Alizah Salario

From the NYT's Cityroom blog

From my window, I could see about a dozen cops in riot gear on the patio below. Off to their left, a few men stood in the cold without jackets, smoking and looking smugly in the direction of the main attraction: Occupy Wall Street protesters. I thought of the day in March 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. I’d rode around Los Angeles with an activist art collective and wheatpasted  “It’s a Globe, Not an Empire,” signs on bus stops and mailboxes.  I thought of marching down Hollywood Boulevard in protest of the war, and of going door to door to encourage people to register to vote and vote democrat, vote for John Kerry. (I only lasted one day on the job.) I thought about why I became a teacher, and then a journalist. And then I thought about how I ended up here, on the 15th floor of the World Financial Center, looking down on the protesters.

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When I first saw the provocatvie New York Times article about the physically ravaging effects of yoga, I, like many who practice it, was up in arms. Is nothing scared? Then, after reading the article, I found myself feeling slightly somber and quite humbled.

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I’m making a best of list to suggest that you should read the same  books and articles I enjoyed this year. My motivation is more personal. List making  a way to take inventory, define patterns, and remind myself that I’m not a totally worthless blob of cells and fluid wasting the world’s precious space. Rather, I’m a worthless blob of cells and fluid that reads and writes a lot!

In 2011, my reading wheelhouse seemed to be death. (Shocker!) I was stuck on work that explored the tension between order and chaos. I found myself enthralled by stories that tapped into either a thrilling life lived on the edge or a life of stability that made perfect sense, in a picket fence sort of way, but verged on suffocating. I mention this because while one can argue about objective quality in art, for the sake of this post I’d like to define “best” not by quality of language or craft, (though many of the pieces mentioned possess top quality style) but by my reading experience. I often judge whether or not a book captures me by how strongly I feel like writing after I’ve read it, and that has just as much to do with my sense of ennui as it does with the quality of the text.

The truth is, for all my yoga-practicing, list-making, straight and narrow behavior, I prefer to live at life’s extremes (perhaps that explains all the douchey guys I date?)  I’m no tastemaker, so take this all with a grain of kosher salt.

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Last week, the New York Times ran a piece full of cloying praise for The New Inquiry, an up-and-coming journal of cultural criticism that tackles everything from Zooey Deschanel to OWS to Basquiat’s hair.  Think 2st century literary salon meets Tumblr.

The article dubbed the crew of masters degree holding, culture loving, literary-leaning academics who started the site “New York’s literary cubs.” I’ve hesitated to write about the precocious group simply because to be critical of the success and ambition of up-and-coming book nerds a few years my junior makes me sound like a bitter old yenta. “When I was in college, we didn’t even have Facebook or Twitter!”

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In the latest episode of “Could I Possibly Be Any More Awkward?” I attend a book party in Williamsburg. [...]

I fear I’ve reached my saturation point with fiction. When the inner workings of novels start to become transparent, is it time to stop reading – or just time to start thinking about them differently? I think, in fact, it’s simply time to start why books do what they do. Here’s a old essay I wrote on the topic — and Elif Batuman’s The Possessed –that suddenly seems relevant.

“I fake it so real, I am beyond fake.” When Courtney Love sings “Doll Parts,” she may not realize she’s summing up the contemporary novel.

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I was going to write a long-winded post about the conflation of information and entertainment and the blurred lines between news and gossip, but I think this speaks for itself.

I really want the leopard print jumpsuit. No, I’m not being ironic.

Animal print: it's not just for grandmas in Boca anymore

Whenever I check my site stats on Google Analytics (which is embarrassingly often) I notice that my search engine traffic stems from one particular search: Jersey Shore. Sometimes it’s “Jersey Shore Analysis” or “Jersey Shore Critique.” I wrote one post on the subject way back when, and though I’ve written about important, highbrow junk too — Malick and Herzog, Foster Wallace and Whitman — this one little ‘Shore post continues to be my jackpot. So. I’ll write it again. Jersey Shore Analysis. The Situation. Juiceheads. GTL. Abs. Beer, pouf, pickles, Snooki. J-Woww. Snooki, Snooki, Snooki.

I hope someone out there finds this useful.

Hey. Whatever works.