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I saw this image on Jess Bennett’s Tumblr, thought of Didion’s Where I Was From (which I’ve just re-read), and wondered if the Olivetti she wrote about could possibly be the same model as the one pictured here. And it is: … I was a year or two out of Berkeley, working for Vogue in New York, and experiencing a yearning for California so raw that night after night, on copy paper filched from my office and the Olivetti Lettera 22 I had bought in high school with the money I made stringing for The Sacramento Union (“Big mistake buying Italian,” my father had advised, “as you’ll discover the first time you need a part replaced”), I sat on one of my apartment’s two chairs and set the Olivetti on the other and wrote myself a California river. Click for high-res photo

I saw this image on Jess Bennett’s Tumblr, thought of Didion’s Where I Was From (which I’ve just re-read), and wondered if the Olivetti she wrote about could possibly be the same model as the one pictured here. And it is:

… I was a year or two out of Berkeley, working for Vogue in New York, and experiencing a yearning for California so raw that night after night, on copy paper filched from my office and the Olivetti Lettera 22 I had bought in high school with the money I made stringing for The Sacramento Union (“Big mistake buying Italian,” my father had advised, “as you’ll discover the first time you need a part replaced”), I sat on one of my apartment’s two chairs and set the Olivetti on the other and wrote myself a California river.

(Source: lamarde)

(this post was reblogged from jessbennett)

Niccolò Tucci, futurist

I am here tonight to (not so very dogmatically) assert that this particular webcam trained on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris is predicted by the little-boy narrator in “Terror and Grief,” Niccolò Tucci’s short story in the 11/15/1958 New Yorker. The relevant sentences:

Just as we always looked for our parents in the post cards they sent us, so we looked for them in the picture books on the living-room table. “Today they are in Paris. Let’s try to find them.” The big green book with “Vues de Paris” in gold on the cover was placed on the carpet and opened. … (A) new image was before us—the Rue de Rivoli taken with a camera in full daylight, the shadows quite visible and clouds in the sky.

“Here they are, entering this car.”

“No, they are here. See? There’s Father.”

“Oh, no, you are mistaken. I think they are back here, clear outside of the page. They will reach it tomorrow.”

“No, they are right here in this car, and we can’t see them.”

This was only a game and we knew it, and yet the longing for our parents was such that to look at those crowds in the streets of Paris was like being close to them. If anyone had told me that a new person had come into a certain page, I would have believed it—or at least I would have looked, with an absurd hope in the back of my mind. And I did, in fact, look every morning, knowing that this was madness. Had those been drawings and not photography, I would never have thought of doing such a thing, but photography was real; that was exactly what those people had looked like in the Rue de Rivoli. Only one more thing was needed—that the picture go right on developing itself after it had been taken and after it had been printed in this book. And some day, by means of other inventions, such as the waves in the ether, perhaps this would be possible.

“Terror and Grief” is included in Tucci’s The Rain Came Last & Other Stories, which I bought thanks to Thomas Beller, who read and discussed Tucci’s “The Evolution of Knowledge” for the January 2012 edition of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve listened to that one.

One last thing: Follow Thomas Beller on Twitter because of stuff like this, which started its life as a batch of 55 tweets before Salon published the whole thing.

Does the world need a Tumblr showcasing manicures devised to match the covers of books? Clearly, not. Am I unaccountably pleased that such a thing exists? Yes. - David Quigg, 11/10/2012 Click for high-res photo

Does the world need a Tumblr showcasing manicures devised to match the covers of books? Clearly, not. Am I unaccountably pleased that such a thing exists? Yes.

- David Quigg, 11/10/2012

(this post was reblogged from pagesandpolish)

fathers and vanished sons

Here’s the passage of Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue that made me tweet this and get the deep and near-instant satisfaction of this:

“Distractions.”

“Yeah.”

“Getting off your main focus.”

“That’s right.”

“Which is what, again?”

“Huh,” Archy said. “Hey, Mr. Jones? What’s wrong?”

Mr. Jones was up and out of his chair. He reached up a hand to Fifty-Eight, and the bird sidled up the gangplank to its inveterate perch.

“Mr. Jones, what did I say? Why you leaving? I’m not quite done, but I’m almost.”

“Just bring it to the gig,” Mr. Jones said. “It don’t work, fuck it.”

