF are over for dinner. I make chicken and broccoli from dinneralovestory.com, and even the picky eater eats it. 8:24 P.M. The Littlest and I are reading Charlotte’s Web. They’re at the fair, and Charlotte has just created her magnum opus, her egg sac. My friend Sarah says that when she got married, CW was one of three books she required her husband-to-be to have read. 8:54 P.M. The Middlest reads me a chapter of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights while I flip through New York. After the kids have been convinced to go to bed, I realize the Eldest has stolen my New Yorker, so I read The New York Review of Books (Cathy Schine agrees with me on Jennifer Egan). 10:15 P.M. I read a couple of chapters of Sigrid Nunez’s Salvation City. I loved The Last of Her Kind, but this is a different—if equally accomplished—kind of book. The last one was saturated in envy, but this one seems to be about … love. Read More
November 2, 2010 Arts & Culture All My Real Estate Agents Have Always Been Writers By Emma Straub Patchin Place, off 10th Street at Sixth Avenue, where e. e. cummings once lived. Photograph by Berenice Abbott. Some writers learn by practicing their craft alone in their rooms, some by a mentorship with a beloved teacher, some by M.F.A. committee. I have always tried to learn by osmosis: by placing myself in the physical location of genius, on the off chance that some greater force clinging to the chandelier would attach itself to me and give my writing a cosmic boost. Though I did spend many nights in my early twenties at the Cedar Tavern (where there was certainly some cosmic mojo to be had), the easiest path to absorbed genius always seemed like the real estate section of the newspaper. I found my first apartment a couple of months after graduating from college—a studio on Perry Street, at the curious point in the West Village when 4th Street finds itself between 10th and 11th Streets. Though I knew the neighborhood a bit from my own teenage explorations, there was one simple reason I wanted to move to Perry Street. Ted Berrigan, one of my favorite poets at the time, wrote this in 1963: I think I was thinking when I was ahead I’d be somewhere like Perry Street erudite dazzling slim and badly loved contemplating my new book of poems to be printed in simple type on old brown paper feminine marvelous and tough. Feminine, marvelous, and tough. I wanted it tattooed on my forehead. Never mind that in 2002 a pair of Marc Jacobs stores sat around the corner from Perry Street, and I was too intimidated by the salespeople to walk into either of them. I was tough and feminine and absolutely convinced that living on Perry Street would make my writing more wild, which it did: I wrote a long, messy novel that took Wuthering Heights and put it in my high school. There was incest, in a sexy way, like Flowers in the Attic. I forced my boyfriend to paint the entire room a shocking shade of pink and shoved my tiny desk against the oven, which was good for two reasons: The first was that I never used the oven, not once, and the second was that an entire family of mice soon took up residence inside the oven’s walls. Read More
November 1, 2010 On Sports A World Series Serenity Prayer By Louisa Thomas Dear Will, I trust you had a good time as a Giants fan last night. Is it too much to hope you’ll remain one? As our kind readers have assured me, the San Francisco bandwagon has room for all. I can’t imagine why you’d want to leave it—the Giants are too much fun. Last night they put a lanky kid named Madison Bumgarner on the mound. He recently bought a bull calf for his wife’s birthday. (She requested it.) He’s twenty-one years old, their number-four starter, but he pitched a game for the ages. Of course, he had help. We’ve been talking about pitching and hitting—what about fielding? Josh Hamilton probably had the highlight last night, with a slip-‘n’-slide catch in center to save an RBI single, but the Giants played a monster defensive game. Cody Ross continued his postseason heroics by making a grab on the slide. The infielders spun double plays with abandon (and a little good playacting, fooling the umps on at least one occasion). And I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of Freddy Sanchez flinging himself up and back to snare a shot that seemed destined for right field. Fully extended, leaning back blindly, somersaulting to protect the precariously held ball—it was a leap of faith. Faith in himself and in physics, in the determined arc of a batted ball. Who needs gods when you have such gloves? The Giants’ first two wins had commentators giving credit to the alignment of the stars. ESPN’s Jayson Stark invoked the heavens so many times that I started to think he was serious. In game 4, the Giants proved once and for all that the answer to their success is simple: They’re really, really good, better than the Rangers! They’re lucky, too. Luck is part of the game. The Giants control what they can control, and they shrug off the rest. Read More
November 1, 2010 Arts & Culture A Filmy Kind of Dread By Liz Brown Georges Simenon famously wrote in a kind of concentrated trance state, starting and finishing books within a matter of weeks, sometimes days. And that has always seemed to me the best way to read him, too—in a concentrated trance state. Quick, immersive, done. (See his Paris Review interview here.) I don’t necessarily remember many details afterward—just a blur of images, a filmy kind of dread—but once I begin to read his work, especially the romans durs, nothing else exists but the slide into whatever seedy underworld awaits: cheap hotel rooms, colonial outposts, occupied cities, whorehouses, and roadside bars. Whiplash quick, atmospheric, his are usually the skinniest books on the shelf. So, at five hundred and forty-four pages, his autobiographical novel Pedigree is something of a departure, and not simply in terms of length. Pedigree is the book that Simenon spent the most time on, and it’s the one where the most time passes. Set in his birthplace, Liège, it opens in 1903 and continues through 1918, just after the Armistice. Liège, the town where Georges Simenon was born. Read More
October 30, 2010 On Sports Of Gods and Men By Will Frears Dear Louisa, I hope you’ve been enjoying yourself so far. I have a serious question to ask you; in fact, I have a serious piece of begging to do. May I please switch teams, just for game 4? It’s not the Texas collapse that leads me to this embarrassing volte face. It’s not Cliff Lee’s implosion that I mind—although we have to discuss that—or the fact that Josh Hamilton and Michael Young are hitting a buck twenty-five each, or even that Matt Cain looks like he’s wearing a clown wig under his cap in honor of Halloween. These are all things I can deal with. No, the problem is that the George Bushes, pere et fils (just to be elitist about it) are scheduled to throw out the first pitch in game 4. I had been willing to overlook the issue of previous ownership, but this is too much. I would like the Rangers to win tomorrow, lose game 4 and then have Cliff come back and win game 5 with me a fan all over again. What do you think, is this possible? Read More