12/17/12 12/17/12

Bling Theory: 10 favorite new books of 2012

Hell yes, Johannes!

When you have to leave two dozen or so kickass books off your list simply because 34 is not ten, you know it was a good year for new books.

Two trends I noticed in my favorites newbies of 2012:

indies rock

skinny is in

With six of the ten books from small presses—Dzanc, Mud Luscious,…

11/29/12 11/29/12

Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:

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huffpostcomedy:

Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:

“Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”

We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.

And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.

It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”

- from Live from New York: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live

[via oldloves]

11/28/12 11/28/12

I'm steppin' tall on ya'll

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh_vXdT2xRsDo you like your oatmeal lumpy? Here is the video (god help us all) of my risk from last week’s incredible Happy Endings Reading and Music Series. Think of it as a pre-holiday present to you from me, so heartfelt I even RAPPED it. Thank you (?) Ted Dodson for making me do this.

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

11/26/12 11/26/12

Ben Jahn reviews SAFE AS HOUSES on Full Stop

"Allusions, in good hands, send us forward, not back into something we already know. In the case of Bertino’s debut collection, they send us into the sometimes surreal but always convincing world of skillfully drawn plots, complex metaphors, and quirky-serious wordplay."

11/25/12 11/25/12

The Happy Ending Reading and Music Series

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Photos from The Happy Ending Reading and Music Series at The Box on November 21, 2012. Amanda Stern has run the series for almost ten years and last week was the very last one! I was so happy to participate in such a special night with Sondre Lerche, Vanessa Veselka and Zadie Smith.

11/19/12 11/19/12

morning sweetness

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believermag:

Here’s some morning sweetness for you: the poet Eileen Myles and her girlfriend, writer Leopoldine Core, express the feeling of being in love so perfectly, you just want to roll around in their love all day. Watch them read together over at Jupiter 88.

11/18/12 11/18/12

What the Museum of Natural History taught me

Last week at The Museum of Natural History Whoopie Goldberg’s recorded voice told us the sun is going to explode in 5 billion years. If there’s anything I’m putting off, I thought, I should probably go ahead and do it. I took mental stock and one thing that made me happy—I’ve always made time to be silly. Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, Thoreau said, which has always baffled me. If I have to be desperate, I would at least want to be really loud about it.

11/18/12 11/18/12

Love from Switchback in San Francisco for this girl, who loves San Francisco right back.

"Bertino’s stories are surprising and funny and extremely well-crafted. This is a collection not to be missed."

11/16/12 11/16/12

At the Museum of Natural History

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From the Mixed Up Files of Ms. Marie-Helene Bertino. At the Museum of Natural History. Sometimes you have to tell being an adult to go scratch.

11/16/12 11/16/12

Pete's Candy Store Reading Series

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I was so honored to be among the crowd hearing Mira Jacob read from her novel (out in 2014) for the first time. She and Alison Hart have been running Pete’s Reading Series for 12 years. 12 years! The audience they gathered was incredible. It made me so happy I sang! Would that every reading could be like this.

11/14/12 11/14/12

Pete's Reading Series Tomorrow at 7:30pm

Pete’s Candy Store: tomorrow, November 15th at 7:30pm. I will be reading with the lovely Mira Jacob in the bar that looks like a club car. Do come! You don’t see why not…(709 Lorimer Street in none other than Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

11/13/12 11/13/12

The music of SAFE AS HOUSES: playlist for Largehearted Boy

"I NEED TO KNOW YOUR OPINION ON COLTRANE."

David at Largehearted Boy: A Music and Literature Blog let me yammer about one of my favorite things to yammer about—music! Specifically, the music that infuses the pages of Safe as Houses…

11/8/12 11/8/12

Manhattan

"Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. Oh, I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be."

11/8/12 11/8/12

Three Lives & Company

Yesterday I stepped out of the cold and into Three Lives & Company to sign a few books and Toby and his staff brightened my gray day. I always feel like Kathleen Kelly from You’ve Got Mail in this bookstore. The next time you are in the West Village and are in need of a charming experience: www.threelives.com

11/5/12 11/5/12

Amanda Faraone and I sat down to chat for Fiction Addiction, and this is what happened.

"Things exist in the world that don’t make any sense to me. People can be very mean to those in need. That will never make sense to me. Friends will make decisions to be cruel and unkind. That will never make sense to me. Someone can go through a break-up—I mean last week, I had three of my girlfriends call me, upset about random various heartaches, and, in many cases, they are being mistreated. That will never make sense to me. But, I can write a story about a girl who’s going through a break-up with a rodeo clown who goes to live in a convent and I can make that story funny to me, so that it makes me laugh. There are very sad things that happen in the book—like a house fire, like robberies, but if I put magic in it, then the world seems a little bit lighter."

10/31/12 10/31/12

The first time I've felt like a New Yorker

I’ve lived in this city for 9 1/2 years yet I’ve always insisted on calling myself a Philly girl. And I am. However, over the past three days the acts of strength I’ve seen, the unwillingness to complain, the compassion in the face of obscenely sad photos, the compulsion to help out, the tenacity, the runners in the park (!!!), even Bloomberg’s insane Spanish, has given me this overwhelming feeling of bratty fortitude that makes me certain that when these lights come back on, they will be brighter than they were before. Holy crap, I realized, I think that’s called being a New Yorker.

10/28/12 10/28/12

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Holly Golightly: What do you do, anyway?Paul Varjak: I’m a writer, I guess.Holly Golightly: You guess? Don’t you know?Paul Varjak: OK, positive statement. Ringing affirmative. I’m a writer.

10/25/12 10/25/12

You can rely on the old man's money

I had been feeling homesick for Philly then last night, I found a (Philly’s own) Hall & Oates pin gum-ball machine! Needless to say, I stocked up. It was minutes before Royal Young hosted a reading for Elizabeth Crane Brandt, Adam Wilson and I in a beautiful house on the Lower East Side. A good omen for a great night.

10/23/12 10/23/12

Mean Neighbor

I have a mean neighbor who never smiles at me or my dog, no matter how hard I smile at him or how cute my dog’s sweater is. Well tonight from my kitchen window I heard him scream-singing the words to “What Makes You Beautiful" by One Direction. He knew all the verses. He was INTO IT. I listened and when he finished I thought to myself: Good job, mean dude. I felt marginally better about him, and the entire world.

10/22/12 10/22/12

Happy Endings Music and Reading Series, Wednesday, November 21, 2012, 7:30pm

Oh, how I love Thanksgiving—football games on the lawn, dogs in cute sweaters, frosted up windows and the brutal wonder of family. If you are in the NYC area on Thanksgiving Eve, consider joining me, Vanessa Veselka, Zadie Smith, and Sondre Lerche at Amanda Stern’s wonderful Happy Endings Series. Each reader and musician is required to take a risk. I am considering playing my first song on guitar and singing—which would be quite a risk, if you’ve ever heard me play guitar, which you haven’t, because I’ve never played for anyone besides a select group of people I’ve blood-sworn to secrecy! I will be reading “North Of" for the first time in public, my story about a girl who brings Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving.

November 21st, THE BOX, 168 Chrystie Street, doors open at 7:30pm, show starts at 8pm. $15