He started toward the back of the van, wanting—or feeling that at the very least he ought—to tell Archy about Lasalle, born and died April 14, 1966. Tell him about the two hours and seventeen minutes’ worth of the pride and the joy that Archy had been squandering for fourteen years. He went to the Econoline, slammed the doors on the empty cargo bay. Mr. Jones helped the bird onto the headrest of the driver’s seat, where he liked to ride, clutching the shoulder belt with one claw to keep its balance.

“Maybe you need to start trying to focus on the distractions instead,” Mr. Jones said. “Maybe then they wouldn’t be so distracting.”

“Mr. Jones! Hey, come one, now. What’d I say?”

Mr. Jones got into the van, started the engine. Even over the slobbering of its three-hundred-horsepower V8 Windsor, he could hear Archy repeating uselessly, “Mr. Jones, I’m sorry.”

“
If the author once winked during this accumulation of preposterous particulars, it would all turn flimsy and come tumbling down. But White never forgets that he is telling about serious matters: the overcoming of a handicap, and the joys of music, and the need for creatures to find a mate, and the survival of a beautiful species of swan.

- from John Updike’s 1970 review of The Trumpet of the Swan

It takes restraint for me to post anything about E.B. White without linking to my 2010 post with White’s quote about how “It takes more than a genius to keep me reading a book.” At this hour, I have no restraint. So here it is.

“

“You have no respect!” my mother screams back. “How can you talk to me that way? Either you obey me or you get out of my house!”


Early the next morning, before Boma wakes, I creep out of our bedroom with three shirts and two boxer shorts in a Snoop Dogg rucksack, my toothbrush in my jeans pocket, and one book in my hand. Portnoy’s Complaint.

- from A. Igoni Barrett’s “I Want to Be a Book: On Becoming A Writer”

(via Charles-Adam Foster)

turn to page 19 for the book's first sentence

  • Salon.com: "The Marriage Plot" opens much more simply and directly: "To start with, look at all the books."
  • Eugenides: Yes, with "The Marriage Plot," it's different. Because the first sentence of that book I arrived at in the same circuitous fashion as "Middlesex" — but the first sentence of this book is really on Page 19.
  • Salon.com: This one: "Madeleine's love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love."
  • Eugenides: Yes, that's really where the book began for me and I understood what it was about.
“
What follows is a condensed version of our conversation, edited lightly for clarity and with all of Díaz’s frequent swearwords removed.
- Sam Anderson talks with Junot Díaz

my divorce (a post in which I’ll try to use my brief, rich correspondence with novelist Lauren Groff to tell the very long, (eventually) hopeful story of this year that started as the worst time of my life)

On January 18, a couple weeks after my wife told me she needed to end the romantic relationship we started in 1989 as high-school seniors, I got her blessing to use this blog to write my way through the shock and anguish my life had become. But I balked. I feared shredding my dignity. I feared hurting our kids.

I trust myself now, and I’ve decided to mark the end of my marriage here for the simple reason that it matters. Matters to me, of course. But matters also to so much of what this blog is about. Matters, for instance, to how I connect to words like Joseph O’Neill’s “My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.”

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This old David Foster Wallace quote seems to be back. It’s loose in the world. Disarmed and undangerous. Disarmed, specifically, of its context. Undangerous enough to function as a get-out-the-vote cheer for an incumbent president. Forget whether or not I want our president re-elected. You’ll be able to make a good, fast guess if you Google the stuff I wrote for Huffington Post in 2008 or, faster still, if you simply base your guess on me having written for Huffington Post. Partisanship aside, then, please consider this a reminder that David Foster Wallace is dead, and consider it a plea against quoting a dead guy in ways that make him seem more like a bumper sticker and less like the David Foster Wallace, who as Jonathan Franzen wrote, “was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him.” Here, from what was originally an April 2000 piece for Rolling Stone, is Wallace’s get-out-the-vote cheer in something nearer to its natural habitat:    … this also explains why the amazingly lifelike Al Gore, over in the Democratic race, has been so relentlessly Negative and depressing in his attacks on Bill Bradley. Since Gore, like the Shrub, has his party’s Establishment behind him, with all its organization and money and the Diehards who’ll fall into line and vote as they’re told, it’s in Big Al’s (and his party’s bosses’) interest to draw as few voters as possible into the Democratic primaries, because the lower the overall turnout, the more the Establishment voters’ ballots actually count. Which fact then, the short but highly respected CBS cameraman says, helps explain why, even though our elected representatives are always wringing their hands and making concerned noises about low voter turnouts, nothing substantive ever gets done to make politics less ugly or depressing or to actually induce more people to vote: our elected representatives are incumbents, and low turnouts favor incumbents for the same reason soft money does. Let’s pause here one second for a quick Rolling Stone PSA. Assuming you are demographically a Young Voter, it is again worth a moment of your valuable time to consider the implications of the techs’ last couple points. If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting; you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.    Click for high-res photo

This old David Foster Wallace quote seems to be back. It’s loose in the world. Disarmed and undangerous. Disarmed, specifically, of its context. Undangerous enough to function as a get-out-the-vote cheer for an incumbent president.

