The Junk Drawer

Bridge-and-Tunnel 'Poser Hipsters' Clog Williamsburg Bars, Locals Complain - Williamsburg - DNAinfo.com New York

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:24:38 -0400

Bridge-and-Tunnel 'Poser Hipsters' Clog Williamsburg Bars, Locals Complain - Williamsburg - DNAinfo.com New York:

“I have friends who come in from Manhattan to walk around or go to Brooklyn Flea” she said of the weekly waterfront market. “And I’m like, ‘Just because you want your touristy fix one day doesn’t mean I can hang out [with you].’ I live here all the time.”

I think this has to be the final nail in the coffin of the “hipster” thing, right?Isn’t “poser hipster” a bit of a redundancy? The identity politics in here are so warped! Strains of anti-Manhattanism, nit-picky defense of a semi-derogatory label, addition of other derogatory labels!

Also, I wasn’t aware that visiting another neighborhood in your city of residence could be classified as tourism. Admittedly, there are times when I’ve been to the Upper East Side and felt as though I had changed worlds, but I don’t think you can precisely deem it tourism. We all live here all the time.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Matt Smith! What did you do to your hair?!...

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:21:35 -0400

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Matt Smith! What did you do to your hair?! YOUR GLORIOUS FLOPPY HAIR.

I just cannot. I can’t.

Not even the presence of Ryan Gosling helps this. (Even though his hair looks adorable.)

Thanks, Buzzfeed, for trashing Friday.

Photo

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:25:14 -0400

Books of April

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:17:01 -0400

An almost-all-lady month, marred only by the inclusion of our book club book, Mr. Johnson’s tome on North Korea.

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

I had mentioned earlier my problems with Gone Girl. Essentially, it was a gussied-up thriller (not bad!), that went completely off the rails for me at the end. I was buying the character study of two married people who are so very different from each other’s perceptions. Then it went full crazy town at the end and I just could not stay on board.

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

An incredibly light and somewhat hollow romance. Full of things I usually embrace when it comes to fast Twinkie reading—magic, epic games, duels, flights of fantasy—but nothing ever felt solid. The characters, the setting, even the plot points had the reading equivalent of a cardboard stage-set.

The Tiger’s Wife, Tea Obreht

On the other hand, Tiger’s Wifefelt VERY rounded and hearty. Part of me was jealous, when this first came out, that a 26-year-old girl was getting volumes of praise. Well, now I understand why. The characters, the story all feel very realized, and satisfyingly alive. It does read as a feminine novel—though NOT chick lit—but it doesn’t shy away from the ugly and the brutal.

Birds of America, Lorrie Moore

Collection of short stories, and shockingly the first Lorrie Moore I’d read. She has a strong, funny tone and draws excellent sketches of people and personalities in just a few lines.

Salvage the Bones, Jessamyn West

The story of a family outside New Orleans in the days just before and during Katrina, narrated by the daughter. Oh man, so much sadness in this book. Everything is disappointment for this family. And this is not noble or character-building adversity—nope, this is just the fact that being poor and stuck SUCKS, and what can you do but go along. Even when you have friends and family. It still bites. (Also, that small lives can be epic—especially when you throw in disasters of mythical proportions.)

The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson
A sort-of bildungsroman, sort-of Boys’ Own adventure story all as warped through the lens of the setting in the DPRK. It’s hard with an outsider trying to recreate a closed world to navigate what is real and what has taken a bit of creative license. In the end, the best way to approach it, I found, was to think of it less as a narrative of North Korea, and more one of how people express, control, and rewrite their lives in the constraints of the world. How do we reshape our personal stories, or not, around the obstacles our environment throws up?

thepierglass: itskatianicole: Oh Captain, my Captains The...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:08:58 -0400

thepierglass:

itskatianicole:

Oh Captain, my Captains

The whole internet ships this.

Alright, internet. Time to go home. Our work is done.

"What are you planning to read next? For the past 20 years or so I’ve been planning to read the..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:28:00 -0400

“

What are you planning to read next?

For the past 20 years or so I’ve been planning to read the final four volumes of “In Search of Lost Time” next.

”

- Jonathan Franzen, in the NYT Sunday Book Review

This is an almost perfect encapsulation of how I feel about Proust.

Sharon Olds Won a Pulitzer!

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:27:28 -0400

And I love love love her poems. Here’s an excerpt from one about a photo shoot for Vogue:

And I told her I had made a deal,
early on, with my fear that I was
distasteful to look at, my face ashamed
to be seen — you know, the usual — and my
deal was that my features were invisible,
as if when someone looked at me
they would see just my spirit, a changing
upright oval of colors, framed by the
dark and now silver matter of the hair.

And here’s another, one of the first I read of hers, Sex Without Love, and knew I was in love:

These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio
vascular health—just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

(Hat tip to Nicole Cliffe at The Hairpin)

Awkward Moments

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:48:08 -0400

An object lesson in why one should learn the NATO phonetic alphabet:

I answered the phone at work, as I am wont to do, and spoke with an elderly, slightly deaf man who wanted to mail in a submission. He asked for the address. I proceeded to give it to him, spelling out our street, Varick, several times.

Once we’d gotten all the way through, he read it back to me. “Seventy-five Barick St,” he said.

“No,” I answered. “Varick. V as in…”

And this is where I lapsed into an extended pause because the only V-word I could think of at that moment was “vagina.”

I racked my brain for several very long seconds.

“…as in vile.”

Epilogue: After relating this story to them, my interns and the freelancers proceeded to volley V-words at me. Volcano! Violin! Valentine! Also, I now know, and will likely never forget, that the NATO code for V is “Victor.”

Non Sequitor, from a friend

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:20:00 -0400

marie antoinette is not that bad!
its like fucking tree of life
watch them both
back to back
it makes sense

Guys! Guys! Isn’t this new bat genus super cute?!

