August 2011
7 posts
Creepy literary nuances, take 1: This morning while getting dressed I listened to Slate’s Audio Book Club discussion about Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, in which both Goon Squad (obviously) and Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story are discussed at length. About twenty minutes later when I boarded my morning train, I sat down across from a woman reading Goon...
“For a long time I thought I would be a philosopher too. To be a philosopher...”
– The Dubious Salvation of Jack V. by Jacques Strauss
And Your Body It Leaks Like a
One of the many things I’ve found unique to New York is the effect it has on the notion of private versus public spaces. In a city so vast and so fast, rarely do many of us have a moment to carve out a private place, and many simply forget that the option exists at all.
While crossing Broadway at 42nd Street today during my lunch run, I walked past a tall, thin blonde woman on the phone;...
““But why you asked me about the tightrope walker?”
“Because...”
– The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley
What It Is We See (What Is It We See?)
While getting dressed this morning, I streamed ABC National Radio’s The Book Show, which tackled the fact versus fiction debate—why readers gravitate towards non-fiction versus fiction, and what about fiction turns off readers. (Philip Roth recently said he stopped reading fiction because he “wised up.” So there’s that.)
There are about a million different,...
a) A semicolon bridges two separate-yet-related clauses.
b) A semicolon-obsessed girl in transition—in her life and her writing—is searching to bridge her past and present into one fluid thought.
c) Coincidence? No; in this case, I think not.