Posts tagged NYT

“Since typing that small type, I have received dozens of angry and concerned queries about the anecdote. Why had I fed her grapes? Did I not know they were toxic? After some back-and-forth, I was surprised to discover that these incredulous comments often came from readers of the electronic version of my book, where the footnotes are shunted off to the end of the text, relegated to being mere endnotes. If footnotes are at risk of going unread, endnotes are even more so.

All this is discouraging for a champion of footnotes like myself. The footnotes are among the first things I look at when I pull a book from a store shelf. My editor gamely tolerated my inclusion of many in my own book (though we removed more than we left in). I would be proud to be a footnote in someone else’s work.” - Alexandra Horowitz

(Read the rest of the peice HERE)

Add this to the list. The thing that annoys me more than the screwing up of the footnotes (which does annoy me) is the fact that aparently eBooks are not formatted for pages, that they’re continuous scroll. I was not aware of this. Are all eReaders/eBooks formatted that way?

“Why, I wondered, if the guy’s so anti-­everything, does he keep bothering to write?

From the vantage point of two decades and thousands of pages of Roth later, I don’t think it’s a bad question. My mistake was asking it rhetorically. If treated as a point of real inquiry, the question affords an opening, a way of reading and being reached by the work. For a writer so generously endowed in the irony department, Roth turns out to be astonishingly earnest. We see this in his excesses — not merely the prolificacy of his output, but the outrageousness of his characters’ offenses, their deeds, appetites, shames and confessions. Steaming along on the twin engines of intellect and humor (and what engines — horsepower through the roof), the novels transport us or run us over or both. His characters sometimes get caught up in a kind of Socratic Möbius strip, endlessly debating one another and themselves in a way that can verge on the tedious, but even then one cannot but marvel at his sheer energy, his unremitting investment in — what? Provocation. Interrogation. The feat of living. This is not a nihilist. This is a writer whose creative work lays bare the act of struggle.” - Leah Hager Cohen

(Read the rest of the review HERE)

I must say I haven’t read much of Roth’s work, just Portnoy’s Complaint, and I enjoyed it so much I wanted to read more, but I hesitated, always worrying that the humor I had enjoyed, the laugh out loud funnyness of that book didn’t exist in his other work. I read the synopses of his books and I still wonder.

“The special performance of “The Lion King” was sponsored by the Autism Theater Initiative, a program of the Theater Development Fund, the nonprofit organization that runs the TKTS discount ticket booths in New York City. According to Victoria Bailey, the fund’s executive director, it was the first time a Broadway show has sponsored an event specifically for autistic children and their families.” - Erik Piepenberg

(Read the uplifting article Here)

Great slideshow of what should be a fantastic exhibition of subtitled: “Master Painters of India, 1100 - 1900”

(Click here for the slideshow)

I really love the above piece and a lot of Indian art in general. If you live in New York go see this!

“After a poet is dead, his letters are the windows to his soul — or perhaps just the cellar doors. These two volumes detail Eliot’s struggle to find a career and to shoulder his way into the London literary world, a school of sharks where writers reviewed their friends and publishers reviewed their authors.” - W. Logan

(Full Text Of Review Here)

I’m a big TS Eliot fan, have been for a long time. I believe I would find these books very insightful. But at almost 800 pages each. Wow. That’s a lot of letters. Still, perhaps one day. A bit of Anti-Semitry running about in those letters. Disappointing but not surprising.

The tale of the tutu is indeed the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy who have worked ludicrously hard to formulate, shape and perfect the highest form of the human physique, and the result is a glorious paradox: the manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence! - Toni Bently

Read the full review here.

“People assumed for thousands of years that there must be something else. And yet, there is nothing else: this is all we are.” - Johan Lehrer

Read the full review of this anthology here.

“Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain From Antiquity to the 21st Century,” newly published by Abrams, includes short essays by prominent neuroscientists and long captions by Mr. Schoonover — but its words take second place to the gorgeous imagery, from the first delicate depictions of neurons sketched in prim Victorian black and white to the giant Technicolor splashes the same structures make across 21st-century LED screens. - Abigail Zuger

Gods of Egyptian, Norse, Aztec and Chinese extraction, among others, converge in the final chapters, to stress the diversity of a mythical world eroded by onscreen interfaces. Rushdie isn’t against video games, exactly: Luka’s father cheerily defends them in the novel’s early pages. But the story suggests they are a mythmaker’s chief competition, and Rushdie seems determined to make his book busier than any game, a “supercolossal ultra- exploit.”

For all the whizzing and zooming going on, Luka’s battles are ultimately moral ones, and some of the novel’s best moments come as he ponders how his actions will change others’ lives, why getting his way requires dispensing agony to his enemies and whether he’s demanding too much of his friends. - Mark Athitakis

Read the full review here.

The attempt to analyze the hipster provokes such universal anxiety because it calls everyone’s bluff. And hipsters aren’t the only ones unnerved. Many of us try to justify our privileges by pretending that our superb tastes and intellect prove we deserve them, reflecting our inner superiority. Those below us economically, the reasoning goes, don’t appreciate what we do; similarly, they couldn’t fill our jobs, handle our wealth or survive our difficulties. Of course this is a terrible lie. And Bourdieu devoted his life to exposing it. Those who read him in effect become responsible to him — forced to admit a failure to examine our own lives, down to the seeming trivialities of clothes and distinction that, as Bourdieu revealed, also structure our world. - Mark Greif

Every letter of the article is amazing. (Read it here! Do it! DO IT!) He doesn’t specifically answer the question of ‘Who/what is a hipster?’, but he does ask a more profound question, about the sociology of taste, and using the philosophy of Pierre Bordieu for context, he answers it masterfully. 

I’ve been thinking about hipsters a lot, especially since no-one will admit they are one. I find it very interesting that the word ‘irony’ never appears in the article, because to me the idea of irony is what best defines hipsterism. “I’m not (a) _______, so when I wear/do/say _______ , it’s ok/cool, because I don’t mean it.” Does that sound right to everybody? Ok, but now lets put the words ‘hipster’ and ‘hipster things’ in those blanks and voila, nobody thinks they are a hipster. Oh but they are.

I think here is where I need to point out that I have nothing against Hipsters.

Anyways, I think that when most people think ‘Hipster,’ they think of a specific person (I know I do) not any usable archetype or definition (like the “Hipster Paradox” illustrated above [We are going to call it “The Hipster Paradox,” right?])

How do you define a Hipster?