Sardines

The first issue of Oranges and Sardines is out. Know who is in it? No, not me.
This person is.


O&S is a new publication by Didi Menendez of Miposesias fame. She has ushered little Emily into the world of literary mags. Welcome home, Emily. It's lonely here and we all smell like old bacon.

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A reminder.





These young Turks will be reading Sunday at 6pm at Brookline Booksmith. Things could get weird. Sexy weird.


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Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Obama




I sometimes get tears in my eyes when I watch films about the early years of astronauts. I don't know why. Maybe it was their power to overcome something as benignly stubborn as gravity. Maybe it was all the nationalism that seemed harmless and small in the face of an endless universe.

Watching Obama, is like watching a film on the sixties, before the fall.


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I read Paul Auster's autobiography Hand to Mouth, and just as I feared, i did not like it. It falls in line with the starving artist models like Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac. He moves to Paris (several times), he's poor, he does odd jobs to survive. He even works on a oil freighter for about six months. An oil freighter! His romanticized notions are superfluously portentous. I find them to be a dead notion, though I know people who still "suffer" like he "suffers". He barely even mentions writing, only taking a few words to say "yes, I am doing it, I swear".

I want to find a book that combines the juxtaposition of a working life and an artistic life into a story. Suggestions?