Tag Archives: New York Times

Friday Links: Helping Others Is More than Wishful Thinking

17 Apr

MakeAWish

Make a Wish matches!

It’s been forever since I did a link roundup! I’ve been trying to focus more on my memoir writing these days, but I’ve run across so many great news stories and websites lately that I wanted to share with you:

  • My friend Gregory Andrus has been taking these stunning photographs of the Jersey Shore. The other day he posted this article about NJ musician Jon Bon Jovi opening JBJ Soul Kitchen in Toms Kitchen, where there are “no menu prices, to help the fiscally challenged, and the restaurants try to serve organic produce whenever possible.”
  • My friend David Sung, the pastor of the Upper East Side-based Christ Resurrection Church, told me about this New York Times article about how Dan Price, who attended the Christian college Seattle Pacific University (which, by the way, offers a creative writing MFA), slashed his $1-million salary to give his lowest-paid workers a raise. The minimum wage at the company he founded, Gravity Payments, is now $70,000/year.
  • Meanwhile, this article reveals that 25% of “part-time college faculty” (and their families) receive public assistance. You know who this includes? Professors. Many colleges rely on adjunct professors, who get paid per class instead of being salaried.
  • My editor Jordan Green is obsessed with Clickhole. Obsessed. I particularly enjoyed the satirical buzzfeed-style listicle “How Much of a Grammar Nerd Are You?” he posted. My favorite line: “I got a tattoo of a comma splice and then had it removed.”
  • Via Pure Wow I discovered the loveliest named jewelry company: Wanderlust + Co. These gold arrow earrings are super cute. Arrows are so hipster.
  • Another company I discovered recently is Moorea Seal. I love the fact that sales from their goods benefit charities and that you can shop by cause. I also love these Make a Wish matches!

Happy weekend!!

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Coming Soon! Ferlinghetti’s Travel Journals

31 Mar

Ferlinghetti

In super exciting Beat-, travel-, poetry-, publishing- related news, Liveright Publishing will publish Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s travel journals in September 2015! The suspense is driving me crazy!!

Ferlinghetti is one of my most favorite poets. Back when I was in undergrad, I made my first pilgrimage to City Lights, the bookstore he founded, bought his San Francisco Poems, and proceeded to drag my biology-major friend all around the city to read the poems in their appropriate places. The fact that his travel journals are now being published may just inspire me to hit the road again.

The book, titled Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals, will cover the years 1950 to 2013. As I wrote in my recap of the film Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder, Ferlinghetti once traveled to Italy to seek out his family roots and promptly got arrested! He also happened to own a little cabin out in Big Sur, California, where Jack Kerouac stayed; Kerouac wrote a book about his time there that’s since been made into a film. For the record, Ferlinghetti does not consider himself a Beat, and he’s not one of the characters constantly described as sitting in the back of a car driven by Neal Cassady. He’s had his own set of adventures through Cuba, France, Haiti, Mexico, and North Africa.

Kerouac’s literary agent Sterling Lord brokered the deal for Ferlinghetti’s new book with Liveright’s editor-in-chief Robert Weil. You can read more about it in The New York Times.

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Correcting My Joisey Accent

28 Jan

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image via Harvard Dialect Study

“You’re from Joisey!” all the West Coasters would exclaim when I moved out to Los Angeles for college and told them I had come from New Jersey. That’s what I said, “New Jersey.” Not “New Joisey.” Yet they hoisted the accent upon me anyway.

My finger nails may have been a tad too long and I may have grown up spending every Saturday at the Garden State Plaza, but I definitely didn’t speak like some chick who over Aqua-Net her hair. In fact, no one I knew spoke that way.

…Well, at least I thought we didn’t. No one I knew pronounced “hamburger” like “hamboiger” or anything as nails-to-the-chalkboard as that, but when I really listened to the way my friends talked, I noticed there was maybe a slight accent to a few words. Some of my friends pronounced “water” as “wooter.” I also noticed I had a certain way of crunching words. “Orange juice” became “ornch juice.” “Drawers” became “joors.”

