Recommendations

Since Stephanie jumped the gun, so will I. Here are my recommendations for this week.

1) Blood oranges



Juice and delicious, and only 79 cents each at your average Brooklyn grocery store. I especially recommend them to people who don't usually like the pulp of oranges, because they have a good texture and are very easy to peel clean.

2) Roberto Bolaño's 2666



What a shame that he had to die! 2666 hops from European literary critics to a fictionalized account of the women murdered in Juárez, Mexico to a reclusive German author, but it is all grounded by Bolaño's obsession with the abyss. It's terrifying, but I can't put it down. In lieu of continuing to make post after post of Bolaño quotes, I will leave you with just one more that I love and that just barely scrapes at how genius this book is.

"Instead of El Obelisco, some called it El Moridero. And in a way they were right, because there was no obelisk and people did die much faster there than in other places. But there had once been an obelisk, when the city limits were different, farther off, and Casa Negras was what might be called an independent town. A stone obelisk, or rather three stones, one set on top of the other, stones stacked in a haphazard column, though with imagination or a sense of humor the stack could be seen as a primitive obelisk or an obelisk drawn by a child learning to draw, a monstrous baby who lived outside Santa Teresa and crawled through the desert eating scorpions and lizards and never sleeping."

Recommendations

Meghan and I decided to start our first weekly feature: recommendations. Check in every Friday to see what we like each week. I don't want to wait until Friday, so I'm going to post mine now. It's funny how I'm writing this as if people beside Meghan and I read this.

1) Make Em Laugh


Great PBS documentary series on comedy in America. Two hour long episodes air each Wednesday for the next few weeks. Tonight's episodes were about outsiders and sitcoms, and the nice thing is that in between the interviews (which spoke to the larger themes and societal patterns challenged by the comedians), they show really fucking funny archival.

2) Soup


It's been keeping me warm for the past few days.

3) The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman


Energetic, optimistic writing about serious issues.

My Dinners with Dubya

Incredible article.

Groucho at 85

By Richard Avedon

Dancing Plague of 1518

In July of 1518, a woman referred to as Frau Troffea stepped into a narrow street in Strasbourg, France and began a fervent dancing vigil that lasted between four and six days. By the end of the week, 34 others had joined her and, within a month, the crowd of dancing, hopping and leaping individuals had swelled to 400.

Authorities prescribed "more dancing" to cure the tormented movers but, by summer's end, dozens in the Alsatian city had died of heart attacks, strokes and sheer exhaustion due to nonstop dancing.

Barthelme's syllabus

I was happy to find out that Barthelme liked Isaac Babel. (Via Vanessa)

Change your perspective

Click to see it bigger.

2666

At the same moment the Santa Teresa police found the body of another teenage girl, half buried in a vacant lot in one of the neighborhoods on the edge of the city, and a strong wind from the west hurled itself against the slope of the mountains to the east, raising dust and a litter of newspaper and cardboard on its way through Santa Teresa, moving the clothes that Rosa had hung in the backyard, as if the wind, young and energetic in its brief life, were trying on Amalfitano's shirts and pants and slipping into his daughters underpants and reading a few pages of the Testamento geometrico to see whether there was anything in it that might be of use, anything that might explain the strange landscape of the streets and houses through which it was galloping, or that would explain it to itself as wind.

- Roberto Bolaño

Strange Places

Baldwin Street in New Zealand is the steepest street in the world.




North Korea attempted to build the world's tallest hotel, but had to stop when they ran out of money. Ryugyong Hotel is 105 stories high and has no windows, fixtures, or fittings. There's still a construction crane sitting at the top of the building.





A mine fire has been burning under Centralia, Pennsylvania since 1962.

How nice is this?

From the NYT Obituary for George Carlin:

"Offstage, he was a kind man who was unusually generous with young comedians. Liz Miele, who is now 23, was 15 when she wrote to 45 comics seeking advice. Two responded: Judd Apatow urged her to study English. Carlin called. He told her to keep writing, always. Four years later, they met for a soda in the lobby of the Carlyle, where he opened his laptop and showed her how he organized thousands of idea files. She sent him progress reports, and he cheered her on until two days before he died."