sunday short stack

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” - E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

• Already? I read a whopping 8. The 2010 Tournament of Books Long List
• The Most Anticipated Band Reunions of 2010
• Anne Patchett: Writing is a job.
• Rolling Stone's 100 Best Songs of the Decade
• Federico Garcia Lorca's corpse is missing.
• Facebook's Five Most Annoying Parents
• NPR (John Freeman) selects the best debut fiction of 2009.
• The Guardian's 100 Best Films of the Noughties
• Yay! The White Stripes are releasing a live box set.
• "All the hot chicks dig guys with supernatural cars that kill people." Via @ebertchicago, screenshots of actual Comcast movie plot summaries.

santa baby

Dear Santa -

Think of all the fun I've missed
Think of all the fellas that I haven't kissed
Next year I could be just as good
If you'd check off my Christmas list

XO Chris

Gramercy Gate Compact @ Etsy (citybitz) $40


















Miz Mooz Amelia Button Boot @ Amazon $220


















Pictorial Webster's Dictionary @ The Curiosity Shoppe $35
















Aesa Diamond Vein Necklace @ Barneys $267

Stanton T90 USB Turnrable @ ebay $299

















Electra Orbit 3i (Emerald) @ Cyclewerks $549















The Bombshell Woolie @ Etsy (superjennylove) $46
















Collins Sofa @ Crate & Barrel $2499

a life beyond nostalgia

Anne Trubek on the death of handwriting:

The moral of this story is not that typing is superior to handwriting, that parents should have to transcribe the stories of their offspring or that private schools are superior to public ones. The moral of the story is that what we want from writing — what Simon wants and what the Sumerians wanted — is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts. As Wolf writes: "A system that can become streamlined through specialization and automaticity has more time to think. This is the miraculous gift of the reading brain." This is what Palmer wanted for his students — speed. This is what the typewriter promised Twain. This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: We want more time to think.

Related, a student brings a typewriter to class (via Open Culture).

52 books in 52 weeks

33. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Sigh...I'm not getting the accolades. I am a huge Lorrie Moore fan, but this novel did not do it for me at all. It took many, many pages to emerge from a somewhat boring beginning and never quite seemed to find its purpose. Of course, because it's Lorrie Moore, there were sentences of quirky, startling insight, but not as many as I would have liked. However, if the praise for this novel leads to more rapid release of another, then that's fine by me.

34. A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century by Cristina Nehring

I love anyone who dares to point out that twenty-first century heterosexual relationships are suffering at best, totally fukakte at worst. Nehring doesn't explicitly state she's focused on male-female connections, but her use of literary and historical examples of this type imply it. She attributes this contemporary dilemma to a denial of much of the emotional currency that supported the traditional romantic economy. Is everything she says reasonable? Not necessarily, but at least she's saying it.

35. That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

I grew up in Massachusetts and took summer vacations in Maine, so I hoped the settings would charm me, regardless of any other narrative element. No such luck. This book wasn't painful to read and the second half was much more engaging, but I didn't really connect with any of the characters in this character-driven novel. There is one successful scene of absurdity that seems out of place, but it is also the most memorable section of the story.

36. Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow

I can't quite believe this is my first Doctorow novel, but there it is. I enjoyed this quick read that fictionalizes the story of New York's most famous hoarders, the Collyer Brothers. There's a mild Forrest Gump-like narrative arc that shows the brothers responding to different monumental events of the twentieth century. I questioned whether the idiosyncratic recluses would have never had a fight (really?), but the men and their increasingly cluttered home were effectively evoked.

sunday short stack

"Telepathy and clairvoyance play a part in every love story." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

• Margaret Atwood offers 10 editing tips for your fiction manuscript.
• The Spirit Awards announce their nominees for 2009.
• Classic art + graffiti = The Graffiti Ren 2 Contest
• "My MFA Workshop Responds to My Twitter Status Updates"
• Bored? Make all 48 recipes for your favorite LA restaurant dishes.
• Holiday dating? Guys and girls to avoid...
• The bands of tomorrow: SXSW 2010
• 50 Things a Writer Shouldn't Do

End of the year "Best of" lists are piling up. A random selection:

• Favorite Fiction of 2009 from the LA Times
• Said the Gramophone's Best Songs of 2009
• The Boston Globe's Fiction of the Year
• KCRW DJ Picks for Top 10 Albums of 2009
• Jessa Crispin's Picks for Best Foreign Fiction
• The Barnes & Noble Review's Best Books of 2009
  
• Gorilla vs. Bear's Albums of 2009

the death of uncool

Brian Eno thinks we're living in a stylistic tropics.

