Bookmark Graveyard, Chapter 1

Wonder why you have so many pages bookmarked? I was wondering and was thinking, let me just delete this.

Then my cyberhoarder mentality kicked in. So I decided to drop these here. I don't know why. Just because, I guess.

The go-to list for Roberto Bolaño works: The Bolaño Syllabus: A Final Reckoning.

Boston Review's Top 20 Poems of 2015 here.

Rolling Stone's Top 550 Songs of All Time here.

Buzzfeeds's List of Posts about Tattoos here.

"F.A.Q.s," a story by Allegra Goodman on The New Yorker here.

50 Places Every Literary Fan Should Visit via Flavorwire here.

Good times.

More Boyle on the Train

I love sharing T.C. Boyle's work with others.

Today I read "Swept Away," the second story in "Tooth and Claw".

In an interview, Boyle described the impetus of the story:

"A very whimsical piece based on the notion, I had read about the windiest
town on earth, it's in the Shetland Islands and cats blow by, so I wrote my
flying cat story called 'Swept Away' ".

The story won the O.Henry Award in 2003 (an award he has been honored with five times, and counting...).

Of course, I can't find this on the web to share with everyone.

You'll have to buy the book!

Reading on the Train....

There's been a lot of press lately about the new novel from T. C. Boyle called The Women, based loosely around the life or architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Over the weekend, I picked up one of Boyle's short story collections, Tooth and Claw.

I read the first story in this book this morning on the way to work.

"When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone" is classic Boyle, who excels not only at the novel, but is equally adept, if not more so, at the short story.

Check out the story here.

Potpourri for $500, Alex

Just read a great story by Jeffrey Eugenides from a recent New Yorker.
Entitled "Great Experiment," one is reminded what a talent Eugenides
is.

Next up, I saw this hilarious clip on the Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux one-month-a-year poetry blog. Take Stephen Colbert, add Sean Penn (proving he does have a sense of humor), and throw in former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, and you've got a great comedic clip for National Poetry Month.





I came across this because the FSG bloggers linked a post of mine here, about a reading in which Frank Bidart read a sestina. Nice to get a link on the poetry blog of a major publishing house. Thanks guys!

A Random Assortment of Blogfodder

The latest New Yorker fiction podcast features Jonathan Lethem reading James Thurber’s short story “The Wood Duck”. Click story name to listen or right click to save and download.

Last Saturday night, Shayna and I went with friends Max and Jonathan to a professional indoor soccer game in New Jersey. The New Jersey Ironmen faced the Chicago Storm in an exciting contest that saw 6 lead changes in the second half. The home team won 10-9.

We had great seats thanks to my friend and co-worker Steve, who was there with the girls’ soccer team he coaches in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey.

Here’s the last minute of the game, which was extended slightly by a penalty:

I resisted all the bad tabloid covers last week during the Eliot Spitzer debacle. But I had to run this cover of New York magazine because it sums it all up in one word and one photo:


Sephora lent me this CD Inhuman Rampage by Dragonforce:

Listen to "Through the Fire and Flames" here (click to play, right click to save). The guitar is excellent, but the jury is still out on the vocals. They start to sound the same after a while, but the guitarist takes your mind off of that with a virtuoso ferocity.

I’m also deciding whether I like the Shins album Wincing the Night Away, which I borrowed from the Brooklyn Public Library. Apparently, I am supposed to like it. It was on a lot of 2007 best album lists. Lets see if it grows on me.

Sadly, our local branch of the BPL, is closing. The Fort Hamilton branch, a mere 0.16 miles from my front door, will be shuttered for a couple of years while the 100+ year-old building gets renovated.

Our nearest library is now the Bay Ridge branch, which is a mile away, as opposed to a stone’s throw.

And finally, how cool is this:
No, that's not photo-shopped. It's real. Read more about Dinner in the Sky here. Thanks to Cynthia for the link.

Jorge Luis Borges: "The Gospel According to Mark"

This morning I listened to Paul Theroux reading Jorge Luis Borges' "The Gospel According to Mark" via a New Yorker podcast. The story is marvelous and I recommend it. You can listen to Theroux reading it, along with his commentary afterwards, by clicking here or right clicking to save it. The mp3 is 21:57 long.

