Posts tagged as Writers
Some New Directions
Lou Reed wore black. He moved slowly and a bit stiffly through the darkness that had descended on the Great Hall, a sheaf of paper in his hand. For the last thirty years he has looked like an ageless lizard but now I felt concern for him at the sight of his stiff gait. He entered the circle of light and put on reading glasses, gold rimmed. READ MORE
John McPhee: "Who Could Tell What Might Happen?"
Why write about anything? In the print edition of today's New Yorker, John McPhee discusses rambling and thrashing his way into profile-writing.
How They Got There: A Conversation With Author Robert Sullivan
Robert Sullivan is almost certainly the only man in the country with a holiday greeting card from Anna Wintour on his fridge and a bestseller about rats on his resume. The former exists because of his 20-year gig as a contributing editor at Vogue; the latter comes as a result of the year he spent observing and chronicling the urban creatures as they lived their lives in an alley near Ground Zero. READ MORE
The Cordial Enmity Of Joan Didion And Pauline Kael
A column that resurrects the highbrow gossip of yore. READ MORE
The Problem with Young Writers
"One is sometimes tempted to think that the generation which has invented the ‘fiction course’ is getting the fiction it deserves. At any rate, it is fostering in its young writers the conviction that art is neither long nor arduous, and perhaps blinding them to the fact that notoriety and mediocrity are often interchangeable terms." READ MORE
A Supposedly True Thing Jonathan Franzen Said About David Foster Wallace
There’s really no delicate way to put this: at this year’s New Yorker Festival, Jonathan Franzen said that David Foster Wallace fabricated at least part of—and potentially a large part of—his nonfiction pieces. I wasn’t there, but after reading Eric Alterman’s summary Friday, and finding no mention of the incident in any other coverage of the festival, I watched the conversation online. READ MORE
Ken Auletta Dominates Alec Baldwin in East Hampton
On Saturday morning, me and Angelica and a reporter drive my mom's car from Brooklyn out to East Hampton for the 63rd Annual Artists vs. Writers charity softball game, which takes place in a public park next to a really upscale Hamptons strip mall. My only pre-game exposure to the game was when I went to the game's official website, where I was greeted by an unexpected embedded auto-play video of Mike Lupica speaking really loudly about the game, with a resolution too big for the frame that the video is inside so a lot of the text is cut off. The video sounds like a commercial off a local TV sports network that plays high school games. My only previous exposure to Mike Lupica was in the episode of "Seinfeld" when Costanza is asked who his favorite writer is and he responds, "I like Mike Lupica?" Mike Lupica is a sportswriter for the New York Daily News. READ MORE
Six Authors Who Were Copywriters First
For many writers struggling for publication, advertising has proven a useful field (it does pay, after all): F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salman Rushdie, Dorothy Sayers, Don DeLillo, Joseph Heller and Helen Gurley Brown all worked as copywriters early in their careers—some with more success than others. Rushdie came up with "Naughty. But nice" cream cakes for Ogilvy & Mather; Sayers introduced "Just think what Toucan do" to Guinness and founded a dotty, fictional (and wildly popular) "Mustard Club"; and, thanks to Fitzgerald, streetcars in Iowa once ran with the promise "We keep you clean in Muscatine" sparkling on their sides. READ MORE
A Q&A with the Advice Columnist Called 'Sugar'
Last year, an anonymous writer took over the advice column Dear Sugar at The Rumpus. Soon, she'll go public with her identity. Like many others, I've become obsessed with her advice. Her column isn't about etiquette. Sugar writes about being jealous of other writers. She advises people to leave secure relationships because they just know they're not happy. She tells about how she made it through the "thicket of shit" in her twenties. She writes about the absolute horror of grief. And it's not about sex, either. Sugar is soooo over the idea that sex is the only way to connect emotionally or be fulfilled. READ MORE
