couldreads

Fran Lebowitz: Some favorite quotes

Here are my Favorite Awesome Quotes from The Fran Lebowitz Reader. One of these is probably going on my gravestone.

“I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility.”

“It is pointless to assume that the earth alone is afflicted with the phenomenon of life.”

My new role model

As a New Yorker by choice, rather than birthright, I’ve always had mixed feelings about the city’s somewhat incessant need to define its residents as either “natives” or “transplants.” Which isn’t to say that I don’t respect the unique blend of street savvy and odor tolerance that it takes to actually grow up in the Big Apple, but rather feel that the city is—must be, really—a byproduct of its residents in their entirety, not merely those who happen have owned Upper West Side co-ops since the late 1970s.

Still, as a dutiful transplant, I’d like to think that I’ve made a decent effort to avail myself of all that New York has to offer, not only in the sense of museums and landmarks, but also in history and culture. Of course New York’s more famous progeny—Woody Allen comes to mind, as do the Rockefellers and Roosevelts after whom the entire city seems to be named—maintain reputations steeped in NYC charm even as their exports reach the country as a whole. But there are a whole host of other people—from politicians to playwrights to restaurant proprietors—about whom a Maryland native like myself can be lambasted for not knowing, should they come up in conversation this side of the GW Bridge. To this day, not a month passes without my stumbling into some social faux pas whereby I reveal that I’ve never heard of Robert Moses, learned about Ed Koch or read anything by Gay Talese (for the record, only the last of these is still true.)

Super awesome printed artifact

When I started Super Sad True Love Story a few weeks ago, I knew just a few things about Gary Shteyngart:

His last name is borderline impossible to spell. I’ve had to Google it every time I write it.
He’s funny on Twitter.
(actually 2b) Thanks to Jennifer Weiner, he occassionally watches and even more occassionally live-tweets The Bachelor. I mention this both because it is so fabulously out of character for a literary-minded person, and because it makes me feel about 48% better about my own Bachelor addiction.
He was one of The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 last year, which is how I first read an excerpt of Super Sad True Love Story (SSTLS from here on out).

As it turns out, with the exception of No. 1, these few things are completely appropriate factoids to have when going into SSTLS. The juxtaposition of Shteyngart’s amazing writing and almost unreal ability to both document and parody our current social/political/technological environment is bizarre, awesome and more than a little disconcerting. That this novel could feel both prescient, ludicrous and accurate all within the same page is a testament to how freaking interesting it is to read.

It’s Even Weirder Than It Sounds

So I first heard about Geek Love from the person that lent it to me. Our exchange went something like this:

Friend: Have you read Geek Love?
Me: No, I haven’t heard of it.
Friend: Seriously!? TAKE THIS.

My curiosity was further piqued by the back cover:

Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out—with the help of amphetamine, arsenic and radioisotopes—to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniacal ambition worthy of Genghis Khan … Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins … albino hunchback Oly …and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset.
As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.

Um, what? So many thoughts here, like “What does a geek mean in this situation? What kind of back blurb uses the words megalomaniacal and lissome in the same paragraph? What are you talking about FLIPPERS FOR LIMBS?!”

Culture and shit

I’m here! I swear.

The last week has been kind of crazy, a flurry of long-awaited vacation days, GOP debates and the restarting of approximately 647 of my favorite shows. I do have a book review to pen at some point—my humble opinions of an amazing little novel called Geek Love—but in the meantime thought I’d hold all four of you over with a fun fact. Because who doesn’t like fun?

Amid all the lowbrow distractions this week (one might even say in spite of them), I also managed to do something vaguely intellectual. And it’s only Wednesday! Last night, Walter Isaacson, whose biography of Steve Jobs I link to or praise at least once a day, spoke at the 92nd Street Y, which, if you’re a non-New Yorker, does not mean signing books next to a pilates class. For whatever reason, YMCAs here are sometimes gyms, residences and cultural institutions all in one, and I decided last night that it’d be in my best interest to figure out how to live in one.

In any case, the session—a casual conversation between Isaacson and Time magazine’s managing editor, Rick Stengel—ended with questions from the audience. It’s worth noting that this was an eclectic group, lots of older people who I might have otherwise (perhaps unfairly….definitely unfairly) judged as unlikely to be interested in technology.

Anywho, brown-nosing lecture-goer that I am, I submitted a question to Isaacson about what he personally had taken away from Jobs’s life, or, more specifically, from his interactions with the Apple CEO. I’ve written, somewhat facetiously, that one of the book’s perhaps unintentional lessons is on the benefit of pursuing perfection. I even suggested that I might begin approaching my own professional life a bit more asshole-ishly, so that I could one day invent the next iPod and transform a half dozen industries. …I am still waiting for that to pan out.