I was always a little sensitive about the issue of accents. As an immigrant with a thick Greek accent, my father sometimes was misunderstood by waitresses at restaurants, which infuriated me because I could understand what he was saying perfectly and when others couldn’t I believed it to be deliberate xenophobia. But it wasn’t just my father who had an accent. My mother was from Minnesota, another state beleaguered by accent stereotypes. My mother did not talk like any of the characters in Fargo, but she did say “melk” for “milk” and “tall” for “towel.” That’s how my siblings and I grew up speaking, and I made a concerted effort to rectify my speech.

Actually, the school system made a concerted effort to rectify my accent: I was put in speech therapy in elementary school. It was humiliating. I was the shyest kid in my grade—and probably the entire state—and yet the few times I opened my mouth I was punished by being singled out and removed from my normal class to have a therapist teach me how to talk “correctly.” That was enough to keep me silent throughout most of elementary school. Now, I had a real reason to fear talking and stay quiet. I was afraid that if I were to speak up, no one would be able to understand me.

In the school’s defense, I really did need speech therapy. As this eHow article on How to Speak with a New Jersey Accent teaches, I dropped all my “r”s—to the point that certain words, like “art,” became incomprehensible. My accent wasn’t just the issue though. On top of having a foreigner for a father and, let’s face it, as a Midwesterner my mom was pretty much a foreigner too, I had pretty severe hearing issues, which had impacted my speech. I had to have surgery twice as a kid to have tubes put in my ears.

I’m not sure if this was related, but a lot of what I did hear, I took literally instead of as an accent. I remember my speech therapist asking me what type of shoes I wore, and I said, “tenner shoes.” I think I knew that meant “tennis shoes,” but I remember thinking in that moment that I had definitely answered “wrong.” I felt so stupid as she questioned me if I played tennis. From then on, I knew the correct label for my shoes was “sneakers.” How could I have been so stupid as to call them tenner shoes? I taunted myself afterwards. I’d never even picked up a tennis racket. I blamed my mom. She was the one who called them that.

Worse, in 6th grade, the music teacher gave us a pop quiz on the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner.” When I got my test, it was clear she thought I was a horrible speller. I was relieved because this meant I got a better grade than I should have. I was also shocked that she thought someone could spell that poorly. Suddenly, I realized how “dumb” some of my classmates really must be, if I’d been given that much credit for my botched lyrics. In reality, I’d been misunderstanding lyrics the entire time. I thought “dawn’s early light” was “donzerly light.” I wasn’t sure of the exact definition of “donzerly,” but I pictured it as hazy white fireworks, since that’s what often accompanied the national anthem and seemed to coincide with what “bombs bursting in air” would’ve looked like.

So when that New York Times dialect quiz, based on the linguistics project Harvard Dialect Study, spread like wildfire over Facebook, I took it figuring it would identify me as having some random accent. But nope, it identified me as being from Newark/Paterson, Jersey City, and—somewhat inexplicably since it’s in northern California—Fremont.

Once a Jersey girl, always a Jersey girl.

What accent did you get?

Also, you might like:

 

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“Flophouse Budget Lifestyle”

27 Feb

Remember the other day when I waxed poetic about my submission spreadsheet? Well, I just stumbled upon Aaron Gilbreath’s article “The Business of Tracking Lit Mag Submissions” on Tin House‘s blog. I loved his old-fashioned pen-and-paper advice. This paragraph punched me in the gut:

Accepting contributor copies as payment for something that took six to twelve months to write; subsisting off microwavable Trader Joes food in order to keep your expenses low enough that you can afford time to write; working temp and odd jobs while publishing in magazines that writers respect but non-writers have never heard of – that’s monkey business. To have an adult’s business mindset and the flophouse budget lifestyle of a twenty year old musician seem antithetical, but I think of those things as part of the business of writing: few poets or essayists make enough money to support themselves by writing, but if you’re willing to live frugally and without popular recognition, you can enjoy a gratifying creative freedom by writing for literary magazines.

