Liz Brown

Observed without comment.

From an article in today’s New York Times about the emerging field of sentiment analysis:
a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.

One of my recurring frustrations with entertainment biographies is overdocumentation. Concert dates, recording sessions, studio memos pile up as if the profusion of unmediated data will ultimately transmit a deeper understanding of the performer. Usually, though, all that minutiae just ends up obscuring the subject. That you learn a singer took a fifteen-minute break during [...]

The other day Liza pointed out this passage in Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica:
A car rolled up and got stopped in traffic in front of us. Music poured from the radio, carrying a voice that was all smooth and elegant, except burps and grunts kept popping out of it like a baby trying to talk. “She says [...]

Forty years ago a massively popular performer died from a drug overdose. Judy Garland was 47 at the time. Her fan base was enormous. Some 20,000 people lined up to view her body at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison Avenue.
Susie Boyt, who was born a few months before Garland’s death, has [...]

That’s what Eve Babitz was craving at 15.
Since reading Deborah Shapiro’s review of Eve’s Hollywood at The Second Pass I’ve been combing the internet for a copy of the “out-of-print 1974 commingling of fiction and memoir that chronicles the adventures of a young woman growing up and living in Los Angeles.” Shapiro’s account of Eve [...]

Flannery O’Connor, age two or three
My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson’s blind housekeeper used when she poured tea–she put her finger inside the cup.
Here’s a link to my review of Flannery, Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor, in Newsday.
If you’ve got some time, I highly recommend WFMU [...]

Wyclef Jean and the cast of The Electric Company sing “Electric City.”

The Los Angeles Times reports that “beat-boxing, it turns out, is a surprisingly effective tool for repeating consonant and vowel sounds.” There’s much more at the new school Electric Company headquarters and here’s an old school lesson from Easy Reader.

My write-up of favorite books of 2008, topped off by Zachary Lazar’s extraordinary Sway, is up over at Newsday. The longer and more pressing list, though, is the one with the books I haven’t gotten to:
Farewell Navigator by Leni Zumas
2666 by Roberto Bolano, translation by Natasha Wimmer
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies [...]

From the New York Times obituary:
The stage direction “pause” would haunt him throughout his career.
Intended as an instructive note to actors, the Pinter pause was a space for emphasis and breathing room. But it could also be as threatening as a raised fist. Mr. Pinter said that writing the word “pause” into his first play [...]