A Lively Debate
Barista #1: “When you think about it, it’s got to be hard to be Steve Buscemi.”
Barista #2: “I don’t know about that. I bet it’s harder to be me than it is to be Steve Buscemi.”
I think these are both valid points.
Interviewer: “Are you working on anything right now?”
Ellis: “Well, a shark movie is taking up a lot my time right now.”
-From the Spring 2012 Paris Review interview with Bret Easton Ellis
So now you can relax.
Sometimes when it is afternoon and it is raining and I can’t seem to figure out where the morning went, or for that matter the week, and I’m forced to consider the fact that whole months are slipping through my fingers without my knowledge or consent, I find myself haunted by a certainty that moving to New York was a mistake. Yes this city has bookstores and writers and museums and good coffee but Los Angeles had all of those things plus my boyfriend and my car. Plus good weather. Plus the beach. Tonight, after I had to take two buses and a subway just to to see a friend of a friend’s graduate thesis play in Hell’s Kitchen, I experienced a temporary upswell of rage that turned me, momentarily, into the crazy lady on the train. At a too-long stop light, I actually cursed out loud. Loud enough that the pretty girl in the seat next to me scooted another seat over. This is a version of me that comes clearer every day winter persists and one I’d hoped never to encounter.
Because of this I gave up on the play and took the train back down to West 4th street where I got off at the IFC Center and saw Jiro Dreams of Sushi. This movie combined with Pina and Bill Cunningham New York has me, for one, convinced that documentaries about talented old people are the fundamental cure for all of nature’s ills. Something about coming face to face with a man who was kicked out of his family’s home at seven years old and raised himself to become, at eighty, a world famous chef with three michelin stars and incredible bicep definition made it impossible to continue wallowing in self pity. Definitely recommended for a solo viewing on a lonely winter day.
What if
All the moments of your life had been leading up to a single moment and that moment was now and you spent it on the Internet?
I got blurbed in the preview for the documentary Unraveled.
What’s funny is, they only quoted half the sentence for a reason.
“Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, ‘You’re all a lost generation.’ That got around to certain people and we all said Whee! We’re lost.”
-Dorothy Parker
I impulse bought The Paris Review Interviews off Amazon and this is turning out to be the best idea I ever had.
“Successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right. And that seems to be what mood disorders help with.”
- Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa who, in the 1980s interviewed several dozen writers at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and found that 80 percent met the formal diagnostic criteria for some type of depression. (Courtesy Jonah Lehrer’s newest book Imagine: How Creativity Works)
“Do we even have to say that physical beauty is beside the point when discussing the work of a major author? Was Tolstoy pretty? Is Franzen?”
-Victoria Patterson on Jonathan Franzen on Edith Wharton (Franzen article is subscribers only, but the gist is, he read House of Mirth wrong.)