It’s so important to protect your creative freedom. There was a time when I didn’t. When I’d take little writing jobs here or there just for the few extra pennies in my pocket and the thrill of seeing my name in print. It took a breakup for me to realize I’d been squandering my time and my creative energy. I don’t publish as much these days, but the writing I’m doing is better, more thoughtful, more “me.” It’s worth more, to me.

And yet it’s so difficult to explain what Gilbreath phrases as “To have an adult’s business mindset and the flophouse budget lifestyle of a twenty year old musician” to someone who isn’t an artist.

Especially when you live in New York City, where the first question someone asks you is “What do you do for a living?” and where you’re judged by which neighborhood you live in. Here, a box of pasta costs double of what it costs over the bridge in New Jersey. Being middle class in New York City isn’t really the same as being middle class in other parts of the country.

Take this quote from The New York Times’ article “What Is Middle Class in Manhattan?“:

By one measure, in cities like Houston or Phoenix — places considered by statisticians to be more typical of average United States incomes than New York — a solidly middle-class life can be had for wages that fall between $33,000 and $100,000 a year.

By the same formula — measuring by who sits in the middle of the income spectrum — Manhattan’s middle class exists somewhere between $45,000 and $134,000.

But if you are defining middle class by lifestyle, to accommodate the cost of living in Manhattan, that salary would have to fall between $80,000 and $235,000. This means someone making $70,000 a year in other parts of the country would need to make $166,000 in Manhattan to enjoy the same purchasing power.

Or this one from NY Daily News‘ “N.Y.C. so costly you need to earn six figures to make middle class“:

In Manhattan, a $60,000 salary is equivalent to someone making $26,092 in Atlanta.

And of course, there’s this one from The Huffington Post’s “New York City’s Middle Class Is Facing An ‘Affordability Crisis,’ Says Christine Quinn“:

City Council defines “middle class” as those with a household income within 100 to 300 percent of the area median income (AMI). In New York City, that means an income ranging from $66,400 to $199,200.

I personally don’t have a “flophouse budget lifestyle.” I have a Career. Yes, capital “C.” I enjoy the work I do, and it also affords me the creative space I need to work on my writing without having to make a living off my writing, though I do earn money for my writing.

But, what does “lifestyle” really even mean? Reading and writing, and even being part of the literary community, do not require much money. There was some talk a while back about bookstores considering charging for readings, however most readings in New York City are free. Libraries lend out books for free. Museums have pay-what-you-wish days. There are more literary opportunities for writers in New York City than in many other places in the country, so in some ways it evens out. But maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

I did think this Onion article was funny, though.

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List of Reviews of “On the Road”

19 Dec

OTRstill

[official film still from On the Road]

Yesterday, I posted my review of the On the Road film adaptation. As LeVar Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow, “But you don’t have to take my word for it.” Here are some other reviews of the film On the Road:

The Beat Museum: “Everyone knows a  book is not a movie and a movie is not a book.  The genius of Jack’ Kerouac’s novels is his prose. It’s not the story, it’s not even the relationships, it’s the prose with the language that he uses to sketch the scene to move the story and to describe the relationships.”

Buzz Sugar: “The plot at times drags, but there is so much energy in the production that I didn’t mind. … This is the role Sam Riley has been waiting for — he’s talented and looks great on screen.”

The Film Pilgrim: “Where Salles really shines is the party/drug scenes, capturing the beatnik life style beautifully.”