UPDATE June 28, 2008: An anonymous reader provided this link to read the story. Thanks!

You can also go here to learn more about New Yorker podcasts.

"Sin Dolor" by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Just finished "Sin Dolor" by T.C. Boyle, in the October 15, 2007 issue of The New Yorker. Read it here. Boyle continues to write great stories. Don't miss this one!

Back Issues: Stairway to Heaven

In my random grabbing of unread, neglected back issues of The New Yorker, I skimmed through the October 23, 2006 issue.


For the sake of Mets fans this year, let's hope the team from Flushing can work out its current tailspin and start playing good ball again.

This issue was rather uneventful, with the exception of the story "Stairway to Heaven" by Aleksandar Hemon. Read the story here.

Back Issues: The New Yorker and Frankfurters, Roominghouses, Meteorites and Vanishing

In my plodding through back issues of The New Yorker, I dispatched the July 9, 2007 issue.


There were several items that stood out.

First, a nice piece by Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk about the origins of street food in Istanbul:

“We’d gaze through the glass at the dark-red sauce that had been simmering all day and select one of the frankfurters wallowing in it like happy water buffalo in the mud…” For the writer, eating American street food was a major break with Islamic tradition and a step towards the “solitary individualism that modernity so often involves.”

Also, "This Old House," another great reflection of personal history by David Sedaris. The full piece is linked to the title (whereas the Pamuk link is only to an abstract.

Then, "On Impact" (abstract linked) by Ian Frazier on what happened when something fell from the sky and broke through the roof of Srinivasan Nageswaran's house in Freehold, New Jersey. I discovered a blog called New Yorker Comment that quoted Frazier and his opening salvo:

Tell me you don't love the guy who could write three opening sentences like these:

"People get excited when strange objects fall from the sky. We seek portents and meaning, we venerate the object, and we horripilate at the uncanny scent of our beginnings, or end. Even wised up by science as we are, we tend to freak."

("Horripilate"—I looked it up—means "to cause one's hair to stand on end and get goosebumps," as in "I horripilate at the sight of blood," or "Hitchcock movies horripilate me.")

If you can't read the article in full, perhaps you should bookmark the aforementioned blog that is subtitled "One of the five blogs you loiter with in purgatory."

And finally, I really enjoyed the Stuart Dybek story, "If I Vanished," viewable here. One of the more interesting fiction pieces I had read in a while.

Grace Paley, 1922-2007

The writer Grace Paley has passed away. The NPR report is here. Despite many opportunities to see her in New York I never had the opportunity. Her poem "Here" appeared in The Best American Poetry 2001:

HERE

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sitting
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips

I was bemoaning the fact that I never had the chance to see her to my friend north of the border and he wrote me back the following anecdote:

I met her once, and she was delightful. I got her to inscribe her second book to me (from 1974) formally and to sign a bunch of anthologies, etc. I recall her smiling complaint about signing a Best American Essays proof underneath Cynthia Ozick's signature: "Oh, I'm used to this---Paley always follows Ozick alphabetically." When I presented a book of interviews that had already been gloriously inscribed to me by Joy Harjo ("For _____/for justice/for love...") she craned her neck and said "whose writing is that?" When I replied, "Joy Harjo, isn't her handwriting beautiful?" Paley jokingly responded "she's a show-off!"

There is more great Paley material here at The Paris Review site.

New Yorker Update

Just recently read three pieces in The New Yorker:

"How I Spent the War; A Recruit in the Waffen S. S." a fascinating memoir piece from Nobel Laureate Günter Grass. Strongly recommended reading.

Significantly less compelling, but still a nice piece of writing is the short story "Faith" by William Trevor.


Both came from the June 4, 2007 issue.

