Psychic City- Yacht

I just danced to this all by myself in my room for a little longer than I planned to. Hope you do too.

how the crap do I compete with puppies?

Blah blah blah this week I read some Nathaniel West. Blah blah blah even all those decades ago, he nailed the differences between New York and Los Angeles and while I'm glad I read this not living in LA, I'm not sure living in NY was any better. Blah blah blah his descriptive power is amazing. Blah blah blah what took me so long to discover him? Blah blah blah who cares what I am saying I want to watch that puppy again!!!!!

PUPPY!!!!!!!

Maybe Nobody Reads Books, But Everybody Loves Puppies

Thanks Justin.

Girls (and Boys) Gone Wild

So I joined a book club. And let's be honest, I joined a book club to meet cute boys who read good books and instead, found myself in a room of middle aged ladies and one gay dude from Houston who swears he doesn't know Sarah, which means he's the crappiest gay dude from Houston ever. Essentially what I'm saying is, I have no idea how to meet men. But I'm not as much of a social trainwreck as the folk from this month's book club selection! Yay! Here's to not being Amish!

But seriously, this book is fascinating, as are any and all books about those subsects of humanity that somehow manage to participate in our world and yet not. This is a pretty even-handed discussion of the Amish and their tradition of Rumspringa, when teenagers "run wild" prior to settling down and becoming baptized in the Church. The writing is peppered with real life stories, some that seem too crazy to be true. And on one hand, I pity these people so much especially because their scholing ends in 8th grade, because, y'know, learning highfalutin' things like literature just make you think you're better than your kinsmen. But on the other hand, to grow up with that sort of community? That's sort of special.

But if I had to take a buggy to get everywhere, I'd go batshit.

Yummy

So I picked this book up because it had ice cream cones on the cover and I had two hours to kill. Oh, and, also, because, yum:
That is Jonah Lehrer and he is younger and hotter and smarter than you. Also, married. BOO.
Ok, but the point is, that reading this book was a random decision I made that turned out to be exactly the right one. It's based on the premise that, despite what scientists used to think, rationality doesn't always trump emotion when it comes to making the right choices. In truth, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that we reason with, and that we use to understand rule-based behavior), when left to its own devices pretty much always makes the WRONG choice, picks the more expensive wine even if the cheaper one tastes better, overthinks at the grocery store and buys the wrong strawberry jam, and so on. It's when we don't think that we often make the right choice, because our brain knows intuitively what's best for us. Our subconscious looks out for our well-being far better than our conscious mind could ever hope to. Most of the studies Lehrer cites are food-based which is probably the number 2 reason I loved this book (for number 1, please see above.)

I tried to explain what How We Decide was about to my boyfriend and he assumed it was a ripoff of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and I was all "Perish the thought." Because that is not what it is. That is not what it is at all. Rather, it's a sort of guide book on how to most productively use emotion to guide thought. Lehrer explains how we can use our brain to control the way we feel and how those feelings play out in our day-to-day engagement with the world. The most important chapter, for me, was the one in which Lehrer explains how failure = learning. As in, our brain only figures out how to do things right by failing over and over again. We've been programmed to think of failure as a bad thing, something that is singularly detrimental to societal progress. I am pretty good at failing, so it was kind of nice to find out that actually I am paving the way for our advancement as a society.

You're welcome.

Faaaaabulous

When one of my favorite playwrights/screenwriters writes a book of essays with my favorite candy on the cover, it is obviously a must-read. Paul Rudnick reminds me a lot of me as a small child: mouthy, FABULOUS and consisting entirely on a diet of candy. Except I grew up into a useless twentysomething and he grew up to write a bunch of awesome plays and the screenplay for ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES. His essays are off the chain hilarious, his depiction of Hollywood dead on (SISTER ACT was originally his screenplay and the path from how it went from his sassy movie starring Bette Midler to a lame Whoopi Goldberg flick makes for excellent essay fodder) and his fictional pieces about an elderly man in the Village who sticks his nose where it doesn't belong are equally entertaining. I want to hang out with him and eat marshmallow peeps all the day long.

Ah, To Be a Literary Mistress

Last week, I heard Jonathan Lethem speak. And when I say I heard Jonathan Lethem speak, I mean, I listened for 45 min, fell in love and spent the remaining 15 starring at his wedding ring, debating if I could be a literary mistress and what kind of hotels he'd put me up in while I waited for him to escape his wife's clutches. And then I realized, that's probably not a good moral path and I sadly walked into the cold New York night back to my apartment, where I picked up the next book of his in my To Read Pile. Motherless Brookln is good but it's no Chronic City, that is to say, it's no book worth participating in adultery for.

All that said, should we change our blog title to "Lethem's Ladies"? I'm just thinking....

In the Darkness

I lost two days of my life to this book. Not in a bad way, just- it kept me from the tasks one must perform to sustain one's facade as a functional member of society, like sleeping, and eating, and leaving the house. Have you read it yet? Well, why not? Seriously, go find a copy (they are literally everywhere right now), open to the first page and resign yourself to a 1-2 day gap in your existence. I promise you, it will be worth it.

I'm not a big thriller reader now, probably because I am a huge snob, but I was once. In my early teens I devoured Stephen King, Dean Koontz, any six-by-eight inch paperback I could find with giant, raised glossy letters and a picture of something ominous gracing its cover. And I loved them. Somewhere in there I stopped reading Peter Straub and started name-dropping Deleuze and so it went. Reading Shutter Island felt like coming home, reading a book not because of the title or the author but simply because once I started, I could not stop. The writing is intelligent but unobscure, well-informed without being dense. It lends itself singularly to the screen and, for once, I am breathlessly awaiting the movie version of the book. Faulkner, DeLillo, Berger and Tolstoy, I'll always love you, but that doesn't mean I won't cheat every once in a while.

First of all...

I would just like to say that I saw Joshua Ferris read from The Unnamed at Skylight books tonight. Here is the text exchange that took place between me and Kevin immediately after.

Me: I want to make out with his beard

Kevin: He has a beard! Wtf. I bet its sum sex thing.

Me: He is either a high school nerd who grew up hot and started sexing all the girls.

Me: Or the high school hot guy who realized he could get girls via art.

Kevin: He prolly was one of those guys who thrived in hs but didn't bekum 2 attached bc he has smart parents.

Me: Nailed it.

Kevin: U shuld hav asked him why the main guy didn't just amputate his legs.