Film School Rejects: “For a tale which so obviously values hedonism and free expression, On The Road is ultimately joyless and unengaging, and for a self-discovering road movie to fudge the journey so much and lose almost all lasting meaning is downright criminal.”
The Guardian: “The film is stiflingly reverent towards its source material, and indeed towards itself. It’s good-looking and handsomely produced, but directionless and self-adoring, richly furnished but at the same time weirdly empty, bathed in an elegiac sunset glow of male adoration.”
Hollywood.com: “Incorporating more of Kerouac’s writing as voice-overs or something similar would have given it more life, the kind of vivacity Kerouac sought out in spades, which is why he tolerated Dean’s vagaries for so long. More than most movies, it feels like On the Road could have gone in any direction, expanding or reducing characters, shortening the trips to concentrate on the characters more, emphasizing the effects of their missing fathers or not, and it’s this wishy-washiness that undermines the movie.”
The Hollywood News: “Visually, Salles’ ON THE ROAD is a thing of beauty. Eric Gautier’s cinematography is a wonder to behold: the colouring, the tracking of the characters, and the close quarters filming take the audience to Denver, New York and San Francisco like never before. The images conjured by Kerouac’s words come to life in a way never thought possible. But whilst it looks ravishing the film is full of problems, the first of which is a glaring problem: Hedlund is not Dean Moriarty.”
The Hollywood Reporter: “A beautiful and respectful adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s landmark novel that intermittently leaves the ground to take flight.”
Honi Soit: “Too often unnecessary scenes were included while others were not given the time to become poignant, such as Moriarty’s very brief search for his vagrant father in Denver. I’m happy to concede that part of the frenzy is intentional, to replicate the experience of its addled protagonists, but some tighter editing would not have gone astray.”
The Independent: “Walter Salles takes an orthodox approach to Jack Kerouac’s classic text. As with his adaptation of Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, Salles seems as preoccupied with the mundane as he is with the tales of threesomes, drugs and broken friendships.”
Indiewire: “The atmosphere of his travels comes first, establishing the book’s searching nature ahead of its loose plot. From that early point, “On the Road” adopts a serious, low-key approach to establishing Sal’s world that keeps the characters grounded.”

LitKicks: “Jack Kerouac would have loved this film version of On The Road.”

Movie News: “As a work of narrative semi-fiction, Salles’ version of Kerouac’s book is appropriately graceful, dirty, and enigmatic. He’s a sensitive director and a good storyteller. What doesn’t come across, though, is why the story matters. Who are these Beatniks?”

The NewStatesman: “Once the beats’ credo of philosophy and pharmaceuticals is established, the film starts noticing those people exasperated or excluded by the party. Sal and Dean may be kings of the road behind their scratched windscreen, but Salles is meticulous in balancing the ledger. There is no liberation in the film without suffering, no beat generation without its beaten-down counterpart (usually female).”

The New Yorker: “I found Garrett Hedlund’s teen-idol depiction of Dean Moriarty particularly unsatisfying. … Hedlund’s performance neuters the book’s animating Mephistophelian spirit.”
The New York Times: “The cinematographer Eric Gautier has done brilliant work elsewhere and doesn’t seem capable of taking a bad shot. But everything tends to look too pretty here — the scenery, sets and costumes included, especially for the rougher byways and more perilous interludes, like the Benzedrine nights that feel more opiated than hopped up.”
NPR: “In fact, any film in which all the characters seem utterly convinced of their own importance and coolness from the outset has the same battle. … There is the Ginsberg-like Carlo (Tom Sturridge), a character drawn here as so self-consciously writer-like that his every appearance inspires twitches. He actually says at one point, while pondering how to describe his feelings, ‘Melancholy’s too languorous!'”
Ropes of Silicon: “The tedious result of this adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s famed novel is, however, unfortunate considering Eric Gautier’s rich, smoke-filled cinematography, Walter Salles’s direction and stand-out performances from most of the cast.”
The Telegraph: “Despite its pretty cast and sun-ripened colours, the film quickly settles into a tedious looping rhythm of Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) experiencing some kind of beatnik debauchery with co-wanderers Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) and Marylou (Kristen Stewart), before retiring to a shady corner and scribbling wildly in a notebook.”
Time Out London: “Freewheeling spontaneity is tough to convey on screen, and the drink- and drug-fuelled carousing lacks Danny Boyle-style zing. But the bull-nosed cars, jazz soundtrack and soft light of a bygone era are a joy.”
Total Film: “Even if the film has a patchwork quality, Rivera’s script mines some much-needed humour from events – from Stewart giving new meaning to the phrase ‘two-hander’ to the priceless scene where Dean drives Sal’s mother back to New York.”
Variety: “Yet despite the high level of craft here, it’s an inadequate substitute for the thrilling, sustaining intelligence of Kerouac’s voice. Admittedly, any definitive adaptation would have to adopt a radically avant-garde approach to approximate the galvanic impact Kerouac’s novel had on literary form. But even audiences content with an easy-listening version may be put off by the weak conception of Sal’s inner life.”

