Jonathan Lethem gives The Guardian a tour of his Brooklyn neighborhood.
Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn
Green Girl and Zipper Mouth Release Party
If you like leading ladies so blazing they burn a hole in your head, make way to the East Village on Tuesday evening to hear Kate Zambreno and Laurie Weeks read at Dixon Place. Their latest novels, Green Girl and Zipper Mouth, depict intense, edgy women with razor-sharp prose. And befitting both protagonists, there will be an after-party with DJs and projections that will go on till…?
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The Idealistic Hero
“What is missing from Testimony is the customary idealistic hero, the one last encountered in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass who doesn’t avert his eyes from suffering and sordidness, but who nevertheless is full of hope for a better future. Testimony is a corrective, an anti-epic.” Charles Simić recounts Charles Reznikoff’s long poem Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative in the NYRB.
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Curiosities
Try out our new “Random Post” button below the search boxes on the sidebar.CJR unveils new software in the quest to stamp out “gotcha journalism.”* Charlie Gibson, September 11, 2008:Question: “Have you ever met a foreign head of state?”Gotcha Quotient: 95Reason: First of all, foreign policy-related questions are incredibly unfair…Tennis reprints David Foster Wallace’s feature essay from its September 1996 issue.Perhaps not the most useful link in these tight times: “The Most Expensive Things I could Find On Amazon.com” (Note: several of these are out of stock. Coincidence?)None of you saw this coming: Rapper Coolio to release his own cookbook.Cindy Sherman’s famous librarian “Untitled Film Still” fetched $900k at a recent auction.
Heti and Didion, Chatting It Up
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Reel Art
“‘A good projectionist should be invisible,’ he says, his small rectangular glasses steadied on his forehead. ‘No one should be able to tell you’re in the booth changing the reels.’” A look at the hidden process of reel-to-reel cinema.
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Cross Off and Move On
Equipment for today’s lunch hour: 1) somewhere sunny and out-of-doors to sit; 2) failing that, a gazebo or other shelter from inclement weather; 3) a printout of Deborah Eisenberg‘s latest short story, from the current NYRB; 4) undivided attention.
Talking Truth to Power
“Steinem welcomed them all—the rich, the celebrities, the climbers for the cause. She was a radical but, consciously, never an outsider. She enjoyed the world where she plied her trade as an entrepreneur of social change, and, with her mouth spray at hand, she had long since mastered the subterfuges of talking truth to power. You could call it consciousness-raising—on a wider canvas.” The New Yorker profiles Gloria Steinem in anticipation of her latest release, My Life on the Road.
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