30 Sep
Zuccotti Park, ground zero of Occupy Wall Street, is near my work. You can easily extrapolate that sentence to mean exactly what it does mean: that I work on Wall Street, not the street per se but the environs – in finance, in the financial district, in the World Financial Center to be exact, the idea of big business and corruption being more important here than the street itself.
25 Sep
Rhetorical question.
I passed through Union Square shortly before this occurred. I weaved through a crowd chanting “the people, united, will never be divided” and headed into the nearby movie theater to see Drive. I’m not sure which type of violence I prefer: the gratuitous, almost cartoonish gore of the blockbuster, or the candid, made-for-YouTube street conflict below.
These days, I’m working near Wall Street, not protesting against it. I wonder: are there sides in all this, and if so, which one am I on?
8 Sep
The view from my window
Like many Americans, my consumption of 9/11 coverage has dramatically increased over the past week. And also like many Americans, I still stare in disbelief at photos taken in the wake of the destruction. But these days I’ve been doing something I haven’t always been able to do. I look at the photos online, then I looked out the window of my office at Ground Zero. I looked back at the photos, and then again out the window, where an unconventional triptych emerges fifteen floors and ten years below me: one part pool of water, one part transformer-like metal structure, and one part gaping hole.
14 Aug
Back in my early blogging days, I’d often obsess about a brief 700 word post for hours on end. Then, after many frustrated hours obsessing at the keyboard, I decided to try a little experiment: decide on my topic, set the clock, and write a blog post — a finished, edited post — in one hour or less.
Because Slate always has something to say that makes me feel insecure about my own life, today’s article on How to write faster made me revisit my slowpoke status yet again. Writes Michael Agger:
17 Jul
About six months ago, I sent out my first round of query letters to literary agents about the book I’ve been working on for quite some time. All responded with rejections (although I had a few “nice” rejections) and some didn’t respond at all. This is fairly typical in the publishing world, unless you are a well-respected individual or someone with an incredible story like Jaycee Dougard or, say, Snooki.
23 Jun
How do you tell if a story is interesting or not? I always try to think it terms of the three S’s: Stars, scandals and sex, and it seems editors at the New Yorker think exactly like me! Well, sort of. I found this rather amusing:
19 Jun
I haven’t had a chance to update this weekend because I’ve been busy feeling sick, and doing this:
Exhibit A: marching along in sea creature gear to the radical tunes of the Rude Mechanical Orchestra at the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade.
14 Jun
It make
s sense to couch parts of your life between parentheses. Those slender cupped hands of punctuation hold auxiliary information often glossed over or outright ignored — but also that which gives new depth and meaning to the bare bones narrative. Parenthetical statements are distinguished from separate clauses set apart by commas, and easier than footnotes.
13 Jun
On principle, I won’t read what everyone else is reading. The tastes of the masses are often bitter, salty or just plain wrong (think the high waisted jeans trend or that weird Orbitz drink with the little gel balls floating around that’s now off the market) so I never run out to purchase the latest Swedish mystery novel or whatever else I see people reading on the subway (unless it’s the L train and we’re talking Roberto Bolaño). In this case, it was Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, and I resisted the celebrated novel until I could no justify ignoring it.