Also, a very good story from Marisa Silver in the November 20, 2006 issue: "Night Train to Frankfurt". The writer Michael Lowenthal, on his non-blog, remarked on the story:

I did, however, read this week's short story, "Night Train to Frankfurt," by Marisa Silver, and I'm very glad I did. The story is about an adult daughter accompanying her elderly mother, dying of cancer, to a German clinic for an alternative treatment. Silver's prose is heady but humorous and full of heart (hearty?), with an almost Philip Rothian (and yet distinctly female) fluidity. Here's an exchange between Helen, the daughter, and her mother, Dorothy:

"Would you like me to read to you?" Helen asked, once they were back in their seats.
"What have you got?"
Helen dug eagerly in her bag. "Vogue. People. Neruda."
Dorothy smirked. "That's cheap, sweetheart."
"You love Neruda."
"Are we searching for my epitaph?" Dorothy said.
"That's unfair," Helen said, with the requisite amount of hurt in her tone. The truth was that she had thought about what to read at her mother's funeral and had made the private decision that it would be Neruda.

I agree with Lowenthal's assessment. It's a haunting journey with an underlying sense of humor in the face of a parent's mortality.

New Yorker updates

I have recently read through a few New Yorker stories...not very high on the George Saunders story, "Puppy," from the May 28 issue. Strange since I generally love his work. He's even a friend on MySpace. Nor did I dig "Wasps" by A.L. Kennedy in the July 30 issue. However, I did like this one, "Shauntrelle" by Antonya Nelson from the July 23 issue. Do check it out.


Currently reading the August 6 issue, which includes a feature called "Rip Van Golfer" on the U.S. Open by long-time columnist John McPhee. McPhee could write about toenails and make them interesting, so I always read his pieces when I see them. Safe to say one of my favorite non-fiction specialists. Alas, the story is not available on the magazine website, but the abstract is.

However, if you need to get a McPhee fix, check out this piece from February 2003, called "A Fleet of One," an in-depth look at truck drivers transporting dangerous materials on the highways. He really draws you into the subject matter and keeps you there.


Just discovered that Dana Goodyear has a "Postcard from Los Angeles" blog on the New Yorker website.

My New Yorker Conundrum

At some point in early 2006, I stopped reading The New Yorker.

Let me clarify. I stopped reading The New Yorker cover to cover, as I had religiously for at least a good ten years, perhaps more.

I remember being aware of the magazine in high school. Perhaps my mother had a subscription and I read her copies. Maybe I scanned them in the library at Iolani. The day I graduated from high school, in 1985, I gave myself 10 years to have a poem published in The New Yorker's hallowed pages.

I stopped writing profusely from '86 to '92. There were poems, but they were not regular emissions. I published a few in local college lit mags, but that was it.

In '92, I started writing more, and started sending out submissions. I was three years from my deadline of New Yorker publication. I was wise enough to understand that it was not a reasonable goal. I read the poetry in the magazine and knew, I wasn't writing at that level.

But I was a reader and I managed to read and write and even absorb some books as well.

In 2005, things changed. BillyBlog was born, which may or may not have mattered, but I also became addicted to the New York Times crossword puzzles, especially the Sunday magazine puzzle.

That beast was what I brought with me on the trains, the designated place for my New Yorker consumption. And then there was the Shul's book club, which started around the same time as BillyBlog. By 2006, my New Yorkers began to go unread.

So last November, when my subscription threatened to run out on me, I renewed, blindly. Despite the stockpile of back issues that went uncracked.

I admired their covers, but often didn't even check their tables of contents.

I stopped bringing the Sunday puzzle on the train with me. This explains the explosion of novel consumption I faced at the end of June. I am beginning to reassert my right to read The New Yorker, albeit sporadically and fleetingly. Of late, I have been referencing notable pieces (like here).

It is my goal to get through this stockpile, and I will let the readers of BillyBlog know how I am doing, on occasion.

Or, at least, tell you when I read something interesting, or particularly good.

For example, I am currently reading the May 21, 2007 issue.

I just read a fascinating article ("Walking the Wall" by Peter Hessler) about the Great Wall of China, which dispels my preconceptions of the structure. Namely, that it is one big, long wall. Sure, there are sections of Wall that are big and long, but there are multiple structures that make up the Idea of the Great Wall.

Additional notes from Peter Hessler here via National Geographic:

The Great Wall is not a single construction but a series of defensive walls built sporadically by a succession of rulers—at a monumental cost in human toil, injury, and death. The exact combined length of its sections remains unknown.

I also read a short story called "A Beneficiary" by Nadine Gordimer in this issue.