It’s not a retail location, baby. No more corner stores. Not for us. This is a branding opportunity.
“I’ve been writing for a living for around 15 years now and whatever method I practise remains a mystery. It’s random. Some days I’ll rapidly thump out an article in a steady daze, scarcely aware of my own breath. Other times it’s like slowly dragging individual letters of the alphabet from a mire of cold glue.“
–Charlie Brooker, in the Guardian
Facebook emails received yesterday:
“Buku S—— invited you the event “Book Recycling at Union Square”
“Maris K—— invited you the event “Vol. 1 Brooklyn Birthday: The Greatest 3-Minute Record Reviews”
The other week I had the good luck to talk to Andrew Potter about his book The Authenticity Hoax. Potter is personable and quick on his feet and has the kind of nimble mind that runs on novel formulations of you know, this thing is like this other thing, this whole other phenomenon that appears unrelated but isn’t, not at all.
I typed up our conversation for a publication that didn’t end up running the piece. So here it is, here:
About twice a day a perfect argument for why even competent writers need editors lands in my Inbox. Below is the latest, and it typifies one of the primary ways organizations misuse email, churning out external communications that are not only too long but also, ultimately, ineffectual.
…and red state / blue state divides in a CB2 catalog. I have respect for what photo-shoot stylists do, and I love New York and the urban aesthetic and white dishes and topiary and half-full glasses of sangria, but when I see things like this, all I think is nooooo, that is NOT how folks eat chips and dip.
Not enough chips on that platter, for one thing. Also, it’s a platter. Potato chips go in bowls. All of which goes to support my feeling that we should institutionalize some intranational cultural exchanges. We’ll send photo-stylists to, oh, I don’t know, take notes at Old Home headquarters in New Brighton, MN, then invite their marketing people for a round of drinks at Raoul’s in Soho. Win-win.
Also, if you’re serving olives, you should include a receptacle for the pits. Just a thought.
The New York Times Book Review has a policy of asking potential reviewers of a book they’ve chosen to cover if they know the author. If author and reviewer share a history, be they friends or antagonists or residents of some lukewarm state in between, it will be difficult in the extreme for the reviewer to approach the book free of personal baggage. That’s the idea, at least, because if the answer to the question is “yes,” the potential reviewer doesn’t get the assignment and the Times calls the next person on their list.
I think the question doesn’t go far enough. All criticism announces its author; it’s the rare reviewer who’s able to use the space allotted without an eye toward advancing his or her own career. As such, linking arms with a author via a glowing write-up, or the alternative — distancing yourself from an author / genre / scene via a negative one — is always and inevitably informed by meta calculations that have zero to do with the merits of the work being discussed.
So perhaps the NYTBR should ask not one but two questions:
1. Do you know the author of this book?
2. Would you like to?
I imagine the answer to this second question tells us as much, and a lot more.
Michelle O. cops Jackie O.’s style? Maybe. I submit: Lady Bird Johnson, Bess Truman.
“Say you want to eat a whole pie. If you put your face down in the pie, you get pie all over your face. But if you slice out one piece at a time, you’ve a chance of getting it done.”
“How to Be Useful” as per 2 Corinthians.
And in common-school education during George III’s reign:
There were no cheap books or newspapers, and no proper system of public instruction. The poor seldom left the counties in which they were born. They knew nothing of what was going on in the world. Their education was wholly of that practical kind which comes from work and things, not from books and teachers; yet many of them with only these simple helps found out two secrets which the highest culture sometimes misses, – how to be useful and how to be happy.