There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

going west

A beautiful short film for the New Zealand Book Council:

Via @spikenlilli

you should have offered her your boots

V.L. Hartmann reflects on Joan Didion after seeing her on the street.

For some of us, mimicking Joan Didion has become the height of literary ambition, and not just her sentences. “Goodbye to All That” is a jumping-off point, California will fall short of its promise, but there is always Hawaii, and a penthouse, even when you are broke. There is a husband across the hall in his own study in your house in Malibu while you write. This is the Joan Didion who is forever leaning out of that Stingray with a cigarette in her hand. She appeared to be living in her sentences, and it was this intimacy that took me everywhere that she had been, even in the decades before I was born. The text might say it was hard, but the style makes it look easy.

sunday short stack

"Only a world without love would be worse than one without music." - Kingsley Amis

• 100 Notable Books of 2009 from The New York Times
• Oddly Specific: The Strangely Particular Website About Peculiarly Exacting Signs (via @GreatDismal)
• So you have invented Twitter. Congratulations. This is where that time machine would definitely have come in quite handy.
• Mary Gaitskill, Lionel Shriver, Walter Kirn, and others contribute to New York Magazine's Political Fictions Project.
• LA Weekly's Post-Apocalyptic Playlist
• What does indie mean to you?
• Rick Moody starts his 153-tweet fiction project tomorrow @ElectricLit.
• The AV Club's 10 best short-story collections of the ’00s
• No duh: Jack White is The Observer's rock 'n roll start of the decade (via @largeheartedboy)
• The Guardian's Best Books of 2009
• Make sure you have some time: The 99 Most Jaw-Dropping Movie Moments

ladwp holiday light show by day

Every year, the LADWP hosts a bizarrely retro light show along a road through a golf course at Griffith Park. Yesterday, I made a Thanksgiving morning pilgrimage in order to take some photos. The whole collection can be seen here, but below are some of my favorites.

happy thanksgiving!

judging a book

i09 presents a history of 16 science fiction classics, told in book covers.

sunday short stack

“Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.” - George Saunders

• Nick Cave joins nine other writers on the Literary Review's bad sex in fiction award.
• Limone!
• LA Weekly's Top Ten List of Major Stars Covering Other People's Music
• 1000 Awesome Things
• McSweeney's offers standards for grading the life of an adjunct composition professor.
• Three Guys One Book is just what it says.
• The 25 Greatest Coens Movie Moments
• I wish I had been at this Jesus Lizard show.
• Top 10 Bad Messages from Good Movies
• From Neatorama, 13 Examples of Literature in Song and from Flavorwire, Writers Who Sing, Singers Who Write
• Check out Google Image Swirl.
• NYC's Best New Buildings of the Decade
• Jack White and Wanda Jackson are going to make an album together!
• I never got around to posting this when it came out, but behold: the four-part Paste feature, "Glory Days: Dispatches From an Academic Conference on Bruce Springsteen."

what an essay is, exactly, these days

Zadie Smith wonders what essays offer to a novelist:

Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it's the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you're generally looking into is the self. "Other people", that mainstay of what Shields calls the "moribund conventional novel", have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the "lyrical essay."

These are all satisfactions the practice of writing novels is most unlikely to provide for you. Perfect essays abound in this world – almost every one of Joan Didion's fits the category. Perfect novels, as we all know, are rarer than Halley's comet. And so, for a writer, composing an essay instead of a novel is like turning from staring into a filthy, unfathomable puddle to looking through a clear glass windowpane. How perfectly it fits the frame! How little draught passes through!

disco bloodbath is a pretty great name

The New York Times looks at the indie music scene in Greece.

One factor in Athens’s downtown indie transformation was a recent explosion of free press in the city. Five years ago, there was only The Athens Voice, an alternative weekly that then had a meager listings section and only a few pages devoted to the arts.

But along came Velvet (www.velvetmagazine.gr), a free monthly first published in 2004 by the Athens-born brothers Lakis and Aris Ionas, who run a veritable do-it-yourself culture factory out of their fourth-floor downtown studio.

In addition to running the magazine, devoted entirely to the local indie scene, the Ionases have an art collective, a fashion line (their mother sews all their futuristic neon-colored metallic wool creations), and an art-punk band called the Callas. The group has self-released two albums and performed throughout Europe — often in homemade spandex Superman costumes — with the Callasettes, their five “laboratory-made groupies.” Following Velvet, many other locally focused free publications, like Lifo, FAQ, Don’t Panic Athens and Ozon, which has an English-language Web site (www.ozonweb.com/en), have sprung up.