Apparently… And a few other characters besides.
First time as tragedy, second time as farce. (General grossness alert.)
Miss Ellen interviews Mr. Matthew … and does crackerjack job of it.
Got a call from the Lansing Priest the other day.
“Hello?”
“Fleshpots.”
“Well, yes.”
“That was in the reading yesterday. I thought of you.”
Sasha Weiss reviews Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.:
We’re also shown the cruel hilarity of writing a comedy of manners in a time and place where manners have eroded: What is the proper etiquette for Nate, Waldman asks, when he’s gone on a few lacklustre dates with a woman and she becomes pregnant? They decide together that an abortion is the only solution (and it becomes clear that Nate feels no spark of romance), he dutifully accompanies her to the clinic and, after keeping her company with movies and takeout that evening, calls only once, to see how she’s doing, but not again. When Nate runs into this woman a year later, and she sputters some furious words at him, how guilty should he feel for behaving more or less straightforwardly? Should he have assumed that a successful woman, with a large social network, really needed his continued attention and ministrations?
With her eye for social folly in the streets and restaurants of New York, Waldman resembles Edith Wharton. But where the manners and hierarchies of Wharton’s world are highly codified (and the scandal in her books is the arrival of someone who tries to break them), Waldman’s characters are set adrift in a world without clear rules, and they torment themselves trying to figure out if they’ve in fact violated some ill-defined conventions of courtship and sexual etiquette.
The New York Times real estate section is currently featuring a Majorcan farm dating to the 13th century. A few of the heartbreaking details about the $5 million property:
“The 8,000-square-foot manor house is the centerpiece of the 40-acre property, which has been owned by the same family since 1790.”
“In a nook off one of the living rooms, right, is a small chapel where Mass has been celebrated weekly for centuries.”
“[A] dwelling, used historically for baking bread, is one of several unrenovated outbuildings included in the sale.”
“An ancient reservoir helps with irrigation.”
Elmer T. Lee, creator of Blanton’s Bourbon, has died.
Declining demand for bourbon, which began in the early ’70s and continued into the ’90s, was attributed to various causes, including recreational drug use, the mass marketing of beer, and the rising popularity of gin and vodka among cocktail drinkers.
With the work force at Buffalo Trace shrinking steadily — from 250 when he started in 1949, it would reach a low of 50 in the early 1990s — Mr. Lee and his staff selected their best bourbon whiskey, put it in decanters with attention-getting horse-and-jockey bottle stoppers, and shipped it for retailing at about $30 a bottle, compared with an average price of $10 to $15 for a regular bottle.
The audience gathered slowly. But once it arrived, said Eric Gregory, president of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association, the premium audience was devoted. “We had to have cases and cases of it every Friday, or else,” said Mr. Gregory, who as a University of Kentucky student worked part time in a liquor store in the mid-’80s.
Jonathan Galassi comments on Farrar Straus & Giroux:
It all began in 1945, when Roger W. Straus Jr., a brash young New Yorker fresh out of the Navy, decided to apply his talent for public relations to starting a publishing house. Straus was the black sheep in a powerful “Our Crowd” family with a burning desire to make good on his own. Roger was no littérateur, but he loved the glamour and excitement of books. He was destined to be the last of a string of Jewish “gentleman” publishers, including Horace Liveright, Alfred Knopf, Bennett Cerf, and Donald Klopfer, who broke into a Wasp-controlled business and ended up dominating it.
An aristocrat with powerful connections (his uncle Harry Frank Guggenheim was the publisher of Newsday; Peggy Guggenheim was a cousin), Roger was a rank newcomer to publishing and knew he needed an editor with a name to give him credibility. So he asked John Farrar, recently cashiered from the Wasp house of Farrar & Rinehart, to come in with him. But it was the arrival of Robert Giroux that made Farrar, Straus & Giroux, as it came to be called, into a significant player in the business.
So, so tickled that I got to pay a visit to those offices once. Also the offices of the Wylie agency, which is mentioned in the piece. Both on the same day! All it cost me was a couple of bottles of really good Petite Sirah and all my literary hopes and dreams. But that last part came later.
The AV Club has been in something of a tailspin since most of its senior staff took off for The Dissolve. But when you give the Criterion release of Babette’s Feast a C+ and lead with a graf like this…
Anyone looking put themselves into a quick coma for some reason should consider sitting down and watching a lot of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winners from the ’80s and ’90s. Most of these films aren’t bad, by any means, but AMPAS tends to be drawn—even today, but especially back then—to blandly inspirational period pieces rather than to the truly vital work being done all over the world. Babette’s Feast, which won the award in 1988, exemplifies the kind of foreign film the Academy loves: tasteful, literary, unchallenging, faintly dull.
Where they discuss the not-so-usual suspects – including you and you and you and you and and you and you and…!
La tempête a béni mes éveils maritimes. – Rimbaud
The scalloped curve of the empty seashell
Is barren and barely beauty reaching as far
As it can before all is flushed from heart and soul –
O, the covetous rush! And the cavernous lust
Becomes a mere apology for the senses,
Disengaged, amused, parsed out, abused,
Passed on, withdrawn… The whorling spires yield
A frank anatomy of bone, a fluid flesh
Itself shedding finer, more erotic robes
Once keel’s draft is drawn. Anonymity preserves
The graveyard of bowed mastheads and nude figureheads.
The shabby rag-bagged baggage of pornography
Adorns the wavering sea with weird images.
A curse of doldrums and stale maps promise nothing else.
The compass needle begins its spin, its long drawn
Curvature reminiscent of earth and sea and…
Hybrids and homunculi…Succubi and sarcophagi…
Monsters and maelstroms… Man is born threadbare,
Awash upon a beach of strange allegories,
Marooned, nearly naked, but unable to resist
The temptation to dream of footprints in the sand,
Conscious of his mind roaring in a conch’s crook.
Ford speaks to Kurosawa who speaks to Eastwood (and of course Leone) and Kurosawa also speaks to Sturges – and now Eastwood speaks to Lee Sang-il…
To think I could have gone further east – and closer to the source – if only I’d waited 25 years…
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
Søren Kierkegaard
Walker Percy
Bob Dylan
Literature & History
Letters from an American
Beau of the Fifth Column
This American Life
The Writer’s Almanac
San Diego Reader
The Stranger
The Inlander
Adoremus
Charlotte was Both
The Onion
From Empty Hands
Ellen Finnigan
America
Commonweal
First Things
National Review
The New Republic
All Manner of Thing
Gerasene Writers Conference
Scrutinies
DarwinCatholic
Catholic and Enjoying It
Bad Catholic
Universalis
Is My Phylactery Showing?
Quotidian Quintilian
En pocas palabras
William Wilson, Guitarist Extraordinaire
Signposts in a Strange Land
Ben Hatke
Daniel Mitsui
Dappled Things
The Fine Delight
Gene Luen Yang
Wiseblood Books
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Dorian is coming….
She’s coming fast and hard with vengeful spite:
You’d better ready yourself now
As she prepares to sweep
The beaches bare,
Her eye
Will spy
Most anywhere
The rapey, killy creep
Who dares to scare her brood – and blow,
This mother will, with ever-loving might!