Over at Design Observer, Michael Erard has a terrific meditation on sentence diagramming and its link to Catholic schooling. Reporting on a new book by Kitty Burns Florey, Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, Erard reveals the source of his own attraction to the practice:
I liked diagramming sentences for a distinctly [...]
Here’s a link to my reviews in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, including books on casting, Stephen Baldwin’s faith, Jimmy Stewart, Ellen Burstyn, and life on the edges of old Hollywood.
Little Annie (aka Annie Anxiety aka Annie Bandez) and friends will be at Mo Pitkins every Saturday in December.
Visual AIDS hosts a preview party for World AIDS Day tomorrow, Dec. 1, followed by the Postcards from the Edge benefit on Dec. 2 and 3: “the most exciting and affordable way to build a collection of [...]
The next reading in the Writers at the Alliance series is coming up. Three writers read from their recent novels:
Clifford Chase (pictured), Winkie
Christopher Sorrentino, Trance
Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document
Tuesday, November 28, 7pm
197 East Broadway
F train to East Broadway
Free
Writers at the Alliance: A Reading Series
This fall I’m coordinating a reading series at the Educational Alliance of New York. (Usually Robert Marshall manages the events, but right now he’s busy with the obligations of his new novel, A Separate Reality.)
Mark your calendars:
Caleb Crain, Melissa Plaut, Brandon Stosuy
Tuesday, October 17, 7pm
Clifford Chase, Christopher Sorrentino, Dana Spiotta
Tuesday, November 28, 7pm
197 East [...]
Over at Harlequin Knights, Joseph Mosconi has submitted a call for papers: “AREA SNEAKS, a new print and online journal, seeks to touch the live wire where language and visual art meet.”
Image from Galactic Central, Phil Stephensen-Payne’s exhaustive magazine index website.
Upon reading about Maud Newton’s thwarted attempt to finish Grégoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, I promptly ordered the book online. And as soon as it arrived, I plunged in, plunged into the narrator’s incredibly funny, rueful, bitter, baffled, and somehow hopeful voice, and I read at high speed, or really, I suppose, the whole thing simply whirred along of its own accord. [...]
From A Far Cry from Kensington, here are Mrs. Hawkin’s reflections upon the upper and the ordinary classes:
I will say, now, that I learned a lot about upper class habits while I was with Mackintosh & Tooley. In the end I concluded that it was better to belong to the ordinary class. For the upper [...]
I have a deep, abiding love for a type of book that I believe should constitute its own category in the Library of Congress catalogue. My name for this literary genre: The. Best. Book. Ever.
How to know when you are in the presence of The. Best. Book. Ever? You quickly develop a curious tic, the [...]
From A Legacy:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow… Life, in the neat sad dry little French phrase that bundles it all into its place, Life is never as bad nor as good as one thinks. La vie, voyez-vous, ça n’est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu’on croit. Never as bad, never as good… When? At [...]