Forget whether or not I want our president re-elected. You’ll be able to make a good, fast guess if you Google the stuff I wrote for Huffington Post in 2008 or, faster still, if you simply base your guess on me having written for Huffington Post.

Partisanship aside, then, please consider this a reminder that David Foster Wallace is dead, and consider it a plea against quoting a dead guy in ways that make him seem more like a bumper sticker and less like the David Foster Wallace, who as Jonathan Franzen wrote, “was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him.”

Here, from what was originally an April 2000 piece for Rolling Stone, is Wallace’s get-out-the-vote cheer in something nearer to its natural habitat:   

… this also explains why the amazingly lifelike Al Gore, over in the Democratic race, has been so relentlessly Negative and depressing in his attacks on Bill Bradley. Since Gore, like the Shrub, has his party’s Establishment behind him, with all its organization and money and the Diehards who’ll fall into line and vote as they’re told, it’s in Big Al’s (and his party’s bosses’) interest to draw as few voters as possible into the Democratic primaries, because the lower the overall turnout, the more the Establishment voters’ ballots actually count. Which fact then, the short but highly respected CBS cameraman says, helps explain why, even though our elected representatives are always wringing their hands and making concerned noises about low voter turnouts, nothing substantive ever gets done to make politics less ugly or depressing or to actually induce more people to vote: our elected representatives are incumbents, and low turnouts favor incumbents for the same reason soft money does.

Let’s pause here one second for a quick Rolling Stone PSA. Assuming you are demographically a Young Voter, it is again worth a moment of your valuable time to consider the implications of the techs’ last couple points. If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting; you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.   

Yes, I already posted a photo tonight of a page from Joan Didion’s 1975 essay “On the Mall,” but it really is a hell of an essay, and it’s never not a joy for me to type Didion’s words the way that Didion used to type Hemingway’s words.

I love the confidence — maybe even the cockiness — of this passage that risks abusing the hospitality of readers, who surely have no pre-existing urge to learn the difference between a Class-A shopping center and a Class-C shopping center:

I first heard of James B. Douglas and David D. Bohannon not when I was 12 but a dozen years later, when I was living in New York, working for Vogue, and taking, by correspondence, a University of California Extension course in shopping-center theory. This did not seem to me eccentric at the time. I remember sitting on the cool floor in Irving Penn’s studio and reading, in The Community Builders Handbook, advice from James B. Douglas on shopping-center financing. I recall staying late in my pale-blue office on the twentieth floor of the Graybar Building to memorize David D. Bohannon’s parking ratios. My “real” life was to sit in this office and describe life as it was lived in Djakarta and Caneel Bay and in the great châteaux of the Loire Valley, but my dream life was to put together a Class-A regional shopping center with three full-line department stores as major tenants.

That I was perhaps the only person I knew in New York, let alone on the Condé Nast floors of the Graybar Building, to have memorized the distinctions among “A,” “B,” and “C” shopping centers did not occur to me (the defining distinction, as long as I have your attention, is that an “A,” or “regional,” center has as its major tenant a full-line department store which carries major appliances; a “B,” or “community,” center has as its major tenant a junior department store which does not carry major appliances; and a “C,” or “neighborhood,” center has as its major tenant only a supermarket): my interest in shopping centers was in no way casual. I did want to build them. I wanted to build them because I had fallen into the habit of writing fiction, and I had it in my head that a couple of good centers might support this habit less taxingly than a pale-blue office at Vogue.

If you choked on the repetition of “pale-blue office,” you probably don’t like Didion because that’s a classic Didion move, and I probably shouldn’t tell you that she uses “pale-blue office” a third time three sentences later. But if you choked on the phrase “shopping-center theory,” you might enjoy this sentence:

One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me.

“On the Mall” is in Didion’s The White Album.

“
You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, a gesture. That’s what happened with your girlfriend Paloma—she stooped to pick up her purse, and your heart flew out of you.
- from Junot Díaz’s “Miss Lora”