let me know, bubele

Correspondence Between Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss That Explains How They Wrote the Same Book...

(via Large Vibrating Egg)

Later: If you go over to LVE's posts for Tuesday, you can find a painstaking (emphasis on pain) dissection of another Jonathan's New Yorker essay this week.

dennis cooper's list fetish

"Literary outlaw" Dennis Cooper now has his own blog, which is not half as sensationalist as I would have expected. He even succumbs to the temptation of top ten lists, just like all bloggers eventually must. (Via chemistry class)

Tempting me to make lists is dangerous. I have a lifelong top ten list fetish -- making them and reading them. I don't know why. I think maybe it's because, as an anarchist, hierarchies are wrong, scary things to me, and I'm drawn to making them in the same way that I'm drawn as a writer to scary subjects that are almost impossible to write about objectively.

William Gibson's blog seems only to have one entry: a dead link to MIA's "Galang" on March 11th.

Later: The 92nd Street Y also launches a blog. (Via Maud Newton)

avoid any reference to "the little man"

When I'm not scouring musty, old novels for references to cults, I can be called upon to give advice to the lovelorn. I think this is a very helpful article, but I hate being called Christine and I hate being 35. (Don't miss Caroline Tiger's advice in book form.)
-

I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you

I first came across Jonathan Coulton's "Skullcrusher Mountain" on Fluxblog a few weeks back, and it has grown on me like a bad habit. Fluxblog wrote, "If you have a high tolerance for smirky humor and mainstream country pop, this will probably seem like some kind of gift from above. Coulton nails the contemporary glossy American singer-songwriter aesthetic while subverting the genre with bizarro lyrics written from the perspective of a reclusive mad scientist/supervillain in love with his dim-witted but beautiful hostage."

Well, it just so happens, I am all of the above. (It also turns out that Jonathan Coulton is the musical director for the Little Gray Book Lecture Series, another one of the things I miss about New York.) You can link to the full lyrics above, but this has got to be my favorite verse ever:

I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don't like it
What's with all the screaming?
You like monkeys
You like ponies
Maybe you don't like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony
Making a gift for you?

Prepare to be taken hostage.

literary cartography

The New York Times Book Review has created a literary map of Manhattan.

Some mysteries remain -- the apartment of J. D. Salinger's nomadic Glass family, who seem to move from East to West Side; the address of the Xenophon, where William Dean Howells's March family found a sublet in ''A Hazard of New Fortunes.'' Nor could we confidently pin down the office of Bartleby the Scrivener, despite many good suggestions from readers, including Ann Sullivan-Cross's. Having had a job at 14 Wall Street -- ''like working in a dead letter office, at the depths of a dark world governed by dark laws'' -- she felt sure she recognized the spot; she pointed out, moreover, that Melville's brother Allan had a law office at that address.

resistance is futile

I try to not concern myself with the goings-on of the celebrati (for the most part), but sometimes it's just so darn fun. See for yourself:

• Defamer
• celebrities eating dot com
• media martini
• A List
  
• Awful Plastic Surgery
• Destroy All Celebrities
• Perez Hilton

What the hell. It's the weekend.

lunar park

Bret Easton Ellis's latest, Lunar Park, gets a Kirkus starred review.

For his fifth and most enjoyable novel, Ellis has found the perfect anti-hero: himself..."Every word is true," declares Bret—but then again, a writer's life is "a maelstrom of lying."

Via Rake's Progress

you are the queen of rock

I have had a soft spot in my heart for Chuck Klosterman ever since he inscribed my copy of Fargo Rock City: "Chris - you are the queen of rock." Flattery will get you everywhere. I won the essay collection/ memoir in a Little Gray Book competition at Galapagos that involved Klosterman, Darin Strauss, and some kind of birthday mystery. Here, he gives away the keys to the kingdom. If you don't see your favorite rock critic for the next couple of weeks, s/he is off making up a new lexicon.

Via Brooklyn Vegan

praying for a publicity stunt...

Jack White weds.

Later: OK, I've sufficiently recovered to say 1) he married the woman seen here and 2) you can stream the album in full again here.

Even later: The stream is muddy.

Even later than that: Welcome back, Scenestars.

what will happen to my coney island baby?

If this is true, I am crushed. The New York Press reports that Coney Island will soon be the latest object of gentrification run amok.

At the end of the summer, thanks to some shortsighted city planners and no-sighted developers, everything you love about gritty old Coney Island is going to be swept away. A few token landmarks may be spared for the sake of postcard sales—the Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel—but you can say goodbye to the souvenir shops that rent beach chairs, the fried clam stands, the Boardwalk Nathan's and—god help us all—Ruby's Bar. And with them the characters who made Coney what it is—namely, one of the last bastions of rabid individuality left in New York.

According to the city, those decaying eyesores need to go in order to make room for the spa, the indoor swimming pool, the hotel, the shopping mall and the fancy cafes.

Nauseating. I can only imagine Shoot the Freak won't make the cut. For a compelling history of Coney Island, don't miss Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.

Later: More on Coney Island's Future: Flashy, Pink, Anodyne!

but do the child brides look like superheroes?

One of my favorite books of last year was Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, but if you want a more condensed, institutionally approved read, you can now get the Book of Mormon in comic book form.

Or if you prefer a more secular subject, you can also now get your Harlequin romance in manga form.

Via Bookninja

friends and lovers

I am an easy mark for compilations like Friends and Lovers: Songs of Bread. I still listen to 1994's If I Were a Carpenter a few times a year. For some reason, they bring me back to driving to arcades, bowling alleys, miniature golf courses, movie theaters, and other arenas of childhood delight on Saturday visitations with my father. Here's a taste from the Bread tribute:

Baby I'ma Want You - Call & Response

It Don't Matter to Me - Josh Rouse

Guitar Man - Cake (just a crumb really)

it's work to confess

The New York Times weighs in on a website I mentioned earlier, PostSecret. Reviewer Sarah Boxer is intrigued by the secret sharers, but casts a somewhat harsh glare on what she perceives as their main motive.

The secret sharers here aren't mindless flashers but practiced strippers. They don't want to get rid of their secrets. They love them. They arrange them. They tend them. They turn them into fetishes. And that's the secret of PostSecret. It isn't really a true confessional after all. It is a piece of collaborative art.

She never goes so far as to say the card-senders are lying, but that seems to be what she is implying. Call me a sucker, but some of the secrets are just too painful to not be true.

better late than never

Even though Lionel Shriver's gripping novel We Need to Talk About Kevin came out two years ago in the U.S., it is only just now starting to receive the recognition it deserves, thanks to its publication in the U.K. Boldtype has a review in its current issue as well as linking to more coverage in The Guardian, Identity Theory, and The Independent.

mix post: the impatience edition

I am in one of those ruts where nothing seems to be happening quickly enough, so I've gathered some songs to battle my mood (or cushion it in a soft cloud of desperation).

All Right Already - Kathy Cashel

Hesitating - Dao Strom

Hope and Wait - Bella

I Can't Wait - Shearwater

I'll Wait - Ruth Gerson

I'm New Here - Smog

Miracle Wait - A Taste of Ra

On and On - Missy Elliott

Slowly Slowly - Magnapop

The Wait - Shelby

Via largehearted boy, pitchfork, popsheep, swedesplease, songs:illinois et al