Since I couldn’t post yesterday

Lunchtime: Bryant Park with Freddie. 89 degrees. Feelin’ fine.

Some book porn

 

Alfred Stieglitz’s Photographs and Letters, rescued from a one-way trip to our archives in Indiana. This may be the most beautiful book I’ve ever owned. It’s pretty massive-about ten by thirteen inches, but the interior is uncoated stock so it’s pretty light. We’ve been printing a lot on uncoated lately. It’s very elegant, it bulks up more, and it’s cheaper than gloss.

 

Stieglitz photographed over 300 photos of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands. I researched these images for Natural Affinities, one of the first books I worked on at Little, Brown that compared the work of O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams, friends and residents (more permanently for O’Keeffe than Adams) of the Southwest. 

More Georgia.

Buildings in New York City, photographed from Stieglitz’s studio, An American Place. Adams’ cityscapes are some of my favorites because he is clearly such a fish out of water, awed by the buildings in the same way he was by mountains. 

Books, videos

I have lunch with a coworker tomorrow, an agent lunch Thursday. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Life is so much dumber without heartache.

This was supposed to be a post about the pretty new book I got, but WordPress is rotating all of the images I try to import. Thought the problem was with my iPhone, alas. 

Here is a nice video I read about today, directed by another old Bulfinch author. He’s dead now. AIDS.

For good measure. Also by Herb Ritts.

I need a bookshelf

 

Exhibit A.

Crime don’t pay

I was packed into a downtown 5 train today on my way home, holding tight onto the center pole at the front of the car. We stopped at Brooklyn Bridge and a few passengers stepped out of the door behind me, but a man clean-shaven man in a gray tshirt angled against traffic, pushing deeper into the car.

“Excuse me,” he said, as he struggled the two feet to the other side of the pole. He walked to a blond woman–thirties, clean-cut, dressed for work–and touched her arm.

“Miss,” he said, “come with me.”

His voice was urgent and everyone looked up at the two of them suddenly. 

“No.” She resisted at first, speaking softly. She was flushed, she shook her head. 

“It’s about your bag.” He said. The bag was cheap, powder blue, probably fake leather. Oversized. I noticed then that it did seem heavy, and whatever its contents were, they were poking against the material of the bag. She gripped it tighter.

He produced a police badge. The train grew more silent. I started to grow nervous that the doors would shut and I’d be stuck in this awkward, intense moment forever. My mind was just starting to turn to violence and whatever mystery objects she had in her bag.

“She knows what this is about,” the officer said, sensing the attention. Finally she acquiesced, and walked off the train, her head down, her arm in his grip. She was much taller than him and a little heavier. She looked genuinely scared. I don’t know if she was embarassed. 

As soon as they were on the platform the doors shut and we sped away. I craned to see the two of them walk down the platform, but they were gone before I could get a second look.

This song is pretty wonderful

Or should I say magnificent? Har har. John Legend is burrowing his way into my heart. It helps that he lived in Philly (not that he went to Penn.)

Richard Powers and I have reconciled

Partly because of this review. 

Character and story drive most good novels, while theme makes a satisfying byproduct, but for Powers the idea is the engine that makes everything go. His method is to fashion a palace out of a spacious metaphor, then to use the experiences of his characters to explore every room.

(…)

Race makes the ideal theme for Powers because it exists only as an idea; scientifically, any variation between the races is insignificant. 

Yet for all its insubstantiality, race is an immense weight on the lives of the people who shoulder its stigma. The Strom children are trapped between two ideas, black and white; nurtured on the idea that they can live “beyond race,” they’re forced to choose once they’re thrust into the world outside their family. 

It’s true–the book’s treatment of race is very anti-humanistic, which is what was making me chafe for awhile. It’s important to suspend judgment, though, to let the author take me for a ride, at least for a little while.

I didn’t read anything Saturday

Didn’t work either. I just walked around Brooklyn, drunk, all day. 

Today showed Aunt and Uncle’s Swedish friends around Brooklyn. Brunch at General Greene, ice cream at Blue Marble in Boerum Hill. The sun was blazing. My new dress has a polyester lining. I was sticky with sweat. We talked about cooking, restaurants, Sweden. 

It’s starting to feel like summer. 

The photo is from Harold Feinstein, a very sweet author of ours who is currently doing a book on butterflies. The rest of the series is here.

I wish I could f**k every girl in the world

Aforementioned.

Amazing