Reading
When you see a poem in The New Yorker, it’s there: (1) to break up the page; and (2) as a gesture, a sop to those who associate the idea of poetry with highbrow culture and class.
Robert Penn Warren’s “Function of Blizzard” - back when I lived where snow fell every winter, a friend and I, on the occasion of the year’s first snow, would get together to recite this poem.
Also, The French Laundry Cookbook. What you learn about Tom Keller is that he does the best; it may not be something you’ll do, like make a consomme, but it does allow you to take from him the foundation.
“He was a driven workaholic and stressed himself too much in ways that affected his judgment. His closest colleagues, who were his friends at Union, would say, ‘Reinhold, slow down. Cool off. Back off.’”
The Roberts Book Company on Canal Street reputedly paid the junkman S55 for the canvases. Soon “piles of unstretched canvases and large sheets of mural cartoons, began to greet the surprised visitors to the Roberts Book Company.
The Art of Burning Bridges Alfred A. Knopf, 2003; 373 pages; $30 FROM THE DUST JACKET: An enigma of 20th-century literature — a writer accorded great importance in his time, if less than in his …
One of the most pleasurable aspects of Geoffrey Wolff’s O’Hara biography is the voice. I said, “It’s a confiding voice, as if we were on some country weekend, in the mid-1930s, before the start of World War II.
"I sent them to Juris Jurjevics at Soho Press in New York. He’d been James Baldwin’s editor at Dial Press. Juris is respected in New York as an ambassador from a more thoughtful, writerly era in publishing."
"My mother read to us every night of my childhood. My becoming a writer in part was because of that. You should have seen how my mother would become rapturous when she read a book she loved."
"I think Chateaubriand is the only man who met both George Washington and Napoleon. He came to the United States and wrote about Niagara Falls. He may be the first person who described the falls for a European audience."
Why Rossetti asked that Siddal’s body be exhumed was that, in a melodramatic gesture, he’d tossed into her coffin the manuscript of his poems. When he decided he wanted the manuscript back, he had the body dug up.
"1 really wanted to try and get a pure sensation of what it felt like to have the thing on, to feel that that was the only recourse, was to wear this thing, to be driven to wear it.”
As I read Chekhov stories about which Ms. Malcolm wrote, that I began to feel that these subtle stories, which on the last page often seem to evanesce rather than conclude, are wasted on the young.
As for Naipaul's willingness to talk with me, he said, in his beautifully modulated voice, “It’s not correct for a person of my stature to appear on a giveaway sheet. It’s not right. It’s not right.”
The Altar of the Body opens with George sitting on his porch on a hot day in Medicine Lake, Minnesota. He watches a man push a Lincoln Continental. “It’s an old car, a four-door boater, champagne-colored.…”
“Millay was the generation of my grandmother, so when you begin the biography of someone of this age, you realize the people you need to interview who are living may not be living a great deal longer."