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Writing Wednesday: Becoming a New Media Innovator

16 Nov

Success isn’t just about doing—it’s about innovating.  It’s about creating something new or doing something in a new way.  It’s not always mind-blowing.  Sometimes it’s so obvious that it’s surprising no one had done it before.  And yet, it’s the game changer.  It’s the concept that makes you rise above all the hi-ho, hi-ho dwarves.

The New York Times recently published an article called “21 New Media Innovators.”

The article shows how writers—mainly journalists—use Twitter, “the art of multipurposed multi-platforming,” aggregated data, video, ereaders, text messages, crowd-sourcing, message boards, citizen journalism, sponsored posts (aka advertorials), widgets, slideshows, and other technological mumbojumbo to bring stories to you in new and relevant ways.

So, what does this mean for writers?  How does a memoirist become a new media innovator?

For one, multi-platforming allows a memoirist to represent different facets of herself and her conversation.  Here on my blog, you get my personal stories as well as updates and tools for writers, but if you “friend” me on Facebook you are privy to the more day-to-day goings on in my life and you have more opportunity to interact with me through comments and even live chats.  I’ve also brought you audio via Broadcastr, as an experiment in whether voice allows for more connectivity.

What sort of new media do you think is particularly relevant for memoirists?  Most of the memoirists I know stick to blogging and Tweeting, and I’d love to hear about any memoirists that are utilizing new media in creative ways.

How would you like to see me use new media?

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Tasty Tuesday: What Your Favorite Writers Snack On

16 Aug

 

The New York Times had an article back in July about what writers snack on while they work.  In illustrator Wendy Macnaughton’s “Snacks of the Scribblers,” we discover Lord Byron drank vinegar to keep his weight down and Joyce Maynard eats lime popsicles, among other eccentric eating habits of writers.

Personally, I like to write early on Saturday mornings in the Barnes & Noble Café, where I’ll order a Starbucks caramel latte and whatever sweet strikes my fancy.  Sometimes it gives me sugar-caffeine overload, though, so it’s better if I have a healthy breakfast before going there.

At home, I don’t usually eat when I write.  Dark chocolate usually is a good motivator, though, so sometimes I start and end on a piece of Theo’s Fig, Fennel & Almond bar.

Dear writers, what do you snack on?

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Writing Wednesday: The Shrinks Are Away

10 Aug

If you ever get a chance to take a writing class with Susan Shapiro, do it.  I took a Saturday personal-essay workshop with her last semester, and even though it only met twice I got so much out of it.  Unlike most of my classes, which have focused on the Art and Craft of writing, Shapiro understands that as much as we enjoy writing for writing’s sake, we also want to get published.  She gives helpful tips on how to do so, and even provides editorial contacts for newspapers, magazines, and print publications.  Talk about generous!

The Lighting Up author also puts together a reading series every August called The Shrinks Are Away.  When Susan Shapiro mentioned it to me in an email, I knew it would be too good to miss.