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:18:01 -0400

Guys! Guys! Isn’t this new bat genus super cute?!

When Books Trick You

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:52:45 -0400

I picked up Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, after avoiding it for months and months and months. I am a little bit (and possibly irrationally) allergic to the breathless hype machine that pops up around certain titles. (I still, to this day, have not even attempted to read Freedom.) But I was swayed because Gone Girl was doing so well in the Morning News’s annual Tournament of Books. If so many smart people are lauding a novel, it must be alright, right?

And this is not to say that Gone Girl was bad. It wasn’t! It’s tense and very exciting and pulls you into reading it at a break-neck, sleep-crushing pace. My problem with Gone Girl, in as much as there was one, was that I felt misled. Here you have a novel that looks like it’s going to give you a deconstruction of a marriage through the trope of a potboiler. What you actually get? A potboiler whose central relationship swiftly begins to stress your suspension of disbelief.

There is nothing wrong with a gripping, suspenseful genre read. But you have to lay that out, a little bit, at the beginning—at least if you’re going to go so wildly out of bounds as the end did. In the end, both Amy and Nick were unlikable, difficult personalities; on top of that Amy was just literally unbelievable. There is no world where I could believe she existed as written. Except maybe a genre world where geniuses and crazy twists are not only the norm, but treated with some grace.

reasonsmysoniscrying: I wouldn’t let him drown in this...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:17:12 -0400

reasonsmysoniscrying:

I wouldn’t let him drown in this pond.

There are times where I think parenting—especially when parenting the young and pre-verbal—must just be an incredibly frustrating and tedious exercise, with a completely arbitrary scoring system, a tyrannical judge, and little reward when you do something they deem to be right.

Which is to say, how did parents do it before they could make fun of their offspring on the internet?

My love life

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:58:13 -0400

whatshouldwecallme:

Expectation:

Reality:

I only WISH I had that many cats to love.

Why?, “Simeon’s Dilemma.” An entry from a dude...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:53:52 -0400

Why?, “Simeon’s Dilemma.” An entry from a dude band! And with this we take the vaguely-creeper things full on into the light of the day. He’s definitely in love with her. And definitely following her on his fixie.

Taylor Swift, “You Belong with Me.” You knew it was...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:40:31 -0400

Taylor Swift, “You Belong with Me.” You knew it was coming. How could it not? It says it right in the title. You belong with me, dude! Are you listening to Taylor? She knows! She’s the one who makes you laugh when you know you’re ‘bout to cry! She knows all your favorite songs! (Seriously, when you listen to several of these in a row, you’re suddenly very aware of how creepy it gets.)

Cat Power, “Still In Love.” Dude, she can’t...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:20:06 -0400

Cat Power, “Still In Love.” Dude, she can’t even see you on the street without totally missing you. And also being jealous of your new girl.

Robyn, “Dancing On My Own.” Time to dance party...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:01:28 -0400

Robyn, “Dancing On My Own.” Time to dance party about people who don’t love you anymore. Also your maybe vaguely stalkery tendencies. (Why are you watching him kiss her from your car?)

Margaret posted this earlier, and now it has earwormed its way...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:18:18 -0400

Margaret posted this earlier, and now it has earwormed its way into my head. Because I love songs about missing people, even though I am not currently missing anyone/regretting anything. Let’s make today “Posting Songs About How People Just Don’t Get What They’re Missing” Day.

Books of March

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:13:33 -0400

Welcome to Middlemarch Madness! This month was light, because I devoted most of it to the task of crushing Eliot’s masterwork. Pulled it out at the wire, while at home for Easter.

20th Century Ghosts, Joe Hill
A collection of short stories—mostly of the horror/supernatural genre—from Stephen King’s son. While some of them seem to end a little abruptly, there are several that are lovely and movingly told. The front section of the book is loaded with these: “Pop Art” and “20th Century Ghost” center the real world around one fantastical element; “Best New Horror” is an entertaining exploration of genre tropes; “Better Than Home” eschews the fantastical entirely to discuss a father-son relationship forged via baseball.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo
This was the most frustrating of the books I finished this month. Boo presents a semi-novelistic, semi-reported account of the denizens of slum on the outskirts of Mumbai. The presentation of the subjects and their inner lives, their struggles and relationships within the society of the slum, sometimes comes across as less a reported story than a fictionalization. I wanted more context from the book, more understanding of how the greater system of Mumbai worked, and where the slum denizens fit into it. Boo gives some view on the corruption of the justice system, the growth going on, and the enormous wealth disparity in the city, but not enough.

Is Everybody Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy Kaling
I picked this up as a palate cleanser to read on a long bus ride to Boston. I’d been deep in the world of Middlemarch, but wanted something light for the trip. It definitely sufficed. Kaling is funny, and quite witty, and occasionally devastatingly, hilariously sharp-eyed in her observations. It’s a shame this voice didn’t translate as strongly to “The Mindy Project.” Someone please let her write/direct/star in an old-fashioned romantic comedy. I think it could be genius.

Middlemarch, George Eliot
Easily the longest book I tackled this month. A slow starter, as Eliot introduces you to the (tiny) world of Middlemarch and its inhabitants. The young people of the novel grow on you, and Eliot’s women in particular are refreshing, intelligent, and lovely. Even Rosamond Vincy becomes tolerable, after being annoyingly terrible for the first seven-eighths of the novel. And, of course, Eliot employs that favorite technique of movies, the What Happened After ending, wherein she tells us how everyone’s life went on. Super-satisfying.

skittlesontoast: ‘My cat’s name is Money’ I want a cat, just...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 10:12:17 -0400

skittlesontoast:

‘My cat’s name is Money’

I want a cat, just so I can make this.