Sloane Crosley on Not Being Truman Capote & Her Ritalin Intake

Disclaimer: This post is titled with the fondest of intentions.

Reading Sloane Crosley is sort of like going out to drinks with your best girl friend, provided that your bf is also whip smart, occasionally writes for the New York Times, and serves a literary agent for authors like Jonathan Frye in her work day hrs.

Sloane (whatever, we're on a first name basis) writes funny, laugh out loud, tell it like it is essays about being a young woman in New York. If you haven't picked up her books I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number?, you absolutely must! The stories all ring so true. Here she is on one of my favorite YouTube watches Drinks with Writers.

New Yorker Fiction Podcast

Tonight while cooking dinner, I listened to the writer David Means read the Raymond Carver story, "Chef's House," which was his first the New Yorker ever published. Raymond Carver is great to hear out loud, because his dialogue is so fluent. And talk about an antidote to Franzen. Carver's midwest is a very different place than the one in Freedom, full of sadness and presented without analysis.

I love Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor, who also hosts the podcast. She seems so omniscient and is obviously revered by the writers she features. In the discussion that follows each reading, she always comes off as the teacher figure, asking questions you sense she knows the answer to, and sometimes it's fun to hear the writers get a little nervous or pretentious. She also always surprises me with the questions she asks. They can be a good resource for readers who want to know how to think about what they read. She always asks the writers to speculate about what happens to the characters after the story is finished.

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

 

 

 

All this talk about Object of Beauty, Steve Martin's latest book,  has got us thinking again about Shop Girl, his Novella published in 2000. The book was beautiful, rainy-day-sad and moving. The movie...? Not so much. Unfortunately, Steve Martin felt the need to write, produce and star in the flick.

The age disparity between the protagonist Mirabelle, played by a luminous Claire Danes, and her foil Ray Porter, played by Steve Martin as the (inadvertently) archetypal dirty old man, worked poorly on screen. As soon as we began discussing SG over tea at home, Acton mentioned that the creepy sex scene between the duo was branded indelibly in her memory. And, fittingly, her fave 'hysterical realist' agrees. Here's Zadie Smith writing for The Telegraph on Shop Girl:

"In the (very good) novel, Martin's writing is so sparse and elegant you can almost excuse the concept. But here on film Ray Porter's unmoving, waxy face is on top of hers, he is running his crepe fingers (one place where Botox will not work) over the perfection of Mirabelle's backside - it is intolerable."

Object of Beauty has been getting some pretty lukewarm reviews. Janet Maslin from the New York Times found Martin's heroine to be uninspiring. 

"Although Lacey is treated as this book’s main source of fascination, it’s less interesting to look at her point-blank than to look at her while wondering what Mr. Martin sees."

The New Republic has Andrew Butterfield of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts discussing the inaccuracies in the book as it pertains to the New York Art Wold. He takes personal issue with the way Steve Martin describes one of the collector's suits. 

"Later he is seen wearing an Armani suit. I have met hundreds of collectors in New York and elsewhere, and not one ever went about with an open shirt and gold chains or wore a suit that said Armani. Not one. The men tend to wear custom-made clothing, and in a range of styles of business attire. Other than the quality of the fabric and the stitching, which you have to look to see, rarely does it proclaim its high sartorial quality."

Hmm..

I'm still planning on picking up this book based on the strength of Shop Girl and the fact that it doesn't seem like a big investment in terms of time a la Freedom. And despite negative or rather non-positive reviews, other readers are following suit. Object of Beauty is still number 13 on the New York Times Best Sellers List. What do you think? Will you be reading SG? Have you already? Let us know.

xx Ellis

Bookstores of Brooklyn Roundup

All this death of the bookshop talk is a fear-mongering conspiracy. At least that's the way it looks from this side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Amazon is of course a resource for the books you know you want. But for those you didn't know you needed, plenty of real life shops continue to do their part for the impulse buys that keep the livre alive. These are my favorite shops all of which curate their stacks expertly, host readings frequently, and lay the good vibes on thickly. If you're looking for a reason to curl up with a read this winter, here are the best places (in my humble humble) to find one.

