Catching Up

I've been away a long time now. On vacation, seeing family and old friends, but not, as it happens seeing much art. I'm catching up on my google reader now and coming across all kinds of good things though:

• I would like my holiday decorations to somehow channel this.
• An always funny literary agent blog. Writers, take note of what not to do.
• Theory: great male artists have more sex.
• My [awesome] [wonderful] donation-based yoga studio, Yoga To the People, is being sued by Bikram for teaching hot yoga. This is ridiculous. Sign the petition.
• More gorgeous, luminescent Chinese illustrations like the one above.

And, now, tis the holiday season and New York remains an almost balmy 55 degrees and sunny. Pandora is set on the Christmas station, I've already done all my holiday shopping, and now if I can just catch up on my reading, art viewing, blogging, and writing, I'll be all set until the New Year.

Fodder from the Reader

Via SwissMiss

Taking another day for the old novel, which is still going full steam, I'm happy to say. However I did get a chance to do a little web browsing, and voila! interesting things abound:

• Hyperallergic has a lovely post contrasting museum art versus street art in terms of how we experience it, with bonus points for working in Proust.
• Innovative trend: artistic funeral urns?
• The Dull New Global Novel from the NYT Review of Books. The title says it all.
• Abstract Expression had a mother? Apparently those macho men have some secrets...
• Jerry Saltz's webpage
• Jhumpa Lahiri and Chuck Close make President Obama's advisory committee via Culture Monster
• The Royal Shakespeare Company is doing a residency at the Armory this June, maybe even one-upping my beloved Shakespeare in the Park

Unrelated thought: 'Write what you know' is rubbish advice. The whole point is to imagine and create, not replicate in dronish detail. If we did that, there would be no magical creatures, no fantasy, and no sci-fi. Not to mention relatively few happy endings, if only because it's hard to know where things end in life. You can't wrap up a person's life after the good parts like a story.


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Near Disaster

You might think, with this as my view, that my biggest problem is sunburn, or hangovers, or perhaps mosquitos. That has not been the case. Since we arrived on Thursday, we have scoured the internet to find high speed internet. The internet at our apartment is slower than dial up. My boyfriend works online, but we couldn't even send an email from our new place.

On Friday, we thought we might have to fly home, or to Brazil, or anywhere so that he could log in to work on Monday morning. On Saturday, we found an internet cafe where he can work--but even it is not fast enough for him to work out of long term. (Not to mention it is a windowless room near the cruise ships.) But then Monday we found out that we could sign up for a faster internet service at the apartment. It takes two weeks, more or less, for the company to install it. So for the moment, we are making due with the internet cafe. And we are staying!

After contemplating running home with our tails between our legs, it feels like we can finally relax a little. There are still little problems--power outages, for example-- but on the whole I feel like I can finally breathe a sigh of relief. It can be difficult enough to adjust to a new place without worrying if you can stay. I know my way around the island now, mainly because when I get lost I just drive forward for an hour and end up back where I started. It's a beautiful place, mountainous and green, with the prettiest beaches I've ever seen. Hopefully soon I will be sunburned, hung over, and covered in bug bites!

Internet Taste Gurus

From magazines to the internet, everywhere has been chock-a-block full of advice on the top 10 of everything, holidays wishlists, and best of 2008 items. Everyone seems to have an opinion on what you should read, see, or listen to. But whose taste do you trust?

There are the standard cultural institutions, of course. The New York Times Book Review, for example, is a list of books in 2008 that might not be exactly to my interest, but is sure to be interesting and well-written. But they get the easy ones, so to speak, the obvious ones of good sales and pedigrees. Rarely do I chance upon a great novel off the beaten track of New York Times highlights; I need guidance. Guidance appears in abundance but, honestly, it rarely proves helpful.

What I want are the sort of recommendations my friends give me. I have a friend with great music suggestions, and another with interesting views on the literary classics. I don't understand why it proves so much harder to find those types of recommendations on the internet, which swarms with people and opinions. People broadcast their voice on everything, but I can't seem to find a voice who speaks to mine quite as clearly as an old friend.

The question is: how do I find people with tastes I respect and admire on the internet? Chance and blog searches seem inefficient methods. I assume people like the ones I rely on in person are out there. But where are you people?

Sam Leith defend books, I applaud

An uplifting and moral article by Sam Leith, the Literary Editor of The Daily Telegraph, a UK newspaper. In "Grand Theft Auto, Twitter and Beowulf all demonstrate that stories will never die," he defends the strength of the narrative in human culture to the delight of all writers and readers, with emphasis on the unfair attack on books by proponents of modern technology who feel books are antiquary repositories of knowledge.

Knowledge and stories come in many shapes and forms. My personal favorite form is a book, and not at all because I'm trying to write one. In anything, I'd say the book form and I have developed a healthy antagonism for just that reason. But the power of the narrative in its classic form is something I consider obvious.

I blog, but I by no means use this platform as write a long story. I use it to connect to other short pieces and to combine word with images and videos. It communicates in a different way by its medium, which is the point, I fancy, of Leith's piece, which I encourage all with old-fashioned bookish tastes to read.

In a twist on this, check out Pepys' Diary in online blog format, where each entry in the diary of Samual Pepys from the 1600s is posted daily, so you can follow his story in much the fashion it was written.