The lineup was impressive: Molly Jong-Fast (The Social Climber’s Handbook), David Goodwillie (American Subversive), Lindsay Harrison (Missing), and poet Harvey Shapiro (The Sights Along the Harbor). This is what serious literature looks like.  It reinvigorated my hope for the current state of literature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After all the writers had given a speedy reading, there were a few minutes left for Q&A.  I always love hearing writers talk about their process because their honesty is so encouraging.  I feel like in other industries there’s this unspoken rule of putting on a façade of perfectionism, but writers openly talk about their failed manuscripts, their false starts, their grappling with the industry.  The writers in The Shrinks Are Away reading opened up on how their books came to be.  Harrison revealed that she wrote about her mother’s passing not long after it happened, and that writing was part of the cathartic process.  Goodwillie talked about being part of a generation that doesn’t find its career callings until late 20s or early 30s, and that it was only after trying on a number of jobs—and getting fired from them—that he took writing seriously, renting a maid’s room at the Chelsea Hotel to spend a year working on his manuscript.  Harvey Shapiro, who worked for years and years at the New York Times, confessed that he’s seen that it’s not always the most talented writers who succeed—rather, it’s the ones with the most persistence.

The Shrinks Are Away event took place at McNally Jackson Books, a wonderful bookstore in Soho (52 Prince Street), where the literature section is broken up by country.  For upcoming events at McNally Jackson, click here.  To sign up for a class with Susan Shapiro, click here.

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Mapping Out Houses of Worship in NYC

24 Mar

Remember the other day when I mentioned that cute little restaurant Penelope?  Well, last Friday Penelope happened to be the opening setting of a New York Times article by Mark Oppenheimer, entitled “Mapping Religious Life in the Five Boroughs, With Shoe Leather and a Web Site.”  The article is about a Texas native named Tony Carnes, who moved to New York to go to The New School, where incidentally I’m enrolled in the MFA program, and who is, according to his website, “exploring the postsecular city.”

He’s mapping out every house of worship in the five boroughs of New York.  My immediate thought was: there are so many churches that make use of school auditoriums, bars, and ballrooms — how will he find those churches, if he’s driving around looking for church signs?  Well, apparently Carnes hears about those by word of mouth.

But he isn’t just mapping the city out.  He and his colleagues are telling stories.  Stories such as:

“The youth of Bethany Baptist Church put together a modestware fashion show in Jamaica, Queens called ‘A World of Difference.’ They follow a long tradition of fashion shows in African American churches.” —Fashion in Church, Jamaica, Queens

“Under the searing sun and stench of roadside garbage, a teenage Hispanic girl carrying a baby boy comes out of a door next to a church. Her tousled hair looked like she’d been up all night. The baby’s unwashed face was smeared with dirt; a diaper was the only thing covering his bare skin.” — Girl Power in Flatbush

“What church would get rid of its pews to make more room for feeding the poor? Surely, wouldn’t the pastor resign, the elders stomp out in exasperation, and the members hastily decamp for a properly pewed church? All that didn’t happen at a Lower East Side church ten years ago when it did just that…” —East Village church threw out its pews to make room for the poor

If you want to know about Greek Orthodox churches and Greek Pentecostal, there’s also an article posted on the census the nonprofit took in Astoria.

I love the way Carnes and his nonprofit organization are uniting houses of worship.  In a way, it’s kind of a blend of the way Burnside Writers Collective gives community and voice to people of varied Christian background (head’s up: check out my church hopping column tomorrow!) and Asphalt Eden illustrates various New York church’s unique personalities by listing events.

In another way, it reminds me of the exciting and noble work the Endangered Language Alliance, headed up by Dan Kaufman, Bob Holman, and Juliette Blevins, is doing, mapping out endangered languages in New York and working to preserve them.

For more on Carnes’ “Journey thru NYC religions” visit http://www.nycreligion.info.

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