Word in Greenpoint

featured feature: an in-store dating service that matches people based on their likes and dislikes in literature. And a nice blog with author interviews.

Book Court in Cobble Hill

featured feature: a jam-packed events calendar that brings in big name authors for readings.

Powerhouse Books in Dumbo

featured feature: high ceilings; triples as a publishing house and event space.

Brooklyn Art Library in Williamsburg

featured feature: shares a wall with Mast Brother's Chocolate. Intoxicating chocolate smell ensues. Enough said.

(Actually, it should be noted that they conduct collaborative projects like a sketch book catalogue that will join the store's "permanent collection," sell concept books from the cool Brooklyn-based Ugly Duckling Presse, and the most beautiful journals.)

And, though it's not in Brooklyn, I cannot stop talking about the effort by Marc Jacobs, BookMarc. I wanted to hate it, but they seriously have the most amazing collection of lust-inducing books about art, music, and fashion.

great view of the shop from Interview Magazine

Laters,

Acton

Excerpt: Franny & Zooey

The experience of re-reading JD Salinger post-highschool can be a little precious. The feeling's akin to being trapped indefinitely on a Wes Anderson set. Everything is just so. And it can start to drive the reader a little mental. From the pea green book that Franny carries to the way that Fatty, as Zooey calls his mother, arranges towels in the famous bathroom scene, Salinger treats his characters almost as if he's giving them stage directions. But the end result is that you leave the book feeling like you've watched an entire movie play out in your head. The visuals are stunning.

Here's Lane meeting Franny at the train station for the first time. Let's remember she's wearing a racoon fur. (JD really nails the fashion sense on his women protagonists). Her malaise is so perfectly Margot Tennenbaum.

"This all the bags you brought? What's the book?" [this is Lane, her teacher's pet boyfriend]
Franny looked down at her left hand. She had a small pea-green cloth-bound book in it. "This? Oh, just some thing." She said. She opened her handbag and stuffed the book into it, and followed Lane down the long platform toward the taxi stand. She put her arm through his, and did most of the talking, if not all of it. There was something, first, about a dress in her bag that had to be ironed. She said she'd bought a really darling little iron that looked like it went with a doll house" p.8

Later at the coffee shop with Lane:

"You haven't touched your god damn sanwich," Lane said suddenly. [Lane, not such a keeper fyi] "You know that?"
Franny looked down at her plate as if it had just been placed before her. " I will in a minute," She said. She sat still for a moment, holding her cigarette, but without dragging on it, in her left hand, and with her right hand fixed tensely around the base of her glass of milk." p36




And then there's, of course, the description of the Glass house p199.

"The Glasses' living room was about as unready to have its walls repainted as a room can be. Franny Glass lay asleep on the couch, with an afghan over her; the "wall-to-wall" carpet had been neither taken up nor folded in at the borders; and the furniture- seemingly, a small warehouse of it-was in its usual static-dyanmic distribution. The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla. There was a Steinway grand piano (invariably kept open), three radios (a 1927 Freshman, a 1932 Stromberg-Carlson and a 1941 RCA), a twenty-one-inch-screen television set, four table-model phonographs (including a 1920 Victrola, with its speaker still mounted in tact, top side), cigarette and magazine tables galore, a regulation size ping-pong table (mercifully collapsed behind the piano), four comfortable chairs, eight uncomfortable chairs, a twelve gallon tropical-fish tank (filled to capacity, in every sense of the word, and illuminated by two forty watt bulbs) a love seat, the couch Franny was occupying, two empty bird cages, a cherry wood writing table, and an assortment of floor lamps, table lamps, and "bridge" lamps that sprang up all over the congested inscape like sumac. A cordon of waist-high bookcases lined three walls, their shelves cram-jammed and literally sagging with books-Children's book, textbooks, second-hand books, Book Club books, plus an even more heerogeneous over-flow from less communal "annexes" of the apartment."

Haha. Anyone? This could literally be my house. I love this visual. It's so perfectly encapsulates what the havoc of living with a big family is like. The former hobbies and acquisitive phases of every sibling eventually becomes part of the floor plan. Also, there's that amazing bit of comparing the contents of the room to being more suited to Valhalla (Odin's living room anyone?) than to an Upper